R.I.P. Sopranos - 06/10/07 (Open SPOILERS after post #12)

Cafe Society
361

Oh come on. TV isn’t divided into “brilliant ambiguous shades of gray nothing-handed-on-silver-platter HBO shows” and “laugh track stupid obvious inoffensive pablum for the masses network shows”. I’d stack The West Wing (the Sorkin years) up against The Sopranos any day of the week, for instance (although TWW is exceptionally good for a network show). And The Office is a WAY better comedy than (say) Lucky Louie could ever hope to be.

Furthermore, I don’t see how promotion of a show (ie, its stars being guests on talk shows and so forth) detracts from the quality of the show itself.
Being ambiguous and open-ended is neither (a) brilliant and original, in and of itself, nor (b) totally unexpected, nor (c) automatically a plus.

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Good points all, Max. We can quibble over Sopranos v TWW, which is a show I loved also. BTW, The Wire puts them both to shame.

Of course, that brings up an addendum to the Levine piece: If the Sopranos had been a network show the high ratings would have precluded ending it at all; when Chase left, it would have been handed over to a team of producers to continue the story line until all meat and gristle had been rendered completely from its crumbling bones. :wink:

Sex and the City certainly demonstrated that HBO is capable of serving us up a crappy, predictable, high-fructose-corn-syrup-coated ending that reverted to every stereotype about modern women that the show had originally tried to destroy.

You’re definitely right about Lucky Louie v The Office, but my standard for how wrong HBO can be on comedy will always be Mind of the Married Man. I would put Lucky Louie up against King of Queens or Raymond or Home Improvement, but that’s only because I’ve watched whole episodes of LL and laughed, but could never make it through a whole episode of the others.

LL didn’t work well, but I loved what LCK was trying to do with the working class comedy, which is the same thing that Rosanne has tried to do – make the characters actually working class, with actual money problems and family friction instead of fat stupid guys living with supermodel wives and wisecracking kids in fantasy homes.

On average HBO has a higher percentage of hits than misses because creators have a lot more control over their shows and a lot looser production schedules. That doesn’t mean that they’re not going to make bad decisions, but they’re going to own those decisions.

The difference between Sopranos and West Wing is ultimately the world views of their creators: TWW is an idealistic show in which the intellectually honest people always got the last word and won the arguments against the demagogues. The Sopranos (and The Wire) are set in a world in which everyone is flawed, even the most well-meaning people don’t always make the right decisions, and people who are morally compromised, or even sociopathic, sometimes come out ahead. In the latter world, an ambiguous ending is, I would argue, the best one.

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Sorry, most Italian Americans don’t even know that gabbo gool is actually spelled Capicola (and there are numerous other spellings).

This Italian pork product is unquestionably capicola. Order a ‘‘mortadell’’ (mortadella cheese) and ‘‘gabagool’’ sandwhich and you might have no clue that you ordered capicola and mortadella cheese, when spelled correctly.

I know Italians who have used the expression “metti-gahn” for literally 80 years of their life to explain anything that is not Italian, and these people have absolutley no clue that the word, when spelled out, is actually “American”.

It has do to with unique, regional US ‘‘broken English’’ dialects and what some would characterize as bastardization of Italian, which is already inlfuenced (changed) by regional dialects in Italy before it gets here (the US).

Don’t be a friggin’ mettighan (American). Understand that gabbagool is actually capicola.

And while we’re at it, let’s have some calamad (calamari). Capish?

Since you mettighans love Wikipedia, I will provide this link as well:

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That’s interesting. I’m American (or Italian-American :rolleyes: )… but my grandparents were from Sicily, and I didn’t know any of that. There are other words and bastardizations I know of, but maybe it’s a NY/NJ thing. Or maybe it’s a Norther Italian thing? I’ve heard “mettighan” tho, but my family never really used it.

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Sicilian. I never knew until this thread that these were the same thing. Been eating Gabba gool all my life, seen capicola on menus. Never made the connection.

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When they say “manna-got” are they meaning “manicotti”?

