How To Watch Television

7. The Sopranos: Episodic Storytelling

65 7 The Sopranos Episodic Storytelling Sean O’Sullivan Abstract: The Sopranos is one of television’s most acclaimed series, ushering in the rise of the twenty-first-century primetime serial and helping to elevate the medium ’s cultural status. But Sean O’Sullivan problematizes our understanding of the show’s seriality, highlighting episodes that function more as short stories than as chapters in a novel, and thus illuminating how the program’s story structures and themes explore and challenge the norms of television narrative. When Jennifer Egan discusses her inspirations for A Visit from the Goon Squad, the winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, she often cites The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007). Egan’s book has nothing to do with mobsters or federal agents. Rather, it is a loosely connected series of thirteen chapters, tracing over several decades a group of people affiliated with the music business. When it came out, there was considerable debate about whether the book should be called a novel or a collection of short stories. The style and point of view can vary drastically from chapter to chapter; characters that may have seemed “major” sometimes drop out and sometimes reappear, with “minor” characters at times taking over the reins. It was this structural restlessness, this ambivalence about linear connection, that Egan found appealing in the HBO show: “The lateral feeling of it, [and] not to have to always be focused on the forward thrust. There were whole episodes where you had no idea why this was going to be important in the bigger scheme of things, and yet it was fascinating; I loved the idea . . . of letting it feel meandering.”1 Egan points here to the powerful anti-serial riptide at the center of the most widely celebrated serial drama of the last decade, its resistance to the accumulative forces of consequence, continuity, and progression that nineteenth -century installment fiction and twentieth-century soap opera marketed as their defining features. This essay will spotlight two episodes from the show’s initial season, each of which operates “laterally” in relation to the rest of that season. 66 Sean O’Sullivan The first of these is the most highly praised of all episodes of The Sopranos; the second is one of the least beloved. That gulf in reception illustrates the attractions , perils, and effects of rupturing serial conventions. Egan’s diagnosis would undoubtedly please David Chase, creator and showrunner of The Sopranos, since his aversion to the traditional television business drove the design and ethos of the show. Chase described his early creative differences with the channel: There was a little bit of friction the first season between myself and HBO, because they were more interested in the serialized elements and I was not. “What’s going to happen from one episode to the next?” “Are they going to kill Tony or not?” “Who planned it?” Or: “What’s the result of what happened in episode 2?” I was more interested in discrete little movies.2 If Egan uses a metaphor of movement—the “lateral” rather than propulsive tendency of a narrative—Chase offers an arboreal image: If you look at a Christmas tree, people don’t care about the trunk of a Christmas tree; they only care about the lights and the balls and the tinsel. But the trunk has to be there. So we always referred back to that; we had this continuing story, which people seemed to get involved in. I didn’t intend to do a soap opera.3 Chase’s notion of “people” here is helpfully contradictory. On the one hand, “people ” got involved in the continuing story—namely the trunk of the tree; on the other hand, “people” care only about the surrounding baubles, those visual delights that make the trunk pleasingly invisible. This conflict between what “people ” want—perhaps different kinds of people, or more likely the same people in different moods of narrative consumption—speaks directly to The Sopranos’ selfconscious shifts between satisfaction and dissatisfaction. The most famous hour of the series, and Exhibit A of Chase’s stand-alone storytelling preferences, is “College” (February 7, 1999), the show’s fifth episode. Composed of just two storylines, rather than the typical model of three or four, “College” follows Tony and his daughter, Meadow, during her college tour in Maine and Tony’s wife, Carmela, during her dangerous flirtation with Father Phil Intintola back in New Jersey. The dramatic core of the episode is Tony’s discovery...