40. Recession-Proof Since Time Immemorial

“Who’s gonna quibble with patriotic entrepreneurism?”

Season four of The Sopranos isn’t my favorite, and its premiere, “For All Debts Public and Private,” has all the problems that will mark the season as a whole. It’s full of great, thrilling moments — moments delivered though better acting and writing than you’ll see on any other series — but the way they come together as a narrative whole often feels incomplete and inconsistent. The synthesis of plot and theme doesn’t quite live up to the potential of season three and, more urgently, it doesn’t quite live up to a drastically changed real-life context. It conveys the sensation of feeling unmoored well — but sometimes it crosses the line into being unmoored in its own right.

Not that responding to 9/11 would have been an easy dilemma for any creative team to solve — but The Sopranos was better positioned than most to come close to doing so. It’s not exactly a dealbreaker for a big, nationwide, apocalyptic-feeling event to coincide with the point at which your television series about the decline of American culture starts to go into an uninterrupted free-fall. But sometimes the series tries to reclaim control of the pace of that decline through egregious brakes-pumping, leaving us with a premiere that sometimes feels like a 9/11-themed rendition of the previous two seasons’ the more things change, the more they stay the same premieres, minus much of the table-setting and character introductions that made those three previous premieres intriguing.

The episode is stuffed with callbacks: the ducks return (though more chaotically this time around); Tony marches down the driveway in his bathrobe to get the newspaper; George gets the shit beaten out of him again; we realize that Carm never got around to removing the vertical-striped upstairs bathroom wallpaper. But few of these incidents call our attention to specific themes that will prove significant throughout the episodes to come, and many feel like a struggle against a radically changed cultural context and a cast that’s visibly aged since we last saw them. 

The filming lag between seasons three and four would pale in comparison to the one after this season and the one after that. (There was, by this point, a lot of on-set drama, which is not worth commenting on except that every account of it includes a sentence along the lines of “meanwhile, the actresses were going to therapy and/or hanging out with their dogs in their trailers,” which is delightful.) So not only does the visible passage of time not feel intrusive when held up against those larger gaps, but it also feels right in a way I wish the episode leaned into a little more. Though the narrative time between them is brief, this episode aired almost a year to the day after 9/11, while the season three finale aired several months before the attacks. Everyone looks older, but it seems correct that everyone would have aged substantially in what we’re supposed to believe is just a few months, given the changes in both their individual lives and the backdrop against which those lives are set. 

The episode lands better when it embraces the magnitude of those changes. 9/11 is often gestured toward, but it’s not explicitly mentioned until the dumbest possible opportunity arises, which feels both true to the series and true to life. The credits are altered. Then, in the opening scene, we expect Carmela to be reading from the New York Times about U.S. current events — and instead she’s narrating old-school-style Neopolitan corruption. (A dramatic reading of a newspaper story for an audience of your uninterested child? Biggest My Mom Energy ever. Edie Falco is always bringing that energy, but this whole scene is a perfect reenactment of every single time my mom reads impeachment news out loud to me despite my repeated explanations that I’ve already read it.)

But Carm eventually does reference 9/11 during an argument with Tony about “simple estate planning,” a concern sparked by the sight of Angie Bonpensiero handing out kielbasa samples at the grocery store. “Let me tell you something — or you can watch the fucking news — everything comes to an end,” she yells. Their corrupt assemblyman has it on the brain too — not as a tragedy but as an economic opportunity — as does Bobby Bacala, who believes the end is nigh. 

These moments don’t just contextualize; they connect a real-world apocalyptic mood with Tony’s increasingly inevitable-seeming personal decline. During therapy, he declares that there are only two potential conclusions for his career: “Dead or in the can.” He and Melfi spar about whether there’s a third possibility, both of them fidgeting like they want to crawl out of their skin, and honestly, same. Their sessions have grown so frustrating that it makes me physically uncomfortable to watch Tony come so close to getting it, only to find a way to warp every epiphany into a justification for digging in deeper on being horrible. 

If his digging in harmed only himself, that would be bad enough — but it doesn’t, and Christopher, his chosen successor, suffers severely this week. As the episode begins, Christopher is increasingly erratic and using heroin, and justifying both with the stresses of his work. But instead of pulling back, he keeps pushing deeper — an impulse that Tony manipulates to entice him to kill Barry Haydu, the newly retired police officer who may or may not have murdered Christopher’s father. 

Obviously, this scenario is worse if Haydu didn’t kill Dickie Moltisanti (although his final “I’m sorry” is a good enough confession for Christopher.) But it’s still profoundly shitty in the event that he did. The temporary satisfaction Christopher finds comes from an action that drags him further into the life that’s made him desperate for any feeling of satisfaction, no matter how minor or fleeting or fraught. He thinks he’s asserting himself as a force in his own right, but he’s recreating himself as his mentor’s clone — the “Special Agent Finnerty, you’re under arrest” blaring from Haydu’s television after Christopher finishes shooting him is particularly haunting in this regard — and it’s brutal to watch it happen without him knowing that it is.