The Sopranos

Dear Jeffrey:

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To be perfectly honest, I would prefer "Big Herring." If you must hang a moniker on me that has inevitable associations to a certain part of the male anatomy, I figure it might as well start with "Big."

Now back to our show, you fuckin' mook. (What is a mook, anyway?)

Here's why I did the right thing in hiring you as a TV critic--and why I'll let you live, for now: You understood Christopher better than I did. And Imperioli does deserve more credit. He's taken a character who's truly dim and callow and found a way to give him a certain hapless appeal. Christopher isn't just a good explanation for why the mob's tanking, though with his crank and inability even to get his Godfather references straight, for chrissake, he's that too. He's a teen-ager in an adult body trying to grow up and getting it wrong every time. Imperioli located humanity in Christopher at exactly two points last year: First, when the guy had an identity crisis over the fact that his murdered buddy was named on TV and he wasn't; and second, when he tried to help his girlfriend switch careers from cocktail waitress to music manager. The band she was representing sucked; the producer she was making nice to was just trying to get into her pants; but Christopher overlooked all that because he wanted to make her happy. Of course, she walked out on him, but that's how everything Christopher does turns out. What he's really evolving into is an instant anxiety-booster. Whenever he's onscreen and manages not to do or say something that gets him shot, I'm hugely relieved.

And now, as if the chronically stupid Christopher and the paranoid Uncle Junior and the wily, batty Livia weren't enough to make Tony strung out, we've got Richie Aprile. What do you make of him? Here's a made man fresh out of prison looking to fuck people up, and doing a good job of it so far. He appears in Episode 2, and by Episode 3, he's jumpstarted the season. The show definitely goes into higher gear when he's around. He's sort of a Scorsese figure--lean, mean, and out of control. All malevolence, all the time. He wants to kill a guy for no apparent reason; he's wooing Tony's sister; he's visiting Tony's mother. He's a whirlwind of bad karma. It's as if, having lost the Melfi method of making Tony seem human, the writers have struck on another way to do it: play him off someone really angry and crazy, so that the Soprano MO comes off as sanity itself.

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Now, on to Melfi. You tell me. Am I crazy? Am I just soft on characters who happen to be female professionals for the obvious reasons? I really like her and, as you know, the whole psychiatric framing device. Did you? Or do you hate it? One of my favorite film critics, Jim Wolcott, hated it. He dissed Lorraine Bracco in Vanity Fair this month, saying her psychobabble sounded memorized. I like the way she spoke in those sessions, carefully choosing her words and drawing out her syllables for fear that Tony would get the wrong idea, which he usually did. (I loved it when she uttered banalities about needing to let one's elderly parents retain an illusion of control, and Tony turned that into a sneaky strategy for letting Uncle Junior think he was fronting the crew, when Tony was really running things.) She's back in Episode 3, and not a moment too soon. She runs into Tony and his gang at a restaurant and flirts with them, of all things, much to her dismay later, when she repeats to her shrink, played by Peter Bogdanovich, what she said when she waved goodbye: "Toodle-fuckin'-oo? What the fuck was I thinking?" I loved the way she said "Toodle-fuckin'-oo," as if she were channeling Tonyspeak. We're gonna get some weird plot twists with that one, I can tell.

Do I think The Sopranos is bad for Italian-Americans? Yeah, but it's equal-opportunity in its disrespect for ethnic sensitivity. What about the Hasid who hired Tony to rough up his son-in-law, and then welshed on his payments? (I loved the son-in-law, by the way. He was so gutsy. A real tough Jew. You have more Hasidic friends than I do. Were you offended? Were they?) What about the streetwise rapper who turns out to be a college kid with a sociology degree? Or the black preacher on the take, whom we meet in Episode 2 of this season? What about the condescending Wasps who let Tony into their country club exactly once, then treated him like he was some kind of freak? No one comes off without stereotyping, but it's like Shakespeare and Shylock (if I may get all high-minded on you again): A good writer takes stereotypes and turns them into characters, which in turns makes you reconsider the stereotypes. Unless you're one of those people who won't go see The Merchant of Venice because it's anti-Semitic.

A reader wrote in to suggest that the writers clone Livia and create a twin who's a nun in San Francisco and sweet as a lamb and who can't believe the things she's hearing about her nephew on TV, it's such a horrible smear on Italian-Americans. Which strikes me as an excellent way to solve the Livia problem. Got any other suggestions for the writers?

Yours,
Judith "Really Huge Herring" Shulevitz

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