Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I finished watching season 6 of Game of Thrones over the weekend. I'm impressed with how strong it continues to be. In fact it seems to get better every season. Moreover, every episode is compelling.

This is a high standard even among highly acclaimed shows. For example, The Sopranos was great overall but dragged multiple times in seasons 4-6. Several episodes were, frankly, dull— and one or two had me asking, "Has this show jumped the shark?" I toughed through the weak episodes because I expected/hoped the payoff at the end would be worth it.

With Game of Thrones the only tough thing is pacing myself. It's so tempting to click "Next Episode" each time and stay up half the night... and I I don't really want to stay up half the night! I've limited myself to generally 2 episodes per sitting. Having finished season 6 I'm itching to dive in to the last 2 seasons— which are kind of partial seasons, at 13 episodes combined.

Several seasons ago it wasn't clear that I'd get to this point. Not only was there the chance of a mid-series slump like with The Sopranos, but after I watched season 1 I felt put off by Game of Throne's themes of evil routinely triumphing over good because good is stupid and clueless, and gratuitous sex. I took a 6 month break before being ready to start season 2. But season 2 redeemed what was wrong with season 1, and every season since then has been great.

This week I started streaming Game of Thrones on HBO Max. I figure I might as well catch up with last decade! GoT originally aired 2011-2019. The last streaming series I caught up on was The Sopranos, and that began in the late 90s. I finished that one about two months ago. Hey, at least I'm moving quickly through the decades! 😂

As when I started watching The Sopranos I felt a moment of doubt, a should-I-or-shouldn't-I decision, about starting Game of Thrones. The series is over now. It's been over for over 2 years. It's no longer part of pop culture. Two years is long enough that even memes about GoT have gotten old-hat. If I watch it now it's got to be because I enjoy the show itself— and not because I enjoy the show plus being able to discuss it with friends and colleagues who are also eagerly awaiting each new episode. That's a higher bar to clear.

Another concern is the length of the series, 73 hour-long episodes. When I started The Sopranos, which was a bit longer at 86 episodes, I thought it'd take me 3 months or more to get through it. I finished faster, in just 8 weeks. Though that was because it was "us" TV; Hawk and I watched it together. As a shared activity I could devote more time to it than solo TV. GoT will be solo TV as Hawk doesn't want to watch it. So finishing this series could be a months-long engagement. Well, here I go....

Winter is Coming!

Hawk and I finished our binge of The Sopranos yesterday. I'll write soon about the ending; I have strong feelings about it. For now I just want to acknowledge that our binge-watch is complete.

When I started the series in September I thought it might take 3 months or longer to complete watching its 86 episodes. I noted that even 1 hour/day of TV watching is well above my long term average. Well, we finished the 86 episodes in a span of 54 days, so (rounding each episode to 60 minutes) we averaged 1.6 hours/day of it. That's well above my long term average of about 2 hours per week.

Watching so much more TV than my long term average is not surprising. My LTA is low precisely because I find so little TV worth watching. Conversely, when there's a show I/we really like with old episodes available to stream, we're happy to plow through at 2 hours a day several days a week. We binged at a similar pace with The Mandalorian and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

And yeah, streaming rocks. It's so much more enjoyable to watch a series by bingeing through a whole season in a week instead of watching just one episode per week. That's like water torture. Drip... drip... drip....

What's Next?

So, what's next? There are a few other series one or both of us would like to catch up on. While we've got HBO Max I'd like to watch Game of Thrones. That's 73 episodes. That'd probably take 3-4 months to finish, longer than The Sopranos because it'd be me-only TV. Hawk doesn't want to watch it.

I mentioned above both The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Mandalorian. Maisel's 4th season has been in production but doesn't have a release date yet. Show biz articles are saying it'll likely drop in 2022 though it's possible it could arrive as soon as December this year.

The Mandalorian has a 3rd season coming. That's a surprising because a post-credits scene in the last episode of season 2 said the saga would continue as The Book of Boba Fett. Well, both are coming. Boba Fett is due to drop in December, with Mando coming out sometime next year.

What could we watch now? Beyond Game of Thrones, which would be "me" TV, one series of "us" TV would be Lucifer. We watched the first 2 or 3 seasons when it was on broadcast TV, before broadcast TV dropped it and it was picked up by Netflix. Also on Netflix is Breaking Bad. It looks like we'll be adding a Netflix subscription sometime in the next 2 months.

