I also find the therapy sessions extremely skippable on re-watch and Dr Melfi pretty useless as a character over all. also, recognizing I'm probably in the minority here, I have no use for tony's mother as a character. yes, she's manipulative and BPD and conniving or whatever, I get it. but she's so fucking awful every time she's on screen I just want to skip her scenes. she doesn't strike me like a Gus Fring where yeah the character is the villain but is also interesting in himself/herself so it's enjoyable learning about the character rather than just seeing them as an antagonist for our protagonist. Livia has almost no role in advancing any of the plots and I just hear the sound of bitchy nails on a chalkboard coming out of my iPad whenever she's on screen.

I recognize that the Sopranos is a very celebrated show and that we have some Sopranos SCHOLARS on this bort so I'd love to get a take from one of them as to why it's better or deeper than what I appreciate or what it is that I'm missing here.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41557664)

plenty of good shows are known for having distinct arcs where their main characters evolve. no one (except you) said anything about them having to be "changed greatly from season to season."

fucking kallmans clitdick retard.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41557704)

go shit up someone else's thread, you fat fucking retarded child molester.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41557741)

ironically, I find it most enjoyable during the plot-heavy storylines and yet I recognize (I think) that it's not really supposed to be that much of a plot-driven show (compared to something like breaking bad).

it's just that, taken as a character study, there seem to be way too many meandering do-nothing plot lines that are boring af and in service of characters who just aren't that fucking interesting.

AJ? completely useless. Carmella? almost completely useless. all of Tony's side girls, basically useless.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41557729)

The only character study that is really intended, IMO, is Tony. Everyone else is supporting cast; maybe there's depth to their role or maybe there isn't but that's not the point.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41557800)

- "you ever feel like nothin good was ever gonna happen to you?"

- "yeah! and nothin did; so what? I'm alive, I'm surviving."

- "that's just it -- I don't wanna just survive. It says in these movie writing books every character has an arc. Like everybody starts out somewhere, they do something or get something done to them, changes their life, that's their arc. Where's my arc?"

And then he goes through some examples I don't remember, but Paulie just doesn't get it. Part of this is because to Paulie, life's a fight and he's winning. Chris wants identity outside of that because he's a bitch. But the larger point from the scene is this: not everyone has an arc. People are who they are, and some people never change.

That's part of why the show is great -- I think it does a better job of capturing deeply relatable motifs about life than most pieces of media ever do. I don't think that the Sopranos is really a mob story as much as it is a story about family life and the modern world, with the mob as the backdrop.

.

The therapy was a great expository device, imo -- it's skippable now because Tony already told you what he thinks, and now you know, so you think it's useless. On first watch I think it's very useful.

I find Livia agonizing to watch, in no small part because of her behavioral similarities to old women in my own family. I think Tony's entire experience in dealing with her is pretty relatable -- sure, it's exaggerated in that most people's resentful mothers don't try to have them killed, but sans that, I've had conversations with my own mother that are jarringly close to the recurring "I gave you everything and I'm such a martyr" bullshit that Livia gives Tony. Again, it's less cinema than thinly veiled documentary. The plot she advances is exacerbating the rift between Tony and Junior, but more than that, Tony dealing with the cantankerous bitch IS part of the plot; it's about dealing with life more than it is about the mob.

To add another example, the entire premise of the show laid out in the pilot is that Tony feels like he came in at the end of a good thing, the best is over; "It's good to be in on something from the ground floor; I came too late for that. But lately I been thinkin I came it at the end -- the best is over. I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me, but in a lotta ways he had it better than me. He had his people, they had their standards, they had pride. What do we got?" Tell me that at least half of every post-boomer generation doesn't think the same thing.

.

I think the purpose of media like this is to capture pieces of life and let us sort of vicariously experience them if we haven't already, or think about them and the similarities to what we've experienced if we have. Maybe that just means you like a show's vibe, maybe you think about it more than that, but I think the point of it is to tell a story we've already experienced parts of.

I don't think I'm anything close to a Sopranos scholar, and I'm sure there are poasters that know the show much better than I do, but that's a large part of what I like about it.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41557791)

it's like seinfeld. can you still enjoy it and recognize its influence and see it as a good show? sure. but it won't ever be the same as watching it when every episode was a water cooler moment.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41564252)

It's like between the points of "the 90s" and "internet-dominated technosatanic social media culture" there was this unhappy lull where suburban globalcapitalism and social isolation really began to speed up but it was hard to articulate what was really wrong. The show gets the vibe perfectly right though.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=4713899&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=5310915",#41564555)