I saw two episodes yesterday (on A&E). They dealt with Tony driving his 18 year old daughter, to here candidate intervies at BATES and BOWDOIN colleges, in Maine. While they wee staying at a dumply little motel, Tony spots a hitman, whom he suspects is fater him. So Tony leaves daughter at Bates, whilc he tracks down and garroted to death the hitman (don’t know if Tony brought the man home, to the traditional mob burial ground (the Jersey Marshes). Anyway, daughter wants to know what Tony does for a living-and his son must be getting flack as well-so Tony moves out of the family home (wife wants an affair with the family priest).
I don’t get the popularity of this-you know Tony is a crook of some kind…but his family suspects nothing?
Anyway, did subsequent episodes have a lot of gore in them?
Not MY idea of a Mafia film!
His family knows exactly what he’s up to.
They’re just in denial (his wife) naively think it’s part of their heritage (his daughter) or extremely dumb (his son.)
Watch all nine or ten seasons and get back to us.
Of course they suspect something, but their “willful ignorance” is a big point of the show. Carmela (Tony’s wife) denies Tony’s real job in public just as strongly as Tony does, but in the first couple of seasons she had a major crisis of faith over whether she could still live her lifestyle knowing how Tony got the money.
Yes, from the start to the finish the show was pretty graphic.
Another big point of the show was the intersection between the idea of the Mafia as seen in The Godfather and other such movies and the reality of it. In the first episode, Tony tells his therapist that he feels like he’s come in on the end of something.
Watch the whole series. One episode out of context won’t tell you much.
Nitpick: Six, six-and-a-half, depending upon how you feel about the extended last season.
Six seasons. This show is great because it is basically a character study of a vile, horrible, powerful man who manages to occasionally be lovable. But every time you start to love him, he does something so awful, you realize he is pure evil. It does a great job of glorifying the mob and making them look really terrible at the same time.
Haven’t seen all of them, just saw the first episode of season six last night. Every time I think it’s starting to get boring, something sucks me back in!
Best/Worst episode ever: Sylvio killing Arianna - my jaw was on the floor for two days after watching that one!
They had a lot of killing in them, but no slasher-pic-graphic gore, IIRC.
The Godfather romanticizes the Mob: We see the dons fighting their war but we never see what they’re fighting over: The right to shake down merchants, hijack trucks, crack safes, do loansharking, collect protection from whores and massage parlors, etc., on a given patch of turf. The Sopranos at least is not guilty of that.
Yeah, rent the first season and watch from the beginning. One of my all time favorite shows. Almost everybody in it makes you hate them at times, but can make you like them at others. Complex characters that draw you into their world.
If you like the HBO series " Rome", set around 0 BC, think of the Soprano’s as a modern day equivalent of such a Roman “noble” family. Criminal, evil, justifying themselves, and yet with the strenght (or weakness) of character to keep on living in such evil, criminal circumstances. A family where self control, mistrust and intrigue are the number one values, along with a twisted kind of honor.
FYI, as I remember that episode, the guy was not a hit man after Tony, but instead was a mobster in the Witness Protection Program, with a price on his head, which is the reason Tony killed him.
Not a price on his head, exactly. He was a rat, and it’s just standard procedure to exterminate rats.
In that particular episode, Tony’s desire to send his daughter to a respectable university, and his effort to protect her from his life, contrast sharply with the brutality with which he murders a man while he’s away from his daughter a few hours.
Tony doesn’t move out of the family home in that episode…he doesn’t move out until season four when he and Carm separate for a while (most of season five).
Agree–watch it from beginning to end. It’s probably the most brilliant thing on television that I’ve ever seen.
And yet it also points up Tony’s personal code of honor: The man never testified against him or anyone in his family. But Tony still had to exact retribution on a made guy who had broken his oath to Their Thing, even though he would make no money by it, gain no credit by it, and it exposed him to the risk of being killed first, arrested, and/or revealed right in front of Meadow.
Yes good stuff – I refused to believe the ending was conclusive and felt it was left that way to confound everybody’s predictions and so I can say keep saying, “Don’t stop believin’.”
[Hijack] Correction: The Wire is the most brilliant TV ever shown. Do/did you watch?[/Hijack]
Ralph124c, take the advice, watch if from the beginning and give it a chance; I don’t think you’ll be sorry.
I don’t know. If the OP didn’t like that episode, he won’t like any of it. That was the first episode I saw as well, and I was quickly hooked.
No…but I have been told by a lot of people that I need to watch it.
Hmm, perhaps I need to add it to my Netflix queue. After all, the Sopranos ended, the only show I’m really hooked on now is Dawson’s Creek–the quality of TV shows in my life needs to improve!
Do Six Feet Under too. It drags a little bit in the last season, but the end COMPLETELY makes up for it. Possibly the best TV episode ever.
I had absolutely no idea how good TV could get before watching The Sopranos. Its characters are so life like and amazing that I would probably watch two hours of just Tony and Paulie peeling potatoes. If you don’t like the characters and prefer the more polished stars you see on network shows, then this won’t work for you.
I’d watch the unedited show (the A&E version can’t be the same) from the first episode. If you don’t like the first four episodes then it’s not really your thing.
As far as the episode “College” goes (the one described in the OP); network producers did not want Tony killing anybody in that episode because they thought it would make the audience like him less. However, David Chase was dead set on having Tony kill someone so that the audience could see who he really was.
That was basically the only reason I kept watching that show past season four. Everyone kept saying that the ending is fantastic, and it was fantastic.
I never cry from movies, but I really felt like tears were going to roll from that ending.
You must’ve missed the episode where Tony and Christopher chop off Ralphie’s head.