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captainsblogBlah blah blah Day 10 - A show you thought you wouldn't like but ended up loving
It's a sign of how desperate I was, at first, that I almost answered this day's entry with "Dallas." I'd have been emailing the Hemlock Society if I could've done no better.
At last, though, I realized that my real answer was all in the Family.
I should've known I'd like The Sopranos from the get-go. Being from Lawn Guyland by birth practically qualifies as Omertà, especially coming from the largely Italian neck of the woods that I did. Joey Bananas lived on the other side of my junior high school, and my sister reports having seen him under deep cover at Hempstead General Hospital, when she worked there in the mid 1960s and other families were looking to take him out.
The first R movie I ever saw was The Godfather. Between that, its MAD parody (that was actually included in an unaired 1973ish TV special), the Crazy Gang comedy record, and various pre-internet riffs on the whole business like this one (we still use "udda thingzas" as a catchphrase around the house), I should have been ripe for an HBO drama about a similar family from the other side of theHoffa Hudson River.
Except the Scorcese influence had permeated too much through the 80s and early 90s. Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed caused me to depart the genre. Too much gore and not enough humanity. So as the 20th century ended, and more and more people talked about This Thing of Theirs on Sunday nights, and how it played on more levels than just a Scorcese shoot-em-up, my resistance became futile. It finally collapsed in a hotel room in Boston, on a trip to visit AOL friends there, where they carried Home Box on the in-room cable. As soon as I saw Tony come out of that tunnel for the first time, I was destined to take the rest of the trip with him- and did, between generous taping privileges at my neighbor's house and, ultimately, our own temporary HBOery, until the non-finale finale a few years back.
It fully earned its L, S and V subratings for the TV-MA warning that appeared every Sunday night at 8:59; still, it didn't need all, or necessarily any, of those distractions for the drama of those stories to work. Despite there always being at least one annoying character in every episode (most of them sharing a last name with the series, either AJ or TWoP's immortal Shut Up Meadow), the strong ones' performances whacked them from your consciousness without shedding a drop. While Edie Falco went on to do greater things (both in Jacks and the John Sayles film Sunshine State that aired midway through Tony's reign), she was never credited as the leading actress in The Sopranos. That was Lorraine Bracco, whose Dr. Melfi had a similar layering of complications to match those of her patient.
While I'd love to have a do-over on the final episode, I don't think there's any hour, or more, or less, that has been broadcast or cabled that I was so wrong about initially. It was an awesome Journey.
It's a sign of how desperate I was, at first, that I almost answered this day's entry with "Dallas." I'd have been emailing the Hemlock Society if I could've done no better.
At last, though, I realized that my real answer was all in the Family.
I should've known I'd like The Sopranos from the get-go. Being from Lawn Guyland by birth practically qualifies as Omertà, especially coming from the largely Italian neck of the woods that I did. Joey Bananas lived on the other side of my junior high school, and my sister reports having seen him under deep cover at Hempstead General Hospital, when she worked there in the mid 1960s and other families were looking to take him out.
The first R movie I ever saw was The Godfather. Between that, its MAD parody (that was actually included in an unaired 1973ish TV special), the Crazy Gang comedy record, and various pre-internet riffs on the whole business like this one (we still use "udda thingzas" as a catchphrase around the house), I should have been ripe for an HBO drama about a similar family from the other side of the
Except the Scorcese influence had permeated too much through the 80s and early 90s. Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed caused me to depart the genre. Too much gore and not enough humanity. So as the 20th century ended, and more and more people talked about This Thing of Theirs on Sunday nights, and how it played on more levels than just a Scorcese shoot-em-up, my resistance became futile. It finally collapsed in a hotel room in Boston, on a trip to visit AOL friends there, where they carried Home Box on the in-room cable. As soon as I saw Tony come out of that tunnel for the first time, I was destined to take the rest of the trip with him- and did, between generous taping privileges at my neighbor's house and, ultimately, our own temporary HBOery, until the non-finale finale a few years back.
It fully earned its L, S and V subratings for the TV-MA warning that appeared every Sunday night at 8:59; still, it didn't need all, or necessarily any, of those distractions for the drama of those stories to work. Despite there always being at least one annoying character in every episode (most of them sharing a last name with the series, either AJ or TWoP's immortal Shut Up Meadow), the strong ones' performances whacked them from your consciousness without shedding a drop. While Edie Falco went on to do greater things (both in Jacks and the John Sayles film Sunshine State that aired midway through Tony's reign), she was never credited as the leading actress in The Sopranos. That was Lorraine Bracco, whose Dr. Melfi had a similar layering of complications to match those of her patient.
While I'd love to have a do-over on the final episode, I don't think there's any hour, or more, or less, that has been broadcast or cabled that I was so wrong about initially. It was an awesome Journey.
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Date: 2010-07-11 12:36 am (UTC)My show was Babylon 5. A critic friend told me about, so I tuned in to the worse episode of the first season, "Infection." Pretty standard Roddenbury tropes, nothing to see here, move on.
At the beginning of the second season, my critic friend urged me to give it another try -- and I was hooked. Big time. I borrowed bad VHS tapes from a workmate to see the first season from the start. There has never been a television show, before or since, that has held a candle to the wonderful story that Straczynski told in that five-year arc. Intelligently written, brilliantly acted, and they actually managed to get CGI into that budget. I'm told the entire five years cost $110 million. Take that, James Cameron!