(Note: The following exchange contains major spoilers for current and past seasons of The Sopranos and The Shield. Proceed with caution.)
Scott: By happy coincidence—made possible by the looong gestation period between Sopranos installments—the sixth seasons of The Sopranos and The Shield have been unfolding simultaneously, and it's been hard to keep them from bleeding together in my mind. Here, we have two of the greatest anti-heroes in television history, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), finally approaching their day of reckoning, when all their past sins are coming back to haunt them. Granted, Judgment Day will come sooner for Tony, since there are only a handful of episodes left in The Sopranos' run, while the ever-resilient Vic still has room to maneuver, because The Shield has one more season left before "The Farm" presumably closes its barn doors forever. But it's been fascinating to see how these men respond as the noose tightens around their necks, and the very different ways these shows are wending toward conclusions.
For the whole of their runs, The Sopranos and The Shield have pulled off a tricky balancing act: Season after season, their central figures have committed terrible sins, fracturing their families with infidelity and violence, and blackening society with acts of criminal treachery. And yet their gifted creators—David Chase and Shawn Ryan, respectively—have elicited sympathy for the devil, drawing us closer to them as their bad deeds accumulate. As the saying goes, "Everyone has their reasons," and for these powerful men, just remaining on top of the Jersey mob or operating the Strike Team in a gang-ridden neighborhood requires some "moral flexibility," even if those compromises mean selling your soul piece by piece. (Or worse still, compromising the souls—and sometimes lives—of the people you love in the process.) Neither one of these shows cares for moralizing per se; there's never a Family Ties episode in which lessons are learned and reconciliations are struck. But it would be a cheat if the good life awaited Tony and Vic at the end of the line; they've paid a heavy price for the things they've done over six seasons, and it's reasonable to expect the heaviest (or perhaps ultimate) price to be incurred soon.
The big questions, of course, are "What?" and "How?": What's going to happen to Vic and Tony, and how are Chase and Ryan guiding us to the finish? Steve, a couple weeks ago—one week before what you and many others felt was the best Sopranos episode of the season—you wrote a blog post expressing your general disappointment with the series' sixth season, and it's safe to say you aren't alone in feeling that way. I sympathize with this position, insofar as I'll admit that the show isn't as entertaining or even gripping as it used to be. However, I'm here to beat you back on it anyway, because I think Chase's refusal to satisfy viewers in conventional ways—and by "conventional," I mean by the high standards of seasons one through five—has given the show an honesty and integrity that transcends mere entertainment. Here's the key line from your blog post:
"And I don't think you have to be an action-hungry meathead to think Chase, like Tony Soprano, might be willfully alienating those who used to love him."
See, you say that like it's a bad thing. After Uncle Junior gut-shot Tony and Tony got a new lease on life—prompting our hero to declare that "every day is a gift," and other such bullshit—Chase has gone in the other direction entirely. After five seasons of providing reasons for us to care for Tony (and a psychiatrist that has endlessly enabled him), Chase has finally, at long last, said "Enough is enough. It's time to reveal Tony as the man he truly is: A sociopath, a menace to society, and a plague on his family and the other murderous cretins who have suffered under his charge. We're now done with psychoanalysis, beyond the excuses suggested by Tony's upbringing and his relationship with his mirthless mother and ruthless father. We're also done witnessing those occasional moments of grace when Tony tries to look outside himself and do the right thing." Now, as the end nears, we're seeing Tony's truest self: The one without loyalties, the one who puts himself above all to such a degree that he does precisely the wrong thing whenever someone's in need, whether its Vito's fucked-up son (whose horrible fate is tied to the outcome of a football game), Christopher (who needed Tony to understand his struggle with addiction), or his own boy, who has never responded to his bullying, and certainly won't be cured by being sent to a strip club. Tony Soprano is, in short, a miserable bastard. My questions for you: Does that really make the show worse? Or is it just not as pleasurable to watch? Is there a purpose to Chase ripping apart his canvas, or is he just being willfully perverse?
