ashthomas//blog

ashthomas//blog

Wednesday, March 10, 2004

Sopranos, Season 5. Slate has a couple of mafia experts commenting on the new season of The Sopranos. Last year they had psychologists, and this year they have Jeffrey Goldberg, formerly the organised crime reporter for New York magazine and now with the New Yorker, and Jerry Capeci who writes about the mafia for the New York Sun and his own webpage, dissecting the new series each week.

This is a treat for me, since we probably won't get to see the new season of The Sopranos in Australia for a few more months, unless I can download the episodes from the net somewhere. This comes a few days after the Salon article that looked at whether the show is a feminist tract in disguise, which was merely a conceit to discuss the first four episodes of the fifth season in a different way.

The guys at Slate only discuss the first episode, so they bring up a few questions that the Salon piece clears up, since it is privy to the next three hours of the storyline. Nonetheless, their discussion, digressing into anecdotes about the real life mafia and the similarities between it and the show, has me salivating. I love The Sopranos; I think it is the smartest, most engaging drama series on the air (possibly of all time). And comments like this are making me impatient to see its return:
First, it's clear that David Chase is bringing mob intrigue back front and center, which is a good thing for our purposes. And second, I think it's fair to say that The Sopranos is most definitely not jumping the shark.... The Sopranos writing remains fresh and disjointed and dread-filled, and that Lily Tomlin is not making guest appearances, and that my favorite characters are still the same sociopaths they were last season, only more so.

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