April 9th, 2007
Heresy time: I liked the first season of The Sopranos quite a lot. It was good stuff. But it didn’t capture my interest enough to stick around for the second season–and if the first season is a fair measure of the show’s quality, then it may be the most over-praised series of our time. (Of course, maybe the the show got a lot better after I stopped watching, which is totally possible.)
The Sopranos seemed to me like a really great show, but the best thing ever to grace the small screen? I liked Homicide better. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, too. Ditto my latest TV crushes, Veronica Mars and Battlestar Galactica. But these shows don’t get giant billboards and Vanity Fair covers like The Sopranos does. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hating on David Chase’s show–I just wish people would save a few plaudits for some of the other great TV being produced.
All of which is a long wind-up to this interesting bit from Ross Douthat:
I would actually go a little further than this (and I do, in a forthcoming piece), and argue that The Sopranos is implicitly – and sometimes explicitly – a show about damnation, and how ordinary, often-sympathetic people can willingly choose to go to hell.
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