JOLLY DAYS

The Sopranos Redux

The Sopranos never ends — in the imagination — for some, and maybe it is a good thing because the assessments and even introspection it generates are engrossing in themselves. Although more elegiac than insightful, this well-written consideration of the show is fascinating in what it evokes for the writer.

This territory thick with mobbed-up construction sites and toxic waste dumps turned out, unaccountably, to be a wonderland: not precisely Alice's domain but one likewise filled with magical locations (Bada Bing, Vesuvio's, the pork store), dream states and alternate realities, parodies and non sequiturs, ordinary objects turned menacing or disorienting, and devastating jokes that popped up in the midst of social rituals as arcane as the Queen of Hearts' croquet match. Every episode was saturated with allusions—to movies, songs, history high and low, scraps of every creed and cult, the common store of rumor and misinformation—a backbeat of information that might be relevant or meaningless. (Where else would we find a mob guy taking to heart the self-help mantra to “feel the fear and do it anyway”?)

I can't say I felt The Sopranos was anything more than a good TV show with some moments, early on, that were very funny and original.