The Sopranos
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The Sopranos DANA POLAN The Sopranos A production of the Console-ing Passions books series Edited by Lynn Spigel Duke University Press Durham and London 2009 The Sopranos DANA POL AN © 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ∞ Designed by C. H. Westmoreland Typeset in Warnock by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. FOR DOUG AND ANN —who first introduced me to a certain New Jersey family Contents acknowledgments ix prologue 1 1 The Sopranos on Screen 17 1 Watching The Sopranos 19 2 Eight Million Stories in the Naked City 32 3 Food for Thought 45 4 Living in the Moment 56 5 The Late Style of The Sopranos 63 6 Gaming The Sopranos 72 7 Getting High with The Sopranos 86 8 Qualifying “Quality TV” 98 9 “Honey, I’m Home” 105 10 Against Interpretation 113 11 New Jersey Dreaming 133 2 The Sopranos in the Marketplace 143 12 Tie-ins and Hangers-on 146 13 Touring Postindustrialism 155 14 Cashing In on the Game 162 15 Cable and the Economics of Experimentation 174 16 This Thing of Ours 194 notes 197 selected bibliography 211 index 213 viii Contents Acknowledgments Any resonant work of television becomes part of a broad cultural con- versation, and, in my own case, I benefited immeasurably from the rich dialogue that The Sopranos has encouraged among viewers. For their rewarding reflections (and with special thanks to those who came to Sunday-night Sopranos fests), I offer much gratitude to Barbara Peter- son, Bill Peterson, Kara Kirk, Doug Thomas, Ann Chisholm, Marianne Hirsch, Leo Spitzer, Kristin Ross, Harry Harootunian, Nick Mirzoeff, Kathleen Wilson, Nick Couldry, Louise Edwards, Noah Isenberg, Melanie Rehak, Tom Kemper, Alison Trope, Lesley Stern, Jeffrey Min- son, Toby Miller, Andrew Sheppard, Jeff Sconce, Cynthia Chris, Scott Bukatman, and Chris Anderson. Chris, Nick M., Ann, and Noah also read the manuscript and offered supportive comment. Maurice Yaco- war graciously gave me information on his Sopranos course, one of the—if not the—first! My own undergraduates in a University of South- ern California Sopranos class willingly and energetically participated in the experiment of reflecting on a television series that was still in its first years of broadcast. A few lines or passages here or there are adapted from my essay, “Cable Watching: HBO, The Sopranos and Discourses of Distinction,” published in Cable Visions: Television Beyond Broadcasting, ed. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Cynthia Chris, and Anthony Freitas (New York Univer- sity Press, 2007). Special gratitude to Allen Rucker for talking to me about his Sopranos tie-ins and to Matt Weiner for recounting his experiences as writer for the show. And big thanks go out to Zarah and the team at the Rhinebeck Smoke Shoppe. Lynn Spigel is a great friend and a wonderful series editor. Her sharp- ness as an analyst of television in its myriad forms constituted an in- valuable support for this project. Ken Wissoker at Duke University Press has been a model of profes- sionalism and editorial rigor. Likewise, Courtney Berger at the Press has been a great supporter and brought immeasurable aid at each stage of the process. Also at Duke University Press, Neal McTighe ushered the manuscript through its final production phases with efficiency and commitment: thank you. And deep gratitude to my graduate assistants, Dan Gao and Alex Kupfer, who aided with proofing and indexing. The intrepid Marie Sturken was the perfect companion for the Sopranos bus tour. Marita Sturken gave so much—in time, support, love, and patience— to this project. This is definitely a case where it is not an idle cliché to say that words can’t convey everything I owe her, everything I feel for her. Little Leo-Andres Polan came into our lives as this book was nearing its final stages. He has been a joy and I am so happy to tie the comple- tion of this scholarly project to the beginning of our new family life together. Acknowledgments At the end of a story, you’ll find it’s all been told. —Earl Grant, “The End,” 1958 Prologue The NON-seNse OF AN ENdiNG In the days immediately following June 10, 2007, the date on which the last episode of HBO’s hit show The Sopranos was aired, the word “Sopranos” itself was the most frequent search term on Internet search engines.1 And in the first few minutes after the episode finished, the HBO Web site crashed and remained down for several hours due to the volume of people trying to log into it. There are several lessons to be drawn from this. One is about the increased role of new media—such as the