"Watching Too Much Television" | The Sopranos | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club

"Watching Too Much Television" | The Sopranos | TV Club | TV | The A.V. Club:

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Let’s start with the bad. The depiction of inner-city characters on The Sopranos is a constant complaint, and the crack houses here are almost laughably bad in their portrayal. It’s not so much that the show resorts to stereotypes; it’s that those stereotypes seem pulled down from a 2-for-1 bin at some TV cliché warehouse store. It’s one thing to have a bunch of young gang members (recruited by the seemingly upstanding Maurice!) storm the houses and roust all of the crack addicts from them. It’s quite another to have a cute little girl who’s the collateral damage from the kinds of behavior the addicts carry out, day in and day out, the kind of behavior that’s often underwritten by men like Tony Soprano. And as if that weren’t enough, the scene where Zellman wanders by to talk with Tony as he’s supervising the stripping down of the houses for copper wire and decorative embellishments features a small child asking Zellman if they’re going to put NICE houses on the spot, in place of the crack houses. Yes, The Sopranos. We get it. And now we’ve seen The Wire, so we can realize just how terrible all of this material really is.

But the story is misbegotten on yet another level. The actual stuff having to do with the scam to get money from HUD that will then make its way into the pockets of Tony and friends is pretty solid, and it’s always nice to watch the show get into the nitty gritty of just how a deal like this is carried out (and just how badly the taxpayers get screwed over). But the scenes where Zellman and Maurice argue about their ideals as children of the ‘60s feel very out of place, sort of like all of those times Melfi’s ex-husband would talk about negative portrayals of Italians in the media. Both characters are interesting as an extension of Tony Soprano’s corruption. (I love the way that the show seems to introduce Maurice as someone who’s mostly getting involved in this scam because his non-profit needs cash… and then you see his house.) They’re not as interesting when we listen to them talk about how the ‘60s sold out.

Still, both of these less successful plots have nice echoes over in the plots involving the main characters. This episode actually features one of my favorite sequences from the entire run of the show, where Tony and A.J. head out to the old neighborhood, so Tony can show A.J. the church his great-grandfather built. Like Zellman and Maurice, Tony feels an intense nostalgia for the past, but in his case, it’s a past he didn’t even live through, a time when the Italians came to the U.S. and didn’t need any handouts to make a neighborhood that was as vibrant as any other in the city. (Tony, of course, nicely looks over the fact that his operation makes obscene profits off of exploiting others, just as his ancestors were exploited.) A.J., of course, just doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t get any of it. He doesn’t get what his dad is trying to tell him. It’s another example of Tony reaching out to someone and getting rebuffed, only this time, it’s his own son, who’s unable to appreciate anything his dad is trying to tell him. The Sopranos always has this sense that what was is better than what is. Here, we see that it’s better than what will be as well.