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Yep. There’s a particular NJ/NY dialect of Italian American that almost always leaves off the final vowel and often munges some of the other syllables together. So you get mas-kar-pone, not mas-kar-pone-ay, motz-uh-rel, not mahtz-uh-rel-uh, etc. Capicola as gabba-gool is just the most extreme that I’ve commonly heard. Sicilian and southern Italian immigrants who migrated elsewhere in the country, AFAIK, tended not to do this, so it’s a matter of immigrants from a particular region of Italy who migrated to a particular region of the U.S.

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The first time I heard a Staten-Island-Italian co-worker say "brah-jole,” I knew it was bracciole, but couldn’t connect the “j” sound with the “cc” in the original.

Also, whenever she was enjoying a piece of pastry or cake, she would always say, “You know what would go good with this? A *nice * cuppa tea" (or whateva).

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My mother’s family is from Avellino, so Tony and I would be paisans, and I’ve heard all these before: gabagool, mettighan, gugutz (which is what he called AJ, an insult that means “squash” as in the vegetable, I believe), moolinyan (derogatory term for black people, means “egglant”). There’s also rigot, meaning ricotta, mootzadel (mozzarella), all that. Maybe that’s why I loved the show so much-- a lot of the characters were so familiar, like people I knew. Yeah, right down to the wings in the hair, the track suits, the pinkie rings, and the RICO charges.

ETA: 5-4 Fighting, you from Staten Island? That’s where I’m from originally, but the family came from Brooklyn over what they affectionately call “the ghinnie gangplank.”

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When my grandparents pronounced it it was more like “manna-gawt,” or maybe it was halfway between the two. But there was usually this tiny little hint of a final syllable that wasn’t pronounced so much as implied, this soft little exhale that kind of over-pronounced the t (hard to explain).

“Ri-gawt” equals “ricotta,” BTW. My Nana made “raviole,” not “raviolis.” The last syllable got lost much of the time–well, almost lost, as mentioned above.

371

Agreed.

I think your statement might be overbroad, but I basically agree. One problem with TWW is that, some personal pecadillos aside, the main characters are all basically 100% moral and correct and right all the time. How often did Bartlett think long and hard about something and then end up being wrong?

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No, I’m actually Mississippi born (black), Connecticut higher-edumacated and have lived in Brooklyn since, in Crown Heights with the Jews and the West Indians.

See “James Gandolfini” aka "Tony Soprano; that’s one of the things that made him so good in that role. I’d try to pronounce words the way him did and, most of the time, just couldn’t do it.

373

Wow, you just gave me one of those memories I haven’t thought of in 25 years, but my grandfather used to call me this (as more of a term of exasperated affection). It’s for a squash called Cucuzzi.

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Yeh, I’ve heard some of these coming from the older generation, but most never seem to stuck in the house I grew up in. Maybe because I’m 3rd generation and my parents are very americanized.

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Yeah, it’s not really a mean insult, more like “Doofus” or “ya little booger.” Another one my mother loved was “jidrool” (that’s the best phonetics I could come up with), which is a cucumber (“cetriolo”). Means “moron.” Funny how all the Italian insults are food-related, eh?

I love it that Tony’s cat was named Gabagool. Perfect.

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The Italian-American dialect that led to distinct pronunciations can be traced to those whose families emigrated from Naples and settled in the Boston to Baltimore corridor, with heaviest concentrations from Brooklyn down to Philly (in general…in general…spare me isolated examples).

Other words that people never connect:

supersat (or super sod): actually sopresata - a salted/spiced meat

pra-shut (or bra-zhoot, or pra-zhut): actually prosciutto - a salted/spiced ham-type meat

And, others have eluded to muzzarell (mozzarella cheese).

Ah fa nabla: actually A fa Napoli: “Go to Naples”, literally, or can be seen as slang for ‘get out of here’, or if your view of Naples is not so good, you would interpret this as “go to hell”.

Most of these found there way to the Sopranos.

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For some reason though, my family which did shorten the word to gugutz, pronounced the full word as (phonetically) gugootZEDa with the emphasis on the part of the word that doesn’t actually seem to exist now that I look at the word “cucuzzi”. I guess that’s what Brooklyn did to Sicilian.

I did have the opportunity to visit Montelepre in Sicily a few years ago, which is supposedly one of the birthplaces of the mob (and my grandfather, not coincidentally). It was not at all what I expected. Like a sleepy mountain town out of the 1920s. Except for the police on the corners with flak jackets and large guns that seemed really out of place, but I’m sure weren’t.

