The Sopranos finale (I’ve never watched the series, but you couldn’t miss discussion of it this week) got me to thinking about the nature of TV series and the nature of story.
In a NJ Star-Ledger interview, Chase comments on his main character:
Now, as a writer, I was always taught that, to have a story, your characters need to go through something, to change (generally, psychologically). Otherwise, you have a character study, or something else, but not a story.
Here’s Chase saying that Tony’s no different this season than he ever was. And the final scene–to analyze something that no one else has ever discussed before --seems to say “just another day … nothing’s really changed …”
So … are TV series, in general, stories? Should they be? Some clearly are more through-storyline-oriented, and some are more episodic on a week-to-week basis. But I think of shows like Buffy or the new Star Trek series, where there is (to me) some clear character evolution. (But maybe one could say that many characters in the Sopranos evolved over the course of the series, just not Tony. I leave that up to the Soprano-ites.)
Certainly there are some shows where the characters change. Londo’s descent and subsequent rebirth, for instance, was one of the central themes on Babylon 5. But for most TV shows, the intent is to always be able to insert new episodes anywhere, and to be able to watch them in any order, so character development is deliberately eschewed. When your show goes into syndicated reruns, you don’t want your audience saying “Huh? Last week, Joe was a cold-hearted bastard, but this week he’s a kind and gentle soul! What happened?”.
That said, though, a story need not necessarily focus on character development, nor indeed even on characters at all. Many of the greatest science fiction stories, for instance, hinge on the development of technological ideas, and the focus in a mystery is generally how and why the crime was committed, not how it changed the lives of those involved.
On the gripping hand, however, most television series, taken as a whole, also don’t develop anything else, for the same reason they don’t develop the characters. You can do whatever you want in an individual episode, including developing ideas or characters, and the individual episodes can therefore be stories. But there’s always some sort of reset button at the end (the guest-star character who was developed leaves, or the idea is abandoned, or the Enterprise goes through a time-warp so the episode never happened) to bring things back to the status quo, so it can fit in with all of the other episodes.
Chase is also responding to the idea that all of a sudden we were supposed to stop liking the character. He was as brutal in the first episode as the last; that much definitely didn’t change. Some of that is also just the nature of episodic television, because not everybody watched all the episodes and you want each installment to be able to stand on its own to some degree.
The show was definitely a study of Tony’s character. We explored him - heck, he spent parts of many episodes in therapy, where he was supposed to be revealing his innermost thoughts. There is no dominant plot to the six seasons of the Sopranos, that much is for sure. There were plot arcs and season-long stories, conflicts that came and went, including a number of rivals who always ended up dead. Other problems remained and were never tied up, which is part of what makes the end of the last episode work if you believe it worked.
I think Tony changed somewhat over the years and gained some perspective on life, but part of the drama of the show was that he couldn’t change that much: he was pullled in different directions by the worlds he lived in, and the tension they created was unresolvable. He wanted some measure of inner peace and happiness, but he couldn’t give up the life he had chosen, which made those things unattainable. He wanted his son to be a better man, but the way he raised his son made him unable to do that. He wanted his daughter to be a doctor, instead she told him that seeing him “persecuted” by the government made her decide to become a lawyer. Tony was more self-aware than anybody else on the show, which made him able to deal with those conflicts once in a while in passing way, but not enough to resolve them. He’ll never be fully aware of it, but he’s trapped and he’ll never have what he wants.
One other thought: if you wanted, you could probably come up with a long list of dramas where the protagonist struggles to change but can’t. For starters, Michael Corleone had a similar problem.
--seems to say “just another day … nothing’s really changed …”