Although it wasn’t widely noticed at first, within the last ten years American television started to get good again. The broadcast terrain which back in the sixties was proclaimed to be a ‘vast wasteland’ wasn’t always bad, of course. During its pioneer days, American TV experienced what has subsequently been considered a golden age. Dramas by contemporary playwrights were taped in front of live audiences, and a generation of comedians like Lucille Ball, Jack Benny and Jackie Gleason found their better selves on the small screen. Even during its bleakest decades, there were moments of truth and inspired insanity that broke through the conventions codified by profit-seeking networks. But no one ever suggested that American television was superior to contemporary film, not to mention the equal of the nineteenth-century novel. Today, serious cultural critics are making just such assertions.
The
new television is rooted in contemporary American experience without
apology. During the bleak years, British television, imported to American
screens in an implicit statement of defeat by the (barely) publicly funded
Public Broadcasting System, was often seen to set the standard of
excellence. But despite the literacy of the scripts, the quality of the
acting and high production values, these costume dramas steeped in European
history had precious little to say to an American audience. Today, British
inspirations are the dregs of the TV schedule. Adaptations of British game
shows like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and, worst and best of all, the
pop industry talent-search show renamed American Idol find huge audiences
but make little claim to quality.
The most innovative shows on American TV today are on Home Box Office, a
cable service that viewers pay for in contrast to the network system that
has dominated American TV from its inception. HBO dramas like The Sopranos,
a saga of everyday mobster life in New Jersey, and Six Feet Under, a story
of a family of morticians battling life and death in their own lives in, of
all places, Los Angeles, and Sex and the City, a comedy of manners set among
a quartet of single women in Manhattan, redefined television in the nineties
and challenged the networks to get real.
Network shows like Fox’s 24 responded in
spirit, producing thrills and suspense in a ground-breaking format with each
hourly segment occurring in real time (minus advertising slots, of course)
to accumulatively document the events of a single day.
The Sopranos is the most watched and highly praised of the new shows. In a
seminal essay, cultural critic Ellen Willis wrote in The Nation that it is
‘the richest and most compelling piece of television – no, of popular
culture – that I’ve encountered in the past 20 years’. Discussion of the
show, its characters and the often startling revelations it makes about
contemporary American life through the medium of brutal mob boss Tony
Soprano and his complicit but questioning wife Carmela animate many
Americans’ conversations. Strangers in bars quote dialogue, citing season
and episode as if it were a scene from Shakespeare. Friends who were once
eager to debate the merits of the latest novels by Don DeLillo or Mary
Gaitskill instead probe the meaning of Tony’s latest outburst and ponder
when Carmela will finally leave him. This past year, a raft of books
inspired by the series has been published, ranging from a Sopranos cookbook
to a collection of essays by Italian-American scholars, and even a Sopranos
designer label. A lively market in videotaped copies exists for those who
don’t subscribe to cable. When the 13-episode season ends, something like
withdrawal hits hardcore fans.
Why such devotion? The new TV shows satisfy
the need for the long-breathed narrative of the nineteenth-century novel
which most contemporary fiction patently does not. The New York Times Book
Review Editor Charles McGrath stated as much a few years ago in The Times
Sunday Magazine. (My God, if the Book Editor feels that way, then it’s true,
right?) These TV shows reflect how we live today, while much serious fiction
is lost in labyrinths of formal innovation. That’s okay for experimental
fiction, but there is also room for good, meaningful stories, which is
precisely what shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and 24 provide. In
her Nation piece, Willis compared The Sopranos to a ‘postmodern
Middlemarch’.
In addition to telling a compelling story, The Sopranos is sociologically
astute. The saga of how turn-of-the-last-century immigrants have been
assimilated into American life – with that Petri dish of ethnic, class and
racial antagonisms, New Jersey, serving as the stage – is being told with
the full complexity it deserves.
The story of Italians in America, which only began to be addressed with Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy and the films of Martin Scorsese, has reached its apotheosis in The Sopranos. Not that Italian-Americans are universally happy to see how they are being portrayed – almost exclusively as gangsters – and civil rights organisations have protested. But the show is enormously popular with Italian-Americans, and the creative force behind it, David Chase (née DeCaesare) is one himself. Indeed, The Sopranos has incorporated the debate into the show, depicting characters thrashing out the issue among themselves. In the most telling of these encounters, the family of Dr. Jennifer Melfi, Tony’s therapist, heatedly discusses the propriety of her treating a Mafia capo. Her ex-husband, whose sense of self-worth is wounded by the identification of all Italian-Americans with the mob, objects to her seeing him at all. Their college-aged son, however, points out that the Mafia has replaced the western as the central trope of American culture. And it’s true that less than a decade after John Ford made his last western, the real frontier having long since been closed, Coppola was directing his first Godfather film. The site of the primal tale of good versus evil moved from the west’s great mountains and deserts to the old immigrant-transformed cities of the eastern seaboard. Cowboys and Indians were replaced by FBI agents and Mafiosi.
