Hit American Mob drama The Sopranos begins its final run of episodes this Sunday with millions expected to tune in for the climax of one of most successful series in United States television history.
Speculation is rife about who will get ”whacked,” who will be ”made” and who will become a ”guest of the government” — Mob-speak for killed, inducted or jailed — but between now and the June finale, it’s anyone’s guess.
The US media latched on to The Sopranos from the moment the first episode hit the screen in 1999 and have been gushing with tributes for a drama that has picked up dozens of awards and been broadcast in more than 40 countries.
The New York Times said the show ”just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter-century”, while the Washington Post said it ”has gone beyond the status of mere TV series and is rife with reverberation”.
The magazine Vanity Fair hailed ”perhaps the greatest pop-culture masterpiece of its day, a fearless series that has transformed television”.
”It’s no exaggeration to say that The Sopranos is the best-written dramatic series in the history of television,” it said in a recent special dedicated to the show’s 86 hours of television filmed over the past decade.
More than the Mob
Hollywood director and writer Peter Bogdanovich, who directed one episode and appeared in 11 others, said in an interview with HBO, the cable network behind the show, that The Sopranos was more than just a Mob drama.
”It’s an extraordinary piece of work, as a concept and the way they’ve carried it out. It’s no coincidence that it’s popular.”
”It’s not really a Mob show, even though it’s about a guy who’s in the Mafia. I don’t think it’s really a Mob film in the way that The Godfather or GoodFellas was. I think it’s more about America,” he said.
The show focuses on the mundane and dysfunctional comings and goings of the Soprano family and particularly Tony Soprano, the boss of the north Jersey Mafia, who happens to see a psychiatrist about his personal problems.
Tony’s struggles to keep his children and captains in line makes for a dark but often amusing story line. His insistence — both to outsiders and his own family — that he works in ”waste management” fails to convince many.
”It’s a dysfunctional family that I think represents a cross-section of a certain kind of American public,” said Bogdanovich. ”That’s why I think it resonates with people. It isn’t just a Mob show. It’s more down to earth. It’s about you and me and your neighbours.”
Home on HBO
The show, which was originally planned for the Fox network, grew out of a feature-film script by producer and writer David Chase and eventually found a home with cable channel HBO.
The channel’s lack of commercial breaks allowed the writers a freer hand in the pace of scripts and to ignore the constraints governing nudity, profanity and violence that more conservative networks would have imposed.
The colourful language and graphic violence, sex and drug use lends a sense of realism that many credit as key to the programme’s popularity.
”But it’s not like the whole reason the show was a success is that people could say ‘fuck’ and shoot somebody in the head,” Chase recently told Vanity Fair. ”Everything has to be appropriate to some version of reality.
”If I was doing a series about the family, or any of these faith-based church groups, I wouldn’t have people saying ‘fuck’, ‘shit’, shooting each other in the head, or dancing around with their tits hanging out.
”But the fact is, for whatever reason, most people in America today use profanity in their daily discourse. So when I watch TV and it isn’t there, it doesn’t seem expressive of the way people really speak,” he said.
The show has even introduced new phrases to the US vocabulary. But words such as ”goomah”, for mistress, and pejorative terms such as ”mulignan” and ”fanook” — for African American and homosexual — have sparked accusations of bigotry.
Criticism
Among the show’s most vocal critics are Italian-Americans who say the series paints the whole community as bigots, wife beaters and criminals.
Chase, whose family name was originally DeCesare and who says he based the original idea for the show on the years he spent in psychotherapy, says he wanted to create a believable story based on real-life experiences.
”Even though it’s a Mob show, The Sopranos is based on members of my family. It’s about as personal as you can get,” Chase told Vanity Fair. ”I wanted to do the kind of stuff I’ve always loved to see. I didn’t want it to be a TV show. I wanted to make a little movie every week.”
James Gandolfini, the actor who plays Tony, said that while the show had been rewarding, it was time for The Sopranos to wind up.
Several million people probably disagree, among them the executives at HBO, for whom the show has brought in hundreds of millions of dollars.
”I don’t have much trepidation about it ending,” Gandolfini told Vanity Fair, without revealing whether his character ends up on the lam, in jail or sleeping with the fishes. ”I think it’s more than time.” — Sapa-AFP