Well, bygones being bygones and deadlines being a concept I haven’t yet fully grasped, I feel I have a duty to my totally-real-and-not-made-up-at-all readership. After all, critics are only there to enhance the already rich cultural jungle that has provided them with so much narrative sustenance over the years. They just hide it really well by doing the opposite. It’s far easier to slag something off than try to figure out why you actually enjoyed it. That’s why it’s so rare to find anything you can praise without leaving yourself open to the jibes of some joyless human-beret complaining about anything written in the past thousand years in a language that more than five people in the world can understand.
Enter The Greatest TV Drama of All Time, one of those uncommon exceptions that turns sneers into smiles and brings people together from all walks of life. I’m going to give you three guesses what it is, and if you so much as think the words ‘big’ and ‘brother’, even as a consequence of reading them in this sentence, I’ll be very disappointed. Not so disappointed that I’ll feel the need to fire a remote mind-control dart into your brain in order to coerce you into participating in a nationally televised knife orgy, but not far off. The Greatest TV Drama of All Time, according to my sources, is:
Now normally I would dismiss comments like this with a hearty ‘Pah!’, maybe even the good old ‘greatness is subjective’ tactic, the sort of thing that a real writer would say right up to the point that they start talking about themselves. When you sit down and think about it though, The Sopranos probably is the greatest drama of all time, which is actually a little bit depressing. If someone, for example, tells you that Eminem is the greatest rapper of all time, you’ll stop, try to think of someone better and nothing springs to mind. All of a sudden you’re convinced that Eminem isn’t just an angry lyric-slinger pretending to be superman, he’s actually the best angry lyric-slinger pretending to be superman there ever was. This is a conclusion often followed by a feeling of emptiness and a realisation that maybe rap isn’t all that good.
Another suitable comparison are shows like The Hundred Greatest Cartoons of All Time, where you wait until the ungodly hour of five in the morning only to find that The Simpsons is still the best thing life has to offer. Why watch anything else? Why not just sit in your underwear all day with a bottomless tub of Ben and Jerry’s, gazing in infantile glee as Homer says ‘Doh’ over and over again and your insides gradually turn into Phish Food? While many will respond that they would if they could afford it (bottomless tubs of Ben and Jerry‘s are even more expensive than the normal sized ones), the truth of the matter is that this situation is likely to lead to a bad case of self-inflicted scissors in eye.
So, the first thing that I thought when I heard that The Sopranos was the Greatest TV Drama of All Time was that it would be pretty dull. Not only this, it would be so seeped in pretension that it would actually have to sprout an arse in the middle of the screen as a visual metaphor of how far up itself it was. It would be dry, convoluted and more incomprehensible than a renaissance poetry collection recited by Scooby Doo.
It’s actually fantastic. Even if I wanted to, there’s not one thing I can complain about. The Sopranos is genuinely, well… great. If you haven’t seen it, see it. If you have seen it, see it again. It’s really that good.
If you’re still in the dark, this is how it goes down. Mafioso Tony Soprano is having some trouble dividing his time between work and family. Except he works for the mob, which in a way is also his family, which kind of makes him a bigamist, which causes all sorts of problems at Christmas dinner. These conflicting (and at times agreeing) interests of the two parties make for a big headache and eventually Tony goes all emo and winds up seeing a psychiatrist. In other words, the audience is invited to share a voyeuristic glimpse into the inner workings of a man who commits atrocity after atrocity while somehow managing to convince himself of his own innocence, like some sort of serial rapist who firmly believes that the taxman is the greatest evil imaginable.
The rest of the show is divided up into violence and shooting, followed by Tony moaning about how violent and shooty he is. Shoot, moan, shoot, moan, shoot, moan. You would think that the simple answer would just be to stop shooting people, but that doesn’t quite stretch into six series. Instead you get offered a rich medley of characters contributing to Tony’s continuously fluctuating perceptions of reality. Is he really a cold blooded killer or just a little lost boy? A lamb in a lion’s clothing? A moray eel with a heart of gold? A sabre-toothed chihuahua? Who knows.
If there is any moral to be drawn out of this post (which there isn‘t), it’s that sometimes you have to set all scepticism aside and just buy all six box sets from play.com. Then tell me what happens. I'm still on season two.
