Monday, March 13, 2006

A DISSENTING VIEW: From the always-worth-reading Matt Zoller Seitz:

[N]o matter how many creative aces Chase pulls from his sleeve, he'll have trouble allaying my gut feeling that the show should have ended two or three or even four seasons ago. By the end of Season One, The Sopranos, which Chase never imagined would last more than a year, had already said most of what it presumably wanted to say about the Freudian fallout of dysfunctional family life and the moral relativism and warped "ethics" embraced by gangsters. Each subsequent season was to some extent re-inventing the wheel, finding new ways to say the same things about its characters and situations. 'The Sopranos' sustained itself through sex, violence and some very effective, at times Luis Bunuel-ish black humor. More a curdled social satire than a straightforward gangster story, The Sopranos is arguably the most cynical long-running series of all time, a show in which nearly every scene depicts characters being confronted with the choice between selfish expediency and a higher good, and invariably choosing Option A.

Do I hear a second?

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