Monday, December 11, 2006

Sopranos Keep Singing

After peaking early in its long run, The Sopranos Season 7 set of DVDs (as rented from Netflix), is part of a long joyless glide of the show to a possibly enervated conclusion next year. The show became more conventional, more fractured, as the sometimes perfunctory story-lines played themselves out over the past several seasons. But still, in its doddering old age it is capable of evoking a shudder of psychological insight and of grappling with a moral landscape in a humorous, often satirical (the show can be very funny), yet serious manner; The Sopranos is still better than the current crop of slickly produced and cleverly done TV — boring and empty manifestations of pop culture at its core.

No longer worth watching for what it is, The Sopranos is worth watching for what it aspires to be.

posted by Ira Altschiller on Monday, December 11, 2006 @ 01:01 AM