Love Thy Sopranos as Thy Self

I don’t think I agree with Matt Yglesias that the end of Season 6A of The Sopranos was “criminally terrible,” especially since his post disregards that the season finale was not, in fact, a season finale, but rather a break point before the final eight episodes due next year. But Yglesias may have a point when he writes that the show’s writers “have just totally lost respect for their audience and their product and they’re basically just mocking us for watching at this point.” I wouldn’t go nearly that far, but I ‘d agree that this season has undoubtedly been the weakest, and not just for the rambling, half-baked dream sequence that sucked so much life out of the show’s first couple of episodes. Despite this, there are still a lot of fascinating things going on, the most prominent of which is that the writers have dropped any and all pretense of the show being about somewhat lovable, likable characters.

Maybe the greatest success of the first four seasons was that they managed to turn audience sympathy toward the show’s cast of thugs and goons not just in spite of their homicidal, lowbrow tendencies, but because of them. Unlike, say, The Silence of the Lambs, which reengineered a cannibal serial killer into a culturally refined, academic aesthete, The Sopranos doesn’t radically alter the essentially brutish nature of its gangster cast. But even still, it’s managed to humanize them, and in some not too subtle ways, suggest that their pathology-and-dysfunction-ridden suburban lives are a mildly exaggerated parallel to the combustive, petty existence of much of America. We could excuse the Sopranos’ selfishness, lies, outbursts and outrages because, in a sense, they were us.

This season, though, has torn down the façade of likeability and gleefully ripped into the characters, especially with regards to Tony’s immediate family. Carmella, A.J., and Meadow have all turned out to be self-pitying, miserable narcissists, as spoiled and unlikable as they come. So when Matt writes that the creators have “totally lost respect for their audience,” he’s almost right. The thing is, I’m not sure the writers ever had much respect for their mostly upper middle class, suburban audience. The writers, by cutting away all but their characters’ most shallow, petty characteristics, are mocking the audience—not, as Matt suggests, for “continuing to watch,” but for being the basically the same witless, self-involved, well-off, middle-American fools that populate their show.