I'm guessing that you would like The Sopranos to behave a little more like The Shield, which has been consistently strong throughout its run on FX. One of the big things I like about The Shield is that Vic's biggest sin—shooting a cop during a bust in order to protect the team—happens in the very first episode of season one, and that incident continues to haunt him, both in the many internal-affairs investigations centered on him, and in his tortured relationship with Shane (Walton Goggins), the most troubled Strike Team member. On a message board recently, someone asked a good question about Vic that I'd like you (and our readers) to answer: To what extent does Vic believe that what he's doing is right? I'd say that about 99 percent of the time, he feels in the right, which is a stark contrast with Tony, who's bothered to the point of bad dreams, panic attacks, and tearful confessions to his psychiatrist. (Until recently, anyway, when he's liberated himself from guilt to such an extent that he can barely stifle his glee over Christopher's death.) Granted, Vic doesn't have anything like Tony's rap sheet, but he breaks the law as a matter of course, accepting kickbacks from local gang-bangers while allowing them to operate (under certain conditions) and doing anything to save his own hide and protect the Strike Team. If there's one thing Vic has over Tony, it's loyalty: The Mob may put loyalty above all things, but that's just posturing. For Vic, it's truly gospel, and the strongest sign that he operates under a code that's conspicuously absent in Tony's conscience.
What The Shield does well is lock us into Vic's decision-making very clearly. Though he's a wily and sharply intuitive cop, he's also a simple machine whose feelings and motivations are right there on the surface. (Contrast that with someone more "decent" like "Dutch" Wagonbach, whose fascination with the criminal mind is sometimes uncomfortably personal. If someone in "The Barn" turned out to be a serial killer, wouldn't he be the first one you'd suspect?) I've often wondered why, in the face of so much danger on the beat and the constant scrutiny of his superiors, Vic holds onto his job so fiercely. You could argue, I suppose, that he needs the power or the kickbacks, but I think it's because he's truly a justice-seeker and he believes his mission is, on balance, a righteous one. We understand his actions completely and yet are regularly reminded of his treachery, which has made him (and the show) continually fascinating.
All right, I've blabbed on enough. How are you feeling about these shows as they reach their final chapter? Have the most recent Sopranos episodes done anything to change your mind about season six? (Side question: Are full seasons better considered as a whole rather than piece-by-piece?) And what do you imagine will happen to our villainous heroes?
Steven: To answer (some of) your final questions first, yes, the two most recent Sopranos episodes have made me eat my words somewhat. I wrote my blog post after the now-infamous "Chasing It" episode, where Tony suddenly became a huge gambling addict and decided to start hating the relatively benign Hesh, one of his most trusted advisors. It was an alarmingly implausible cap on a run of increasingly hackneyed episodes where Tony seemingly contemplated killing another long-running character every week, including Bobby, Christopher, and Paulie. (I still subscribe to the theory that Chase is needling fans who bet in those dumb pools over which Sopranos character will get whacked next. "Maybe it's this one. Or maybe it's this one. Bwahaha!") Clearly, the last two episodes have been more powerful, mainly because they've included more meaningful plot action with the core characters than most of the other season-six episodes combined.
I lashed out in a moment of frustration because The Sopranos is my favorite show of all time, and even though (we both agree) it's no longer what it once was, it's still better than 95 percent of what's on television. Chase long ago set his own standard, and for me, the Shield comparison is apt because it's the only show right now worthy of that standard. I half-hoped, half-expected that Chase would prove me wrong when I argued The Sopranos had become "unsatisfying and sort of empty," and he has to a degree, but even the best parts of season six illustrate where The Sopranos has gone wrong for me since season five. Let's review one of your main statements.
It's time to reveal Tony as the man he truly is: A sociopath, a menace to society, and a plague on his family and the other murderous cretins who have suffered under his charge.
It's true that Tony is a sociopath, a menace, a plague. But he also used to be a caring father, a loyal friend, and a charming guy. Tony's Jungian duality was one of The Sopranos' great themes—evil is rationalized and compartmentalized in the hearts of bad men pretending to live good lives, and this inevitably compromises their families and friendships. When we first met Tony, he wasn't some cardboard cutout of a murderous mobster. He was a regular guy trying to provide for his wife and kids. Yes, he robbed and extorted and murdered people to make his living, but the daily struggles with co-workers and family were actually fairly common and easy to relate to. You could almost imagine Tony living next door, waving at you with that goofy wide grin of his every morning when you both picked up the paper at the end of the driveway. Some might argue that making Tony likeable softened his hard edges, but I think the opposite was true: Seeing Tony share tender father-daughter moments in one scene and killing an old stoolie with his bare hands in the next in season one's classic "University" episode made him a profoundly chilling character. Because you liked Tony, and didn't want him to pay for his lifestyle, it made you as complicit in his crimes as a well-paid bystander like Carmela. (It's interesting to note that The Sopranos began pre-9/11; I wonder if people would accept such a nuanced depiction of evil today.) Tony certainly seems like a black-and-white baddie these days. With the loss of dichotomy in Tony—in all the characters, really—has come the loss of much of the show's richness.