I've finished season 6-B episode 4 of The Sopranos. There are only 5 more episodes left in the series, and I... don't see where it's going. I mean, I know a little bit about how it ends because spoilers have been impossible to avoid 100%, but based on how the story's been developing— or not developing— lately I don't see it moving toward a conclusion. In the middle of season 6 it's hit another slump.

Two things are driving this slump. One is the lack of clear narrative direction I already mentioned. At 81 episodes in and 5 left there should be a sense that things are drawing to a close, preferably rising to a climax, even. Instead the show is just kind of drifting along... and sporting more signs of jumping the shark. There's "a very special episode" in the season premier where Tony survives a brush with death. Then the next episode features another extended dream sequence. Oh, and there are guest stars; another sign of jumping the shark. Ben Kingsley, Lauren Bacall, Danny Baldwin, and Nancy Sinatra all appear as themselves. The show's turning alarmingly to too many gimmicks.

The second problem is related to story drift. There are too many new characters. In the past several episodes there have been various scenes where I shake my head and think, "I'm not sure who anyone in this scene is." They're all new since season 5.

I'll finish watching the series despite these negatives. I'm close enough to the end that it doesn't make sense to pull the plug now. But Hawk skipped out on another episode recently. She said those seven deadly words— "I don't care about these characters anymore"— and asked me to tell her if anything interesting happened as she walked away mid-episode. And afterwards I told her, "Yeah, you didn't miss anything." 😔

Last night I watched The Many Saints of Newark. It's a 2021 feature-length film that's a prequel of sorts to the TV series The Sopranos that aired on HBO from 1999 to 2007.

One question many people ask is, "Will I enjoy the movie if I haven't seen the TV show?" Critics, by-and-large, answer in the affirmative. Their reviews argue that yes, it's a good movie even if you haven't seen the TV series, thought people who've seen the whole series will appreciate the movie more. Having watched most of the TV series now I'm going to disagree strongly with that characterization. The movie does not stand on its own. I consider it more of a fan service movie than a legit prequel.

Here are Five Things why:

1) The movie opens with a major Sopranos spoiler

The Many Saints of Newark opens with a voiceover than gives away a major plot point from the finale of The Sopranos. Fortunately this didn't hurt me. Even though I'm only about halfway through the last season— I couldn't wait until I'd finished it because yesterday was the last day the movie was available for streaming on HBO— I'd already had this plot point spoiled elsewhere. If you intend to watch The Sopranos later and don't want a series-finale spoiler, don't start with this movie!

2) The story begins in a strange place; no character development

One big reason this movie fails to stand on its own is that the plot sputters between different story lines. Nominally it's supposed to be about how young Tony Soprano grows under the mentorship of his uncle, Dickie Moltisanti— whose surname means Many Saints in Italian, an apparent reference from the title— to develop the skills that will eventually make him a crime boss years later. Tony's development turns out to be one of three stories the movie tells... and of those three it's the weakest.

The first scene in the movie showing the critical uncle-nephew relationship has Tony accompanying Dickie to meet Dickie's father upon his return from a trip to Italy. The elder Moltisanti arrives with a young second wife/fiancée from Italy. She is attractive and younger than the man's children. Dickie, who is married, is immediately infatuated with her. Dickie's competition with his own father and his romancing of his step-mom (eww) become one of the major storylines of the movie. In fact it's arguably the primary storyline as it's the only one with a clear beginning, middle, and end in the movie.

Interspersed between scenes of the love story are bits about Dickie being a gangster. He lies, steals, takes advantage of people, beats people, and murders people. He's not a sympathetic person at all. And through all of this he doesn't really grow. He doesn't become a better person at all, nor does he rise particularly much in the gang hierarchy. There's no character growth, for good or evil, there.

Meanwhile an impressionable young Tony Soprano is trying to tag along.... But why? we viewers are left wondering. There are parallels here to the character of Henry Hill in the classic gangster film Goodfellas— not the least of which is that Ray Liotta, who starred as Henry Hill, plays dual roles as Dickie's father and imprisoned twin uncle in this movie. Like Henry Hill, Tony Soprano  envies the respect and financial success the mobster enjoys.

