| A Family Affair |
October
2002 |
The Return of Tony Soprano
After 16 long and eventful months, America's favorite soap opera returned to the air on September 15 as Tony Soprano and his family, and his other family, started a fourth season on HBO. To call The Sopranos a soap opera is not to insult it, but rather to compliment the normally slow-paced, dim-witted TV drama, to point out that the form can be better than it usually is.
That is it a soap-opera is beyond doubt -- will Carmela cheat on Tony with Furio? Will Uncle Junior die of cancer? Will Christopher's smack habit ruin his career?
The way in which the program transcends the form, though, lies in the uniqueness of the characters and their struggle with evil. There is no mistake that the mob is evil, and its members are evil. Not in the sense that Hitler and Stalin were evil, but Tony Soprano is a "regular guy" whose sense of right and wrong died a quiet death years ago. His crew are evil in the same way. His biological family are accomplices after-the-fact. They look the other way.
And who among us has not? The Sopranos' genius lies in showing us our own moral compromises merely by exaggerating the quality of the deal with the devil. It is a convention that Sophocles and Shakespeare would recognize. After all, MacBeth is not a play about Scottish kings; it is a play about the lengths people will go to realize ambition. That's why King Duncan, or Jackie Junior, gets whacked.