01. Hope Comes in Many Forms
“Here we go now with the nostalgia.”
The first episode of a long-lived series often feels, in retrospect, like an endurance exercise in throat-clearing. It runs us through a checklist of all the places and people and concepts we need to know before we get into the good stuff, the actual narrative stuff, that will follow. The appeal of rewatching a first episode is often limited to marveling that some characters are still alive and some have yet to appear, and the actors look so young — like infants, all of them. It’s rare that one can stand on its own merits; the pilot of The Sopranos is one of only a handful that does.
It does all the work a first episode is supposed to do: it lays out the themes and ground rules and key relationships of the series. We learn that Tony Soprano is a deeply depressed mobster, and that his misery is fundamentally intertwined with his context. His professional life is empty not just because it’s immoral but also because it’s part of a national economy in decline. The larger power struggles taking shape might look like they’re about accumulating excess capital, but in reality, they’re a fight over the scraps that remain.
His home life is also shaped by a social institution in freefall — the traditional nuclear family, which wasn’t built to withstand lengthened lifespans and changing gender norms and cultural assimilation. His marriage is held together with money and shared resentment; his children are appallingly self-absorbed; his aging mother is determined not simply to irritate but to destroy him. But he wants to try to be better, sort of, sometimes, maybe. So he goes to therapy, and then doesn’t, and then does; he fucks things up, and then doesn’t, and then does, often in the same ways that he fucked them up previously.
There’s an economy to the way all of that gets conveyed to us in an episode stripped of the tedious table-setting that usually happens in a pilot. It’s not just that the things we need to understand are shown rather than told, though they often are. The lighting and set design are, as one of my weirder college professors liked to say, “positively larded with information.” (I mean, Livia’s lace curtains, my god.) However, there’s also a lot of telling — telling that we would probably be harsher on if this weren’t, you know, a show about therapy. But that telling works because what is told and what is shown inform one another, both in how they cohere and how they diverge; they are so interlinked that it becomes impossible to tell where one ends and the next begins.
And that opens up a way for the high-level architecture to get nested — bird pun absolutely intended — into the episodic arc rather than cannibalizing it. This is a series about a culture in flux and the people struggling to locate themselves within it, but we glean that through a series of panic attacks and mother-daughter fights, through an abortive attempt at a birthday party and an even less successful effort to keep a work conflict from spiraling outward and sucking innocent bystanders into its orbit. The main tension of the season, the Tony-Livia conflict, gets kicked off over the course of three relatively short scenes, scenes which depict some of the most mundane moments in the episode. And yet they’re so loaded with tension that you end up desperate to find out what comes next, to learn how these two nightmare people try to destroy one another.
It’s an impressive feat, and it’s even more impressive when you know that this season-long arc is the first segment of a larger narrative that is, at its core, one of entropy and decay. “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end,” Tony explains in the episode’s opening therapy session. Although he’s generally dishonest, very little in the episode gives us any reason to question this claim. Which means we also have no reason to believe that this first chapter will be bookended by a satisfying conclusion — yet the episode ends with just enough optimism that we want to keep going, if only to see if things really do get worse.
I’m in the middle of reading Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark for the first time, and watching this while reading that makes for a disorienting experience. I bought the book shortly after the 2016 election, when I was depressed and anxious and sleeping very little and taking a high dose of melatonin in an effort to sleep just a little bit more. But the melatonin only made me buy things online in the middle of the night — things I thought would make the world feel a little less dire, things I would not remember I bought until they appeared on my doorstep 5-7 business days later. At one point, I ordered a tarot deck. I assume I bought this book because every left-leaning person on the internet swore it would make me feel inspired, but I can’t tell you if they were right, because I held off on reading it until I started feeling more optimistic on my own. I didn’t want it to backfire and leave me feeling more cynical and isolated if I ended up hating it.
Solnit’s central claim is that social progress requires hope for a better future above all else, along with difficult, interdependent work that includes narrativizing the past with honesty and clarity. Change is not easy, she knows, nor is it linear or quick — but it’s possible, and believing in its possibility is what makes it so. It would be easy to say that a text as cynical as The Sopranos disagrees wholeheartedly with this idea, but I don’t think it’s quite that straightforward. I think it just places more emphasis on the difficult-work part of this formulation, and it suggests that doing that work for your own sake is an act of futility.
Certainly, the question that hangs over the series is whether Tony Soprano can be redeemed, whether he can extricate himself from the murk of who he is and what he’s inherited, from a time and place that only seem to maximize the worst of his tendencies. But there’s also the question of whether he’s doomed to pass that murk onto those around him — most notably, his children. This is the core of all the duck-related stress, of course, but its specific contours are perhaps best drawn out in that brief shot of Artie and Charmaine’s kids, woken from their sleep in a booth at their parents’ restaurant, projecting uncomplaining self-sufficiency. They’re only on screen for a few seconds, but it’s one of the most damning moments in the entire series. It makes clear that Meadow and AJ’s entitlement isn’t a problem endemic to Kids These Days; it’s a problem endemic to Kids With These Parents. And yet there’s a little bit of hope in that clarification — a suggestion of a future that isn’t entirely bleak, an incitement to keep watching to see who that future includes.