In this story arc young Tony actually seems to turn away from organized crime. Oh, there are hilarious scenes where emulates gang crime at the kid level. He runs a low-stakes numbers game in school and mugs the ice cream man to take his ice cream truck for a joy ride. But then he recognizes that getting caught for serious crime means he won't get into college or be able to hold a legit professional job. As the movie reaches a climax he throws out a beloved gift from Dickie he knows was stolen. Given that this movie shows Tony repudiating crime, how is it a sequel for him becoming a crime lord?

3) Minor characters are entertaining... if you know them already

Another reason why I consider this movie a fan service is that many parts of it are vastly more enjoyable— and understandable— to people who've already seen The Sopranos. For those of us who know characters like Silvio Dante and Paulie Walnuts well, seeing the portrayal of their younger versions is a hoot.

Paulie is a simpering fop. In one scene he's painting his nails at a gang sit-down dinner. He can barely pass the peppermill across the table because his nail polish is drying. In another scene, he insists of switching positions during the beating of a rival gang member because he doesn't want to get blood on the fancy suit jacket he just bought.

In the portrayal of a young Silvio we see the definitive answer to a question many Sopranos fans have wondered about: is his magnificent pompadour hairstyle his real hair or a wig? Silvio circa 1970 looks like he's already 45 years old as his hair is thinning, badly. In the first half of the movie he wears it in an awful comb-over. By the later scenes his rich pompadour appears— and gets partly torn off (because it's a wig) during a scuffle.

4) Uncle Jun is (and always was) a pissant fool

Also in the vein of "minor characters that don't mean much unless you know them already" is another of Tony's uncles, "Uncle Jun'". His portrayal as a younger man here shows him to be a jealous idiot. I already wrote about how he's a proud fool in the season 1 wrap-up. This prequel movie portrays that he was always like that. He's a trifling person, isn't very smart, and perhaps most importantly for a person trying to rise up through the ranks of organized crime, doesn't have the respect of his peers. When Tony's father gets sent to prison, Junior haughtily tells the other soldiers, "While my brother's away everything goes through me." "What, you have diarrhea?" one quips. His peers all laugh.

5) A shocking reveal at the end!

While The Many Saints of Newark begins with a spoiler for the series it ends with a shocking revelation about an important plot point that happened in the middle of the series. In the penultimate scene ( movie spoiler )

The final scene shows a different explanation for why this event happened than is provided in the TV series. In a brief, coda-like scene, ( more spoilers )

Season 5 of The Sopranos opens with news that several new characters will join the show. In-show the reason is that a bunch of convicted mobsters have just gotten out of jail, their paroles happening around the same time many years after a justice spree of organized crime convictions. Seeing a raft of new characters coming into the story, moreover with flimsy justification, made me wonder: is this where The Sopranos jumps the shark?

For those who don't know, Jumping the Shark is a storytelling trope named for the 1977 episode of TV series Happy Days in which the iconic Fonzie (played by Henry Winkler) ski-jumps over a shark. The meaning of Jumping the Shark is that a series has lost its way and has to resort to gimmicks to shore up its declining viewership. As the pages on Jumping the shark on Wikipedia and Jumping the Shark at TV Tropes, explain, the gimmick doesn't have to involve water skiing or shark jumping. There's actually quite a long list of disruptive tropes writers can engage in that may signal the show is going downhill creatively. One of the more common ones is introducing a bunch of new characters.

As I've mentioned a few times before I have the benefit of hindisght when it comes to questions about whether The Sopranos holds together or falls apart. The show wrapped more than 15 years ago. It was acclaimed all the way through, and it ends just one season later (6 seasons total).

Watching the first half of Season 5 has satisfied me that this is not a case of Jumping the Shark. The four new characters are well integrated in the narrative. The story remains centered around Tony instead of being changed from that core premise.

Two of the new characters become minor characters. We see them on camera infrequently, and their function is mainly to show that the world Tony Soprano inhabits is not standing still. He's got to deal with changes and challenges that come from new people who might be his friends, his enemies, or both.

The other two characters, Feech LaManna and Tony Blundetto (played by accomplish film character actor Steve Buscemi), become on-screen regulars (at least through the first several episodes of season 5). They, too, are well integrated into story. There are character sub-plots about each of them, but these ultimately center around Tony and how he deals with differences of opinion and unwanted behavior under his leadership of the organization. Plus, the Tony B. character arc is just fun. He's a person you feel good rooting for because while he was a criminal in the past he's trying really hard in the present to go 100% legit... with some slips and falls along the way.