Web—in extending and am- plifying the life cycle of any particular cultural product, of which this television series is an example. Even as it finished out its first run on HBO, the Sopranos phenomenon would spill beyond the discrete object that was the show itself and find additional vitality in multiple sites of media and of everyday culture. Later, in Part II, this book will deal with the ways The Sopranos came to be appropriated and reappropriated to diverse ends in the larger context of media entertainment and sales- manship. This increasingly can be the fate of any cultural work today: its meanings and its effects go beyond its initial manifestation to be reworked and repurposed for new audiences and new profit elsewhere in the social landscape. But there is also a lesson here about The Sopranos in particular, and my goal in Part I will be to describe and analyze those specific and even unique features of the series that both fostered intense audience in- volvement in its original unfolding, episode after episode, and, by those means, contributed to the series’ extended role in a vaster media land- scape. There is something particularly apt about the ways The Sopranos has been picked over for new profits and pleasures and been granted ancillary afterlives, since its own story world (the lives of New Jersey mobsters and the people in their orbit) chronicles an exploitative eco- nomics of creative destruction that seeks profit wherever it can and is driven to eke every last bit of value from any object, including the scraps that remain when products are sent to the junk pile. In its original run on HBO, The Sopranos mattered, and it matters still. The furor over the show’s controversial “ending” confirmed how it resonated famously—or infamously, depending on one’s point of view— in ways that demonstrate just how fixated the fans had become on the ending’s expected role in rounding out the series. Revealingly, HBO’s hope for a show to replace The Sopranos, John from Cincinnati, which debuted just after the final episode of The Sopranos with the clear ex- pectation that viewers could now—and would now—transfer their af- fection to another HBO offering, exhibited a seventy-five percent drop from the viewership that The Sopranos finale had enjoyed just a few moments earlier. (Two months later, HBO announced cancellation of John.) The Sopranos had played a key role in giving HBO distinction, within the field of popular culture and popular media, as a venue for hip, innovative television fare, but that distinctiveness was not necessarily transferable to other HBO shows. With electronic rapidity, the sign-off of The Sopranos achieved noto- riety. As is now well known, The Sopranos ended by not ending its fic- tional narrative: in a diner with his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), and son, A. J. (Robert Iler), New Jersey Mafia capo Tony Soprano (James Gan- dolfini) waits for his daughter, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), to show up so that they all can have dinner together. Tony and his crew had been at war with the New York mob; some of his gang have died, and his consigliere Silvio Dante (Steve Van Zandt) remains in a coma. But Tony had managed to locate the head of the New York mob, Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), and have him killed, and there is now a negotiated peace among the survivors. Tony’s dinner with his family is intended to serve as a moment of respite. Yet an air of menace hangs over the scene. Is the furtive guy who’s gone into the bathroom going to come out with a gun and kill Tony or his family (à la Michael Corleone’s shooting of 2 Prologue Sollozzo in The Godfather [1972])? Is that other guy with the Boy Scouts in the corner booth really as innocent as he appears? Does one figure seem to be the avenging brother of a truck driver who was shot dead years ago in a heist gone bad, back in Season 1? What about those two black men who come in and are made to play into the show’s convention of pairing African Americans hired as hit men, as well as into a general racist stereotype of black men as threatening? And even if none of these men turn out to be assassins, might there not still be something porten- tous in Meadow’s running across the road toward the diner as cars zoom around her? (In an earlier season finale, Meadow had almost gotten run over as she crossed a busy street, and the memory of that would be operative here for the regular viewer of the series.) Meadow approaches the diner. Tony glances up, just as he has been doing for each customer to come into the establishment.