I have never seen the Sopranos as I have not had HBO-access since 1999; I watch streaming and online video content instead. Despite this, these platforms and various other media sources repeat the title of this show so often, that I feel as if I have watched it; I have seen several stills and perhaps some brief fragments advertising the show. This type of popularity is due to only five major corporations owning various types of entertainment platforms. For example, HBO is currently owned by WarnerMedia, which includes CNN, Warner Bros., Cartoon Network, Cinemax, bTV Radio Group, Nova, CW, Rotten Tomatoes, Cartoon Networks, Comedy Central, and E! (past). And WarnerMedia is owned by AT&T, which also includes satellite TV, telephone, internet, film/TV/cable production, publishing, news agencies and video games. Most of the articles Wikipedia links to from AT&T’s description is likely to have been written by newspapers owned by AT&T. This agency reviews itself in its own newspapers, TV programming (from CNN to E!), and on seemingly independent mass-review platforms such as Rotten Tomatoes. Thus, I have heard Sopranos referred to on CW shows, on entertainment news programs, in newspaper articles, and the like and all of these might have basically come from the same company that makes this show. It is surprising that this book’s publisher isn’t also owned by AT&T: Rowman is one of the few surviving independent trade and scholarly publishers left in the world, as other popular publishers have either been purchased by the five giants, are affiliated with a university’s agenda, or the like. Because popularity is determined by familiarity, if most people on the planet have heard these repetitive co-advertisements of Sopranos, it is technically true that it is a very familiar show, and because the co-ads are always extremely flattering, scholars can say the following about a barely literate show about an abusive mob family in a scholarly blurb without flinching: “Widely regarded as one of the greatest television series of all time, The Sopranos is also considered one of the most significant achievements in contemporary American culture.” To avoid criticizing without seeing something, I searched for a Sporanos screenplay and found the original pilot episode script from 8/7/1997, from which the following line by Carmela struck me as relevant in this context: “Tommy watches Godfather 2 all the time. He says the camera work looks just as good as in the movie theater.” Father Phil responds, “Where does Tom rank Goodfellas?” These are some of the more complex bits of dialogue, whereas most lines are Tommy Jr. saying: “What’s going on?” and Meadow bellowing, “You’re so strict about curfew I have to sneak out.” The longer dialogue sections are dedicated to the Godfather and Goodfellas for a reason: they are advertising these other films in a kind of ad-sharing arrangement required to increase your own show’s mentions on future films. With two of these in two random lines I happened to fall upon, it is likely that Sopranos’ has an abnormally high ad-exchange rate, and this has contributed to its own popularity. Meanwhile, do these quotes sound like “the most significant achievements in contemporary American culture”? How can “culture” be defined in this context? This is anti-cultural in the sense that it is anti-intellectual; it can only be especially cultural if it is viewed as representative of a subset of an American populace. Just as Native American cultural dances might be excellent because of their authenticity, Italian gangster culture can be authentically recorded in its natural state and this can be said an excellent cultural artifact simply because it is truthful. Thus, if anything Sopranos are recording the vapid and violent gangster culture in a documentary manner, without adding any artistic flare or design over what life in the represented gangster family is truly like. Instead of acknowledging this airheaded lack of artistic merit, too many popular culture critics raise these junk-shows in status seemingly because their level of sex and violence is effective in maintaining attention from viewers. But, how do these authors, M. Keith Booker and Isra Daraiseh explain this over-blown praise? “The series spearheaded the launch of a new wave of quality programming that has transformed the way people watch, experience, and talk about television. By chronicling the life and crimes of a New Jersey mobster, his family, and his cronies, The Sopranos examines deep themes at the heart of American life, particularly the country’s seedy underbelly.” While “programming” has been enhanced since 1997 with higher quality special effects due to advances in these technologies, reviewing screenplays prior to 1997 and those from the most recent programs does not show any progress in the texts or their artistic complexities. There is no proof of this, and there is definitely no proof that this individual show made any changes in how “people watch” shows. And what exactly is the difference between watching and experiencing a show? If how people “talk about television” has changed it has been because the AT&T and other mega-mergers have spread these ad-sharing campaigns until viewers are not likely to be able to tell the difference between innocuous