Ironically just 1 episode after I complained about The Sopranos season 4 hitting a slump the series picked up its pace again. In s4ep9, "Whoever Did This", Ralphie become distraught after his son is injured in an accident. He shows some character growth by reckoning with some of the bad ways he's treated people... but in his grief he also starts losing control and does something awful that enrages Tony.

( Spoiler: what happens between Tony and Ralphie )

In the next episode, "The Strong, Silent Type", the picked-up pace continues. We see another scene of Christopher's heroin use— one of the things that made the mid-season episodes tedious— but now this arc of the story reaches a climax. Christopher hits a new low with his fiancee, Adriana. ( Spoiler: Christopher's creepy rock-bottom )

Christopher's friends and family stage an intervention. They enlist the help of distant associate of the gang who's a recovered drug addict. He's actually a good guy who's very patient and tries facilitate a positive, "by the book" intervention. It's humorous, though, that he thinks these gang thugs never confronted anyone about a problem. They threaten and beat people frequently! The intervention starts out gently, but gangsters Paulie and Silvio predictably lose their cool and start beating Christopher up in front of everyone, including his mother— who eggs them on! (Christopher and his mom have a strained relationship. That was shown at the end of the episode where he learns who killed his father.)

Christopher enters a drug rehab clinic after Tony makes it clear to him it's that "or else".

I've watched The Sopranos through just past the midpoint of season 4 (I finished s4e8 recently). The series is hitting a slump. The pace of action has slowed way down. The past 5 episodes seem like they could have been condensed into 2 or 3 with tighter writing. Hawk has walked out of the room halfway through an episode twice, asking me to fill her in on what happened... and after finishing the episode I've said, "Uh, basically nothing." 😒

Here are Five Things:

1) Middle Movie Syndrome?

I've perused fan sites online and found that frustration with season 4 is typical. Fans claim that to some extent it's "middle movie syndrome". The show doesn't have the excitement of introducing the characters like in the first season, and can't tie things up like in the final season. We're left with moving the pieces around the board to set up for the finale.

FWIW not all movie trilogies suffer "middle movie syndrome". Star Wars— the original trilogy— did not. Back to the Future did. And some series of novels have suffered middle book(s) syndrome. Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series lost its way after book 4 and stumbled for a few books.

And here's the thing: middle movie syndrome is not inevitable. The Sopranos kept things fresh in Season 3 by introducing a new antagonist (Ralphie), changing the style slightly to spend time a) following the cops who are pursing the crime gang and b) following daughter Meadow as she adjusts to college life, and running a very tight character-driven episode about "two assholes lost in the woods". Season 3 proved the series could stay strong even in the middle. Season 4 just drags.

2) Are They Juicing Us?

A few times in the series gangsters refer to "juicing" a target: encouraging a person to borrow money for something they don't really need... but only as much as they can afford the outrageous interest payments on. The gangsters don't want to put the target out of business or into bankruptcy. They know they get more money in the long run if the target keeps working and keeps paying them.

To some extent it feels like the producers of this show are juicing us in Season 4. At this point in its original broadcast the series had become critically acclaimed. It had built a strong viewership. What better way for the corporate overlords to maximize their revenue than to draw the series out slowly, lengthening the time over which they can collect subscription fees.

3) Okay, So It's Character Driven...

Dislike for season 4 is not universal, though. Some fans defend it as actually being a strong season. Their argument is that season 4's episodes are very character-driven, and the characters are so richly drawn they are fun to watch develop further.

I won't debate that these slows episodes have focused on character development— that's simply fact— but I disagree on all both the reasons why that's actually good.

4) ...But the Characters are Assholes

In some stories rich characterization is really a plus. For that to happen, though, the characters have got to be ones the audience cares about. In The Sopranos the characters are assholes. The gang members are mostly foolish and un-self aware— in addition to being liars, thieves, and murderers. I don't care to see a slow walk through these people's shitty, venal, semi clueless lives!

I don't need, for example, to see multiple lengthy scenes of Christopher getting high on heroin. It was made clear in the first two episodes of season 1 that he's got a drug problem. Quick scenes about it, or even showing him high in other scenes without actually showing him shooting up, would convey that he continues using and is getting worse.

5) The Characterization isn't Consistent

Meanwhile, the slow pace of characterization isn't even. There's so much time spent showing Christopher continuing to use drugs you might think it's a how-to video for injecting Heroin. But subplots involving Tony's kids, Meadow and A.J., jump forward skipping multiple steps.