The Sopranos' well-rounded depiction of evil clearly was an influence on The Shield and Vic Mackey, another loyal, likeable guy who is also selfish, greedy, and probably borderline sociopathic. (Killing a cop in the first episode still haunts him, but only as an open case he might still be busted for. Morally, he doesn't seem bothered by it all. Ditto that for robbing an Armenian money train, engineering drug deals, cheating on his wife, and so on.) While Tony has had any redeeming qualities stripped away, Vic has actually become a "cleaner," better cop as The Shield has progressed. He's no longer the corrupt cowboy constantly looking for a scam from the first two seasons; since the implosion of the Strike Team after the money-train debacle, he's been playing it relatively straight, bending the rules only to serve the interest of his job or to bail out one of his team members. But deep down, he's still a cop killer and a crook who will do anything not to get caught. And nothing Vic does now will wipe off that stench. Like Tony, Vic has rationalized himself beyond reality to forge a normal life. But he isn't as self-aware as Tony. Season six of The Sopranos is about Tony accepting that's he's, as you say, a miserable bastard. Vic fears that realization even more than prison, I think. His hypocrisy regarding Shane murdering Lem was obvious, but he's clearly not ready to accept that yet, preferring the comfort of his usual "for the team, not for me" bullshit. But his safe zones are disappearing. How heartbreaking was it when Vic's daughter Cassidy did the Lexis-Nexis search and found out about his past? Cavanaugh was one thing—your own teenage daughter being onto it is even more terrifying.
Watching Vic navigate the terrain between the good and evil parts of his life is what I love about The Shield, and miss about The Sopranos. In a way, it doesn't matter what happens to Tony from here—he's already dead in the sense that he no longer seems capable of growth or change. You asked if I thought Chase has made the show worse by taking this direction. It's more complex than that. Intellectually, I admire what he's doing. The way Christopher was "handled" in the "Kennedy and Heidi" episode was trademark, low-key genius. But because Chase has distanced us from the characters—either by cutting them out of the show (A.J. of all people is the only core character to get any real face time lately—where the hell is Carm? Meadow? Sil?) or, in the case of Tony, making him so completely monstrous that he's no longer relatable—The Sopranos is a lot less satisfying on an emotional level. Which is why Christopher's murder, while ingeniously handled, also left me a little cold. Again, intellectually I understand that since Uncle Junior shot Tony, he has systematically separated himself from his loved ones because he can no longer handle familial betrayal, real or imagined. And Christopher's murder (and Tony's musical-chairs-style pondering of whacking other main characters) comes out of that. But the lack of emotion and introspection over the death of his once-beloved cousin resulted in a pretty much nonexistent payoff. It's not that Christopher deserved "better"—his death just didn't have the impact of Adrianna or Big Pussy's deaths. I guess that's the point. Chase is showing what a cold prick Tony has become. But why is the overall tone of the show so cold? If Chase is doing a brilliant job of not making me care so much, is that really a good thing?
I also wanted to ask for your thoughts on the parallel father-son relationships between Tony and Christopher, and Vic and Shane. We saw how Tony handled Christopher—how do you think Vic will handle Shane? For me, Walton Goggins superseded Michael Chiklis as the star of The Shield with season five's concluding episode, which is probably the most gut-wrenching episode of any series I've ever seen. (Can The A.V. Club start a "Make Walton Goggins a star" campaign? I can't believe this guy isn't making big-name movies and winning awards.) Like Christopher, Shane is a shadowy reflection of his father figure, and probably more trouble than he's worth. But now that his murder of Lem is out in the open, I have no clue how Vic will handle it. Also, here's a loaded question: Do you think being on commercial television has actually helped The Shield in some ways, making it quicker-paced and more plot-oriented than The Sopranos, which has a very indulgent patron in HBO?
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