MEEN Ag 05 said:

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Cheers is great - also the Office, Parks and Rec.

Growings Pains


And let's give some love to our animated favorites:

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JDUB08AG said:

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Band of brothers gets a lot of love and rightly so, but I think I may actually like the intro to the pacific slightly more.

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DargelSkout said:

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I always liked this one:

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ac04 said:

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this thread made me pull out my copy of "The Sopranos Sessions"

Quote:

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...this is a show that gives mass audiences the double-crosses and rubouts they expect from a Mob tale, but also psycho-therapy and dream analysis, economic and social satire, commentary on toxic masculinity and patriarchal oppression, and a rich intertextuality that positions The Sopranos against the histories of cinematic and real gangsters, Italian Americans, and America.

The opening credits display this graceful interplay. They seem straight-forward enough: here is the hero, this is where he lives. But they do at least five more things that dispel expectations and prepare us for something beyond the gangster-film usual.

Surprise #1: The man behind the wheel. If the overweight, balding, cigar-smoking driver who snatches a ticket from a toll booth is the show's protagonist and a Mafia boss (and we quickly learn that he is), the actor looks more like a henchman - one who'd get beaten up by a much smaller hero or shot by his boss to prove his ruthlessness.

Surprise #2: The music; "Woke Up This Morning" by Alabama 3, aka A3. Now universally recognized as the Sopranos theme, it was an unknown quantity in 1999. The song's rumbling bass line, warbling synthesizer effects, Leonard Cohen-esque vocals, and repetitive harmonica lament signal that this isn't the gangster story you're used to seeing. Notwithstanding oddball outliers like King of New York, post-1970 gangster pictures were usually scored with sweeping orchestral compositions (The Godfather, State of Grace, Miller's Crossing); playlists of postwar pop, blues, and rock (see any modern-day crime film by Scorcese), or some combination (Donnie Brasco). The pilot will use plenty of the second kind of music, but the present-tense newness of the A3 still throws the viewer off-balance.

Surprise #3: The filmmaking. Shot by series cinematographer Alik Sakharov with a handheld 35mm camera, on a route roughed out on videotape by series locations manager Jason Minter, the sequence is an assemblage of "caught" footage, taken in New Jersey locations without permits and edited in a jagged, unpredictable way. Eschewing the uninteresting technique of always cutting on the beat, the sequence holds images for unpredictable durations. It also avoids the clich of showing cast pictures next to their names, instead going for a cinematic style that prizes journalistic detail and atmosphere.

Surprise #4: Immediately after the HBO logo is a shaky shot of converging perspective lines - actually a low-angle view of the ceiling of the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting New York to New Jersey. If you know the Lincoln Tunnel and gangster movies, you'll be surprised when the light at the end of that tunnel coalesces to reveal Jersey instead of New York - not what's supposed to happen. East Coast movie gangsters only go to Jersey when going on the lam or dumping a corpse. Numerous classic gangster films are set in Manhattan and/or the surrounding boroughs of New York, because Manhattan is just more glamorous; it's where real people and movie characters go when they've Made It. East Coast gangster stories might move to Brooklyn, where the mid-level crooks live in duplexes with their aging mothers, or farther east to Long Island, where the bosses of bosses (and Jay Gatsby) buy palatial estates, but in Big Apple Mob films that's usually it. If the story travels farther, it'll probably beeline west to Chicago (historically the second most popular location for gangster movies), Las Vegas, Reno, or Los Angeles. Aside from some outliers (like rare films set in small towns where gangsters hide out, or get entangled in film noir scenarios), the unspoken rule is to set the drama "anywhere but New Jersey" - except to depict the characters as losers.

So by entering New Jersey rather than leaving it, The Sopranos declares it intends to explore the characters' state as well as their state of mind, how each informs the other. The Cape Cods of East Orange immediately outside of Newark at least have some blocky, post-World War II anti-charm, but we fly past those, winding uphill through woods before parking in the driveway of a pale-brick house with no architectural personality. It's the kind of place a man of no imagination whose regional auto-parts chain was just acquired by Pep Boys would buy for his wife.

Surprise #5: The mythic resonance of Tony's drive.

The American assimilation story has one component if you're a native-born WASP, two if you're an immigrant.

The first component is the migration from East to West, as prophesied by Horace Greely ("Go West, young man!") and enshrined in Tony Soprano's beloved Westerns - films about rugged individualism and steely machismo. They depict the tension between civilization and the frontier, but also the reinvention of the self, American style. You go West to leave your old self (and sins) behind and become someone new. The first time we meet him, Tony is heading (roughly) West.

The second component is the movement from the big, bad city - where first-generation immigrants replicated rough versions of their home countries in neighborhoods prefaced with "Little" - to the boroughs or first ring of suburbs around the core city. The houses were small, but they at least had lawns. Second-generation immigrant families could live in places like the ones shown in The Sopranos credits and feel as if their family made it - or at least made it out. Their kids can play sandlot baseball, join civic organizations in Fourth of July parades down Main Street, and eat Chicken a la King, hot dogs, and apple pie in addition to spaghetti, lo mein, or lox. It's the kind of place where Giuseppe and Angelina or Murray and Tovah can raise kids named Ryan and Jane.

This abbreviated migration, in which ordinary car trips become reenacted journeys toward becoming "real" Americans, continues into the third generation, as the grandchildren of immigrants move still farther out, settling into remote housing developments carved out of fields and forests - communities without community, where deer snack on rosebushes, and you have to put chains on your car tires to get downhill when it snows.

It's here that the driver and his family live. A journey of cultural transformation starts with a shot of the Lincoln Tunnel's ceiling and ends with a man pulling into the driveway of a spacious house in hilly northern New Jersey and exiting his vehicle. This sequence of shots compresses the twentieth-century East Coast immigrant experience into fifty-nine shots lasting eighty-nine seconds.

But the image of the driver shutting the car door and leaving the frame doesn't feel like a neat and comforting conclusion. There's an unstable, unfinished quality, conveyed by the needle scratch in the song (universal signifier of something cut short); by the unmoored and jittery way the filmmakers present the terrain; and especially by the character who guides us through it. The rings on Tony's meaty fingers, the thick dark hair on his forearms, the cigar between his teeth, the smoke trailing from his mouth as he checks the rearview mirror, the shots of the neighborhoods where he grew up but would never live today; these details describe a leader and father who was raised a particular way but aspires to be something more - or something else.

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