The Sopranos

 OH - Nov 3, 2008 Cable became a breeding ground of television that could genuinely be considered art: HBO were undoubtedly the frontrunners, The Sopranos, The Wire, ...

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By Anthony Grande I have watched The Sopranos for the past couple of years. I spent about one hundred and fifty dollars buying the first four seasons so I could catch up with the new HBO episodes. Hell, I would not have even purchased and paid a monthly fee to have HBO if it was not for their showing of The Sopranos e...

By Victor Lana I didn’t initially believe this fade to black meant anything, yet so many theories have been offered, but none that make sense. Just think of the implications of Meadow's murder: Carmela and AJ will never forgive Tony and, more importantly, Tony will be destroyed. I think that is why such a b...

By Paul Levinson Some thoughts on the remarkable ending of The Sopranos: Then, of course, if we allow the possibility that no one was killed, then the guy just went to the bathroom not to take care of business but to do his own business. So David Chase has given us a Sopranos, or the Tiger ending.

By David Mazzotta It doesn’t matter, you see? Tony got whacked/Tony went on as before -- it doesn’t matter. That’s not what The Sopranos was about. Ever. David Chase has said time and time again that The Sopranos is about family. Now you add that to the recurring theme of the show -- criminal-level self-delusion...

By Lono When that dude walked past Tony en route to the bathroom, I thought they would do a formal Godfather homage. Namely, a gun is taped to the back of the toilet. What else? Surely, during the painfully prolonged scene of Meadow parking, I thought she would see or hear two or three pops come from the...

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By Victor Lana The Sopranos always has come across as particularly truthful, whether it was the violence that so influenced the lives (and deaths) of the characters, or the philandering of the men with women who were not their wives and girlfriends. There was also real human interaction between charac...

By Patrick To that end, almost all the long-running characters get a nice farewell. We see Janice becoming her mother, something that’s made literal in the great scene where Junior calls Janice Livia and her daughter, Janice. Janice already resents Bobby’s children and will likely be so overprotec...

By Victor Lana As an Italian American, I have sometimes had issues with this show because of the violence and the derogatory way Italians have been depicted over six seasons. I particularly recall one episode where some of Tony Soprano’s gang made a big deal about Columbus Day, and it seemed to me incongr...

By Patrick By way of summarizing The Sopranos, I’m going to go through my top ten episodes of the series. It’s a lot tougher to do that with The Sopranos than with a lot of others, say Buffy the Vampire Slayer or even Six Feet Under, since every episode is at such a consistently high level, and the show does...

By Patrick Yet, the brilliance of the show is that we always understand why he does what he does, and are still able to remain sympathetic. I generally prefer characters who are fascinating to ones who are likable in traditional ways, characters like Spike or Magneto, and Tony is one of the greatest an...

By Patrick The thing that frustrated me about the end of last season wasn't so much that nothing of significance happened with the plot, it was that not much changed for the characters. Even though the New York/New Jersey conflict has been in a perpetual loop, it never felt so teasing as at the end of las...

By Eric Berlin Like a new chapter in a grand and sweeping novel, The Wire returned tonight, opening up its fourth season on HBO. Perhaps The Great American Novel is making way for something else. If that's so, I'd argue that The Wire is a Great American Story, made up of some of the richest and most fully reali...