Meadow is now in her sophomore year at Columbia University. After previously being characterized as a dilettante who railed against privilege with no awareness of the irony about how much privilege she enjoyed, and wanting to drop out of school for a year to travel (on her parents' generous dime, of course) suddenly she's back in school and is volunteering at a law clinic for poor people in a marginalized community. Where did her change of heart come from? In a fast moving story I'd accept such a jump as par for the course. In a slower moving story the audience really needs to be shown the reason for the change of heart to accept it as anything other than the writers cheaping out.

Likewise, A.J. goes from being a clueless boy-child who does dumb things and can't even explain why he does them— he simply imitates his immature male friends because he can't think of anything better to do— to having a stronger sense of himself and pursuing a physical/emotional relationship with a girl. Again, where did that come from? In a fast story I could accept it as that being the pace at which minor character development happened, but now if the show is supposed to be all slow because the characters are so richly drawn, they've got to do better.

Bottom line, I'll keep watching The Sopranos despite this slump. I know it gets better! But even if I was watching the original broadcast (i.e., didn't know future episodes/seasons improve) I'd stick with it for a bit longer. The slump isn't yet so long or so deep that I'd abandon the series.

Season 3 episode 11 of The Sopranos, titled "Pine Barrens", is one of the most memorable episodes in the whole series. The idea came from a dream writer/director Tim Van Patten had during the previous season: Paulie and Christopher get lost in the woods after trying to kill somebody, then they can’t get out. Based on just that one sentence summary showrunner David Chase approved, and Van Patten worked with co-writer Terence Winter to develop the script and screenplay.



Curiously the plot of Paulie and Christopher getting lost in the snowy woods (where they're trying to dispose of a body) isn't relevant to the larger story lines of the series. Two minor plots in this episode— Tony's relationship with his latest goomar and him failing to see the pattern of why he keeps falling for certain kinds of women, and Meadow realizing that Jackie Aprile, Jr., is an unintelligent and unfaithful jerk— actually advance the series. Paulie and Christopher lost in the woods is a self-contained character study. But oh, what a marvelous self-contained story it is!

One thing that makes Paulie and Christopher's misadventure so powerful is the "fish out of water" element. In their stomping grounds of Northern New Jersey they're men in charge. They know what they're doing, they know their way around, and people give them a lot of respect. Out here in the wilds of Southern New Jersey they don't know where they are, they don't know what to do (they get lost and hypothermia sets in!), and the wilderness totally doesn't give a shit whether they live or die by their own wits.

You can see their displacement visually in their appearance. Paulie's hair, usually immaculately coifed, is all messed up. His silver wings sticking out straight sideways. Even a still from one of the scenes, as I've included above, conveys that crazy stuff is going on.

The challenges of the environment, and the feeling of no way out (they get lost in the woods), create a pressure cooker for a character story to develop. Paulie and Christopher are so out of their element, and their personalities and ways of handling things are counterproductive. Paulie tries to blame the situation on Chris even when Paulie precipitated it, and Chris threatens to kill Paulie— going so far as to pull a gun on him and then pull it back with a laugh. "We're just two assholes lost in the woods," he quips.

Early in season 3 of The Sopranos Tony's mother, Livia, dies. Sorry if that's a spoiler to anyone 20 years after the episode originally aired. I'm saying it out in the open here because I want to use it as a stepping stone for talking about real life. The best fiction does that; it holds a mirror to real life in a way that helps us understand it better.

In the series, Livia is a monster. She goes out of her way to insult and demean nearly every person around her. She revels in making people miserable. She plants ideas in various people's heads that they should kill Tony— her son!

When Tony first learns of Livia's death his eyes light up for a moment. "Really?" he asks, seeming excited. His mood turns quickly from glee to sorrow, though. At a meeting with Dr. Melfi later in the episode he reveals that part of his sorrow is guilt over not feeling sorrow. "I'm glad she's dead," he says, then laments whether that makes him a "miserable, disgusting bad son".

This is the where the story that holds a mirror to reality. A lot of us have a relative (or multiple relatives) who are cheerless individuals; people who are not merely unhappy themselves but deliberately cause strife and unhappiness with others. I can think of a few people in my family like that (some deceased, some not). We may not wish them to die but we certainly won't miss them when they do. And that's the point— that's okay. Horrible people should not be honored just because they're genetically related.

Related blog entry: The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.