75. Acts of Janice

“Don’t besmirch the man, Sal.”

It would not be accurate to say that I like Janice Soprano. But I appreciate her status as the most true-to-life character in a show full of characters who remind me of people I know: ideologically well-intentioned but hamstrung by self-absorption, always making external changes and avoiding the internal ones that would allow those surface-level edits to stick, constantly molding herself in others’ images (especially those of the men she dates) in an effort to assuage a bottomless need to be loved and accepted. Maybe we don’t all have a Janice in our own lives — I don’t want to assume universality — but I certainly do. And, even though I know mine all too well, every time the fictional one is on screen, I’m delighted to see what she’ll do next. A lot of that is thanks to Aida Turturro, who is so funny and all-in that she transforms what would be Big Cringe scenes into absolute joys to watch. The more unsavory the moment, the more zeal she tackles it with, and I think she might be my pick for the secret MVP of the series. 

Like the real people I know who follow similar patterns, the character of Janice is tough to empathize with but easy to understand. In an echo of the Johnny-Tony-AJ similarities that “Johnny Cakes” explored, “Moe n’ Joe” asks: How was Livia Soprano’s daughter ever going to turn out to be anything but this? (To be fair, Barbara managed to pull it off. But it sounds like that’s more a side effect of her being lost in the shuffle of her older siblings than anything else. Youngest child privilege at work.) The odds were so fully stacked against her that you have to respect that she did, at one point, try to become someone different — even though she failed due to her fundamental limitations as a person. 

In many ways, Janice is exactly like her mother: mercurial, manipulative, prone to turning every interpersonal interaction into a vicious struggle for power and control. In spite of her (hilarious) insistence that the only thing tying her and Tony together is DNA, their family history makes them inextricably intertwined. They are both entirely their parents’ children — they were well before teenage Janice extorted her brother, and they have been ever since. No amount of anger will change that. 

But Janice deviates from their mother’s legacy in a few important ways. Unlike Livia, who was content to wallow in misery, Janice did something about feeling trapped, even though those geographic and aesthetic changes weren’t enough to keep everything she inherited and learned from her family from catching up with her. And she also, on occasion, experiences sadness and anger that isn’t strategically performed for the benefit of an audience; her alienation from the other wives and her estrangement from her son are genuine points of vulnerability. 

Those genuine feelings of insecurity over her position as a wife and mother drive some of Janice’s most Livia-like behavior, though: she overcompensates in being authoritative with her stepchildren and tries to push Bobby into raising his profile within the Family. Their marriage is one of convenience, and she doesn’t even get what she wants from it — although she’s certainly not alone in that. Where Bobby fails to hold up his end of the bargain because he’s oblivious to its existence, Tony willfully defies his marital responsibilities. He refuses to get the spec house permits in retaliation against both Carmela’s casual domestic strike and the fact that he’s not engaging in the affairs he believes the house would provide him a permission slip for — an arrangement was, uh, not established as explicitly as Tony claims it was. 

I think at this point, it’s safe to assume that strategic negotiations like these structure every mob marriage, with the notable exception of Johnny and Ginny, who share a love and respect that’s completely illegible to those around them. Though his colleagues defend his reputation against outsiders, internally everyone is appalled that Johnny protected his family instead of the Family. Using that storyline as an undercurrent for the rest of the episode makes it easy to diagnose the source of misery in all these other marriages: they’re not allies with a shared commitment to their family, they’re business partners with competing individual needs.