The process of assimilation is re-enacted within the Soprano family; both the nuclear family of Tony, Carmela and their two children, and the extended ‘family’ of mobsters and their wives. Carmela, a good Catholic wife and mother played brilliantly by Edie Falco, is in denial about the source of her wealth. She lives in a McMansion, an overblown suburban home, alongside doctors, lawyers and other professionals. She aspires to respectability and is proud that her daughter is going to Columbia, an Ivy League college. But assimilation is accompanied by deracination. Their daughter has been named Meadow; certainly the first Mafia princess to be so christened. Tony is also proud of his family’s success, but he is truly torn: he can’t ignore the messy facts of how he occasionally makes his living as a killer. Played by James Gandolfini, Tony is a natural charmer, and in the spirit of Brecht the show plays up his brutality to prevent viewers from identifying with him too closely. In a particularly deft move, the show brackets the Soprano family drama with suggestions of the similar but different assimilation process being undergone by Jews and African-Americans, the other two aspirant groups in New Jersey’s post-war history.
Ellen Willis described the show as ‘a meditation on the nature of morality, the possibility of redemption and the legacy of Freud’, and it has been the show’s fidelity to psychological realism – and truth to the psycho-therapeutic process – that has generated the greatest analysis. At the heart of the show is Tony’s relationship with Dr. Melfi, played with total understanding by Lorraine Bracco, and Chase has acknowledged that a mob boss going to a therapist to treat anxieties brought on by a larger sense of existential dread was the idea that generated the entire series. In The Psychology of the Sopranos, Glen O. Gabbard estimates that more than 400 movies and innumerable TV shows have touched on psychotherapy, but that The Sopranos is the first to come close to getting it right. Certainly, compared to Analyze This, a contemporaneous film comedy with a similar premise, it appears to have been scripted by Dr. Freud himself. During the show’s first two seasons, Tony’s sessions are dominated by discussion of his relationship with his mother, Livia, one of the most toxic characters to have appeared in recent fiction. (It is no coincidence that she bears the same name as Roman Emperor Augustus Caesar’s wife, who shared her amoral ruthlessness.) After Tony discovers that she gave his uncle, Junior, permission to ‘whack’ him, he responds, when attempts at reconciliation are made, that ‘she is dead to me’, but he is haunted by the fact that his very own mother agreed to have him killed. ‘What kind of man am I that my own mother would want me dead?’ he ponders; a question with no answer.
If we feel we know the Sopranos as well as our own friends and families, it might be because, after four seasons of 13 hour-long episodes, we have spent 52 hours with them. We know all the central characters’ back-stories, we share in their dreams, we watch them have sex, get high, scheme to do in him who would do them in before he gets a chance to. They are crude, mean, ugly, but human, and we relate to them for that reason. After The Sopranos, films, even exceptional films, seem inadequate. In 90 minutes, how much can they reveal? At best, they are short stories compared to the novel The Sopranos approximates. (Actually, at this point, The Sopranos equals a quartet of novels – let’s call it The North Jersey Quartet.) Certainly, short forms have their unique strengths, but there is no substitute for the power and depth the extended form can offer.
Six Feet Under, which has completed only two seasons or 26 episodes, has the potential to be even more moving and more profound than The Sopranos, and has left me in tears more than once. The story of a dysfunctional family of undertakers, one of whom is facing the possibility of his own death, the show highlights the issue most Americans want nothing to do with – their own mortality. The success of the show – the creation of Alan Ball, who wrote the screenplay for American Beauty – suggests that as a culture, America might finally be reaching maturity; despite the cowboy behaviour of its current leader.
24 marks a sign of maturity in the networks as well. A risky proposition – a story that unfolds through a single day spread over 24 weeks – the show lost viewers as it moved through time, but Fox did not abandon it. Compare that to the fate a couple of years ago of ABC’s Murder One, a potentially brilliant show that hoped to follow a single, lurid trial through a season, but which was pulled by the network when its viewing figures dropped off. During its first season, 24 was structured around the fates of three families – those of Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorism agent; Senator Palmer, a Democratic candidate for President (the first black man within reach of the position); and Victor Drazin, a Serbian warlord who intended to kill both of them in retaliation for the death of his own family during the Balkan wars. 24 suffered from an excess of sentimentality along with a few too many shoot-outs and car chases. Family values, the American vice, dominated, as they do in The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. But the show was remarkably intelligent and incomparably thrilling. It has come back for a second season even better than before. Tauter and less sentimental, it is currently telling a story that attracts the interest of every American, with terrorists planning to detonate a nuclear device somewhere in the Los Angeles area that very day. Only Jack Bauer can save the situation – again.
Of course, most broadcast hours continue to occupy that vast wasteland, but the survival of a few good shows and the amount of positive attention they receive augurs well. However, the networks still show cold feet all too often. This year, Push, Nevada, a story about corruption in a small town that was a cross between sci-fi and David Lynchian paranoia, was ignominiously cancelled after only six episodes despite the production support of movie stars Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. And two years ago, Action, an incredibly cynical (and funny) comedy about a Hollywood agent, was also killed off prematurely. Maybe it’s just as well. If TV got too good, we’d never leave the house again. American Idol returned at the end of January.
David Bonetti is an independent writer in San Francisco