pop-culture references and marketing ads in favor of sponsored programming. And it is absurd to call a mobster family’s crime chronicles a “deep theme”. And if this mob theme reflects America’s heart, this indicates that America has a mobster culture; given the volume of gun-crime in America, this is a true statement, but running a PR campaign for this mobster culture rather than against is a highly amoral scholarly practice. The book promises to be “examining the elements that account for the show’s popularity and critical acclaim”, but they do not actually raise the types of reasons I am naming here; instead, the standard narrative is one of “natural” popularity and critical applause. The fact that Rotten Tomatoes is one of the main platforms for these critics, and some of the newspapers and magazines that lauded this show are also owned by the same company is not mentioned in this critical narrative of popularity due to superiority. In truth, American culture demonstrates popularity of the inferior in intellect and artistic innovation due to superior funding of these undeserving ventures. Ignoring all this, they claim the show’s “ethnic antihero somehow reflected common themes of contemporary American life, including ethnicity, class, capitalism, therapy, and family dynamics.” Any documentary and any show that describes any family’s life in America, must include their class and family dynamics; and yet the inclusion of these basic components of life is lauded by critics searching for significance as proof of greatness. The authors insist the show “rivals film and literature for its beauty and stunning characterization of modern life”. Anti-intellectuals have been selling the superiority of visual dramatic entertainments without detail or other complexities of highbrow literature across the past century, as owners of TV, film, radio and other non-textual media have been promoting themselves and demoting the written word. These types of hyperbolic statements regarding the superiority of this meaningless little show really stresses the emptiness of these repeated falsities.
Appropriately for the subject, the front cover has “America” and “Tony Soprano’s” name crossed out. The first chapter commences with a story about HBO. This chapter explains that before this show, you could not do gangster crime dramas on TV; this is the shows major achievement: it forced the media to normalize gangster culture. Then, they explain that before this show, TV shows included “antitelevision” messages, warning viewers to avoid over-watching to prevent brain-damage; but this special show stopped all such public-awareness campaigns. This seems to fail to convince the writers themselves, so they start stumbling to explain what exactly is great about all this, until they exclaim that it’s better because some of the scenes are actually connected to each other in a manner that “is almost more literary in nature”. “Literary” is italicized despite the word “almost” preceding it: so the authors are emphatically sure but also not really sure that this gangster drama can be called “literary”. To prove this, they then claim that Episode 5.4 is one of many episodes that includes “allusions to literary novels” because its title plagiarizes Tolstoy’s opening sentence from Anna Karenina: “All Happy Families”. Stealing Tolstoy’s content without giving him credit via quotation marks does not demonstrate the authors of the screenplay are literary, but rather that they are so lazy, they are willing to steal from anybody even from a canonical literary writer, utilizing a quote almost all critics immediately recognize (1-5).
The authors keep trying to support their grand claims despite all of the evidence working in the contrary direction. For example, they call a section “The Metaphysics of The Sopranos”, making it seem like a “deep” intellectual exercise, and then begin it by saying that despite its “secular worldview”, its “overt engagement with religion… occurs primarily at the level of the church as a material institution rather than at the level of any genuine investigation of fundamental religious ideas” (100). Again, the authors promise they are going to talk about metaphysics, but then they explain the show has nothing to do with the abstract concepts or “ideas” of religion; in the same sentence, the also contradict the show’s “secular” spin by stressing that it is in fact heavily non-secular in its pro-church institutional propaganda.
This book demonstrates why researchers have to go where the evidence leads them, instead of attempting to present the evidence and then attempt to claim that it demonstrates the opposite of what it is actually proving. Sopranos is just another gangster drama, which happened to be released in a period when American censorship of extreme violence in mainstream programming was waning. Cultural criticism is necessary as it is important for scholars to criticize current cultural productions; but this criticism cannot be biased by a desire to sell a screenplay to AT&T or by other monetary motivations (disclosed or hidden). Great art has been made about gangsters, about wars, just as it has covered poverty and other tragedies; the subject of the art does not define it as “great”, but rather its style, structure and originality.