The Sopranos (HBO) TV Show • Page 32

Thanks! I've only watched the show once (well, I'm still stuck on a few episodes before the end of S5), so I I wasn't sure

 

Wtf The Test Dream is great

 

I love all the dream heavy episodes. ESPECIALLY THE COMA DREAMS

 

The scene where Tony (me) is outside the house with Buscemi is one of the best scenes with them (us) and made me extremely anxious every time I watched it. So well done.

 

hi, I started this earlier in the week I'm on s4 as of last night and I love this show. I'm trying to slow it down now cause i don't wanna just binge this but it's so good it makes it hard to not just let the next episode play lol

the vibe started changing towards the end of season three which was interesting to notice. not that it's all sunshine and rainbows before, but it feels noticeably darker in a lot of ways. fractured relationships, this anxious feel that the floor could drop out underneath them at any time bc who knows who should be trusted within the family, quicker w the nuclear options, Tony getting a little colder the more jaded he's gotten, etc etc.

sidenote, I would like everyone to stop being mean to Bobby :(

 

Please post your feelings after Whitecaps and make me cry about it again.

And the good thing about binging is that the show is endlessly rewatchable, so don’t feel bad about rushing!

 

while not wanting to spoil anything, I definitely agree that the end of S3/beginning of S4 is when the show changes it's tone. It doesn't necessarily begin it's move to the ending straight away, but the focal point of the show's final seasons definitely has it's roots in this time period.

 

I am halfway through season 5 now and I’m going to be sad when we finish it.

 

thinking about my favorite final scenes of seasons, the end of S3 in the restaurant/that whole sequence with Jr. singing and meadow drunk and running out might be my favorite. The final scenes of S2 are fantastic as well in the house for Meadow's party, with Tony clearly preoccupied on Big Pussy.

 

will do! is that in season 4? oh yeah my roommate has watched this a million times, I think it was his latest rewatch that pushed me to really delve in. I'll probably just keep up the pace, especially since each season has only gotten better somehow?

sort of tangentially related to the tone, every time they mentioned the 90s in previous seasons I wondered if a post 9/11 sopranos would incorporate that in any significant way just bc of the setting and whatnot. also thanks for confirming my observations cause I was wondering if I was just imagining that since I went through it so fast lol

 

agree with all of this!! Tony's relationship w both meadow and aj has been a constant source of interest for me and the deterioration is bumming me out but I'm also living for it

 

So I think context is important to the change in tone as well. You have to remember, when The Sopranos premiered in 1999, HBO wasn't exactly known as THE SPOT for incredible television quite yet. They had Oz and Larry Sanders, but it wasn't the cultural touchpoint yet.

Sitcoms like Friends were ruling network television at the time. The Sopranos in its early stages was a lot like a live action version of The Simpsons, just with the mob angle. The show was a lot more episodic, and slowly got more experimental as time went on.

Watching the show for the first time with 2020 eyes, is much different than how it was perceived as it was airing. We are now used to dark anti-hero dramas, with meticulously planned out story arcs, with each episode unfolding as another piece of a long movie. Our minds are more trained to look for all the hallmarks of our current Netflix/HBO premium television. At the time, Sopranos was just trying to tell short stories about these characters, that eventually added up to a greater whole.

David Chase and company realized they could really spread their wings and challenge the audience more with darker and sometimes more surreal material. They were changing culture with each season, and really trailblazing everything that is possible today. Also of note: Season 4 is actually the first season of the show produced in a post-9/11 world.

 

^ ^ ^ ^ excellent points.

Also yeah, seasons 1-3 feature the twin towers in the credits and they were removed for S4's intro.

 

Yes, it’s the S4 finale. We were talking about it recently so I’m very curious to see what someone thinks on a first watch. It’s probably my favorite episode.

 

also as a Mets fan one of my favorite scenes (non spoiler) is when Tony and Johnny Sac meet briefly in the parking lot of Shea Stadium. Citi Field was probably in the planning stages at the time but nobody in the general public probably knew about it yet (2004). I like how one of my favorite shows immortalizes it haha

 

This isn't spoilery but they do touch on post 9/11 mentality a tiny bit and when looking back it does capture the feeling at the time of living in a state of fear of another terrorist attack. There is a recurring thing where Tony tries to gain favorability with FBI by giving tips to possible Middle Eastern terrorists he's come across but that represents a time where most Americans were wary of Middle Easterns in America and immediately perceived them as the enemy

 

Also, not a spoiler really, but I believe Sopranos Autopsy discusses how the entire final season's thesis statement is about the War on Terror

 

Yeah I was gonna mention this but didn't want to give too much away about involvement of certain characters later in the show haha

 

thanks for this, I did notice the episodic nature of the show but it so often ended up going somewhere that it never even occurred to me that that wasn't intentional, just a byproduct of quality writing haha. The Simpsons comparison is a good one, all the domestic stuff definitely has parallels, and the comparison sort of deepens some thoughts I was having where I was connecting it to a lot of coming of age themes.

speaking of changing culture it occurred to me that there's gotta be stuff here that I assume would probably not be written if they were done today, scenes that really shocked me because I felt like I rarely see things like that on present tv (like the assault in the parking garage or the poor girl beaten to death by ralphie, for example) but, graphicness aside, I did like that none of those events were brushed off as being no big deal and the damaging ramifications were explored p thoroughly

I'm gonna be referring to this as I watch the show probably lol

e: changed explicit reference to a character to avoid spoiling for anyone who is also watching this over a decade after the end but hopefully y'all still know what I'm referring to

 

Interestingly enough I find that this show handled difficult stories and problematic tropes of that nature MUCH better than many shows coming out even today. They weren’t perfect of course and some aspects are still hard to watch or dated, but like you said, the weight they gave them in the story and the way they wrote the women involved as complete people is sadly not often the case in this sort of show. It’s one of the biggest reasons why this and a few other shows are head and shoulders above the other “best ever” contenders in my mind.

 

I've watched this show three full times now and all this talk is making me want to watch again lol.

 

yeah I honestly can't think of very many shows where the violence towards women isn't brushed off as either "just the times" or as a stale, gauche plot device. I think Tony's reaction in the case of the girl who died also lent extra weight to it just given his own behavior towards women, the idea that even for a relatively callous "tough guy" (at least as far as women are concerned) there is such a thing as gratuitousness. the depictions of complexity and the utter lack of condescension towards the viewer is what keeps me from looking away from those difficult moments

talking about this show makes me appreciate the writing even more, there's just clearly so much care put into it :')

 

I'm on my 4th rewatch lol Currently on season 3 again

 

I started watching again. Show is undeniably magic

 

A coworker of mine told me he was watching it for the first time recently. He's a film nerd like me and one of the things he said is that it was a surprise to him how cerebral the show is. He was expecting more of a "bro show" but it's not that at all.

It's a genius move that this mainstream hit was able to get people to come for the mob hits and stay for the subtext