SOPRANOS

I watched the Emmy Awards last Sunday Evening. This is unusual for me because I usually despise award shows in particular and celebrity events of any kind in general. But, I was pleased to see Elizabeth I take the evening, if only to demonstrate that there is some good out there in the wasteland. Another good is The Sopranos as may be gleaned from this review from the Guardian.

When The Sopranos began on American television in 1999, even a bookmaker in the pay of the mafia would have had trouble getting odds on it eventually being voted the best TV drama of all time in both US and British surveys. But the remarkable fact to remember - as the final series of the show begins on E4 tomorrow - is that The Sopranos started with almost no likelihood of it being a success. Because of the stamina and ambition required to produce the 20 or so episodes a year necessary to make an impact on American schedules, the biggest US hits - M*A*S*H, The West Wing, Lost, Desperate Housewives - have tended to be created by relatively young talents. But David Chase was already in his middle-50s - a respected but rather underachieving writer-producer, whose previous peak had been working on The Rockford Files - when he conceived the idea of a gangster family drama. Another obstacle to broadcast immortality was that this material did not seem original. Cinema had mob drama in a headlock with The Godfather and then Goodfellas, so Chase was setting himself against two of the most admired directors in America - Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. The Sopranos never tried to get out of this debt - one of the jokes from the beginning was the extent to which Chase's New Jersey mobsters model themselves on the movie bruisers - but this history seemed to limit the series to being a footnote to a genre. It is true that The Sopranos had one big joke of its own: the hardman with the neurotically soft centre. Tony Soprano was so frightened of his mother that he needed to see a shrink each week. But, to Chase's horror, as The Sopranos was in pre-production, he saw a reference in a trade paper to Analyse This, a Hollywood comedy with Robert De Niro as a gangster in therapy. Chase, a somewhat intense and brooding man who had himself been undergoing analysis for 20 years, prepared himself for another reverse. But, for the first time in his career, the dice were weighted in his favour: The Sopranos premiered before Analyse This and so anyone who saw both would take Chase as the bouncer on the door of that story. He has still avoided seeing the film or its sequel, Analyse That, in order to avoid any potential crossover. Even so, despite reaching the screen first - episode one of The Sopranos was screened on January 10 1999 - the show's creator still appeared to have avoided imputations of plagiarism rather than guaranteeing greatness for his creation. The Sopranos had been turned down by Fox, the smallest of the traditional major networks in America, and so aired on the cable channel HBO. In terms of critical attention and potential audience, the show was starting with at least one foot in a concrete boot. In retrospect, it was the displaced location that allowed the show to stamp itself on the map. Now that the funeral parlour drama Six Feet Under and the cosmetic surgery comedy Nip/Tuck have followed The Sopranos - and even a mainstream network, ABC, can screen a series as cheerfully amoral as Desperate Housewives - it is hard to remember just how conventional most American television was at the turn of the millennium. During the long, quiet first phase of his career, Chase had frequently railed against the "network rules". These dictated storylines that were neatly resolved each week, a bad-guy vocabulary which only stretched as far as "sonofabitch", central characters with whom the mass audience could sympathise and empathise and, above all, a moral system in which the good were ultimately rewarded while the bad were punished. These strictures - dictated by a combination of American puritan morality and the caution of advertisers - were so severe that Chase regarded it as something of a triumph that Jim Rockford, the private dick played by James Garner in The Rockford Files, was a relatively troubled and unsuccessful figure by the standards of peak-time characterisation and that some storylines were allowed to run across two episodes. HBO was committed to making cable an arena where greater complexity of narrative and frankness of language would be allowed. The network's hit, Sex and the City, had already taken advantage of these chances, but The Sopranos raised the pitch. The "network rules" were broken from the beginning. For a start, the tradition of central characters with whom the folks at home can identify would, in this case, apply only to a few viewers watching on blood-soaked sofas in New Jersey and Sicily. With the exception of Tony's mother, wife and shrink, the central characters are all murderers and fugitives from justice. Admittedly, the vulnerability Tony shows allows the actor James Gandolfini to make him sometimes worryingly likable - and a regular shot of a paunchy, sleepy Tony picking up the New York Times from his drive is also designed to debunk his thuggery - but the string of killings to which he is linked means that this is an anti-hero in whom the anti far outweighs the heroism. The characterisation also directly assaults one of the most cherished sentimentalities of American culture: motherhood. The dark central joke of The Sopranos is that Tony has a mom who is a mutha. Livia, the matriarch who haunts and daunts the mob boss, is based on Chase's own mother who, though she never took out a contract on him as Livia did on Tony, was prone to savage and erratic moods, in one of which she held a knife to her son's head. Hollywood's storytelling rules are also routinely ignored. Plots will resolve weeks later rather than before the week's final credits and long sections of episodes consist of dream sequences. Compare this to The West Wing, the network-made (NBC) series which has been chief rival to The Sopranos for awards and praise during its period in office. In The West Wing, every central character, apart from the occasional Republican senator, was inherently likable and an A-plot, B-plot and even C-plot were neatly intertwined most weeks. Perhaps the most extraordinary innovation of The Sopranos has been linguistic. Chase's departure from the sanitised vocabulary of mainstream television has been crucial to the show's success. In life, character and attitude are revealed through language, but for decades the prissy talk laws of television meant characters abandoned realism every time they opened their mouths. The fact is that, except when in the presence of his mother or sisters, a mobster does not say, "Get out of my frigging house, you sonofabitch." He accuses his opponent of customarily having sex with his mother or invites him to have intercourse with himself. When it started, The Sopranos was the first TV show to match cinema for vocal realism. The potty-mouthed frankness of mobsters appalled some conservative reviewers and audiences and is one of the three areas in which The Sopranos has received serious criticism. The second is the allegation that it perpetuates stereotypes of Italian-American life, a charge to which Chase responds by saying that when Italian-Americans stop belonging to the mafia they will cease to be depicted as doing so. The third perceived weakness of The Sopranos has been made with less prejudice and is harder to refute. This is the worry of some that, for all the innovations of characterisation and narrative, the storylines are spread too thinly across the 77 episodes. Members Only, the season-six opener, is a good example of this alarm. For much of the episode, nothing seems to happen that has not happened before as Tony spars with Dr Melfi about his mother and broods over his marriage. But then Chase displays the show's ability to incorporate and evade criticism. This meandering approach is deliberate, establishing a template of normality against which a late moment of shocking action makes even more impact. Chase, though, has already tacitly acknowledged that The Sopranos has reached its highest notes. The eight episodes currently being filmed at Silvercup studios in New York will complete the series. Screened in spring 2007, they will despatch The Sopranos into the charmed afterlife of syndication and DVD. It will become one of the measures against which television is judged. Sometimes, admittedly, the show is not as clever as its admirers believe. Many fan pages in cyberspace claim Chase has planted within the drama a systematic symbolism involving food. These web-heads note that when a character eats or breaks eggs, death almost always follows: Tony, for instance, accidentally steps on a carton just before ordering the murder of his cousin. Chase, when I interviewed him recently, insisted that these people were talking out of a hen's behind: there is no intentional omelette sub-plot. Dr Melfi, however, would perhaps conclude that all this egg stuff is welling up for some reason from Chase's subconscious. Perhaps it is because he scrambled for ever the rules and expectations of American television.