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Just wanted to pop in and post this story about the finally of the show on CNN .

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Thanks for the link, cmyk. I’m more convinced than ever now that Tony was whacked. After reading that article, I’d say my confidence rose from 90% to 98%.

The only real question that remains is whether there are enough clues to figure out who ordered the whacking. I see five main possibilities:

(1) Phil had a contingency plan. He told a close personal friend that if anything happened to him while Tony Soprano was still alive, he was to assume that Tony was behind it. Revenge must be taken. Or maybe someone just didn’t get the message soon enough that Butchie called it off. In any case, Phil was responsible.

(2) Butchie ordered the hit. He may have declared some sort of peace at the sit-down, but he’s never liked Tony. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he smirked when Tony visited Phil in the hospital. He started to have doubts about Phil, but he remained somewhat loyal. Either he was truly loyal and the sit-down was just a ruse to draw Tony out of hiding, or he was loyal only to the point of not wanting to reveal Phil’s location. Maybe he really didn’t think Tony would find Phil, maybe he didn’t care but didn’t want to directly betray his boss. In any case, once Phil is gone and Butchie is presumably in charge of things, he knows Tony will only continue to be a pain in the ass.

(3) This is a long shot, but perhaps Paulie was behind the whacking. He’s so superstitious that he truly believed that Tony had sentenced him to death by assigning him to lead Vito’s old crew. He and Tony certainly hadn’t been getting along very well. Tony seemed to be seriously considering whacking Paulie when they were on the boat, discussing the joke about Ginny Sacramoni. Feeling that his long-time loyalty had been betrayed, he decided to take action.

(4) Somebody in particular, but nobody we’ve met. For example, maybe one of the other Five Families decided that Tony was a loose cannon and needed to be taken care of. Who does this little Jersey boss think he is, whacking the boss of a real family? That’s dangerous. Steps must be taken.

(5) Nobody. It’s all just a damned metaphor. The guy in the Member’s Only jacket is a walking metaphor for the mob. Tony’s involvement in the mob is what brings about his doom. Etc and so forth.

Number (1) is the most straightforward. We already know that Phil ordered Tony to be whacked. I think (2) is also plausible. (3) is really out there, I admit. (4) and (5) are rather unsatisfying, in my opinion.

Anyone have a plausible idea that I’ve missed?

Everyone has been discussing the final scene, but there was so much more in this episode that I loved.

I’m curious what everyone thinks about Janice. She tells Tony something like, “I need to catch myself a new husband” and then, “You’re one of the few people who knows that’s a joke.” Are we in agreement that it was not, in fact, a joke? I think she was serious, and I think Tony knew it.

I think my favorite part of the episode was Tony’s conversation with Junior.
“You ruled North Jersey.”
“That’s nice.”

I wish I knew what to make of the damned cat though. Seriously, what the hell? And Hunter. Was her presence just to poke fun at all the people who predicted that Furio / the Russian / whoever was going to come back in the finale? Kind of like, “Oh yeah, someone from an earlier season is back. They’ll never guess who! Haw haw!”

If only the actress who played Livia had survived for the entire series. What might have been!

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Yeah, thanks, cmyk, for the link. And, while I’m at it, I’d like to anoint you WINNER OF THE THREAD for your sociopathically funny synopsis of the Sopranos[sup]6[/sup].

If Tony is dead, I think Phil did it. But not as a contingency plan, but as something he set in motion due to his annoyance at his crew for not taking Tony out first. He’d already expressed his chagrin (bitchiness) to Butchie; that was why the crew was willing to let Tony do what he had to do.

No, see (1) above, especially his loss of loyalty at Phil’s snarking, but not wanting to rat Phil’s location to Tony (even if he knew it). The Mob always seems to find people, though, in this case, a third, unexpected party helped out.

Perhaps, but Paulie was doomed anyway (the cat); plus, with all of his faults, Paulie was a total loyalist.

Nah, Chase was definitely leaving us some real bones to chew on.

I definitely think Chase left it open-ended for us to imagine the rest of the story ourselves, with a preponderance of evidence for Tony’ death.

I think she was in there just to show that Carmela wasn’t really okay with Meadow not being a doctor.