03. I Love the Coziness!

"You know what?" "Probably not!"

I don’t have a favorite character on The Sopranos so much as I have a constantly fluctuating taxonomy of the specific, complex ways I feel about each character. But there are a handful that I enjoy without reservation or complication, and Charmaine Bucco is one of them. I have a big soft spot for fictional characters whose arc boils down to “a struggling, well-meaning person tries to get through each day” (see: my late 2017 Twitter presence, a failed one-woman campaign to get Willem Dafoe an Oscar for The Florida Project) and Charmaine is a particularly compelling iteration of that. She’s just trying to stay afloat without losing her soul or sanity in the process. And we don’t see her often, but every time we do, her steadfastness in pursuing that goal reminds us how willing nearly everyone else is to make concessions and cut corners.

Her lopsided significance-to-screentime ratio reflects both the care the show invests in all its characters and the number of well-developed women it features — two of the things I love most about it. The latter, in particular, is something I’ve found lacking in the prestige dramas that have tried to follow in its footsteps; they often have two or three complicated women characters and relegate any others to a binary of “like the other girls”/weak and “not like the other girls”/tough. It’s disappointing, because prestige television is only as interesting and complicated as what it has to say about the world it reflects, and while I don’t think a work of art must represent women if it’s going to say something compelling about gender, it certainly helps.

And if I were ever tasked with proving that theory, I’d lean on “Denial, Anger, Acceptance” as an example. The episode centers around a conflict between Charmaine and Carmela — and a set of parallel conflicts between their husbands and within their respective marriages — that reveals the overlaps between class and gender in this world, as well as ours. In its first act, Tony and Carmela drop by the Buccos’ new house, and Carmela is quietly horrified by their home, which is small and in need of some minor repairs and redecorating, but still reflective of the tolerable conditions that millions of middle-class Americans live under every day — not evidence of abject poverty by any stretch of the imagination, unless your imagination is Carm’s. In an effort to intervene in what she sees as unimaginable suffering, Carm hires the Buccos to cater a fundraiser she’s throwing in her massive home, and it’s clear throughout the process that she thinks of herself as a generous benefactress while Charmaine thinks of herself as a person doing a job.

Which is not to say that Charmaine is unaware of the class disparity between herself and her friend. While preparing for the party, she witnesses Carmela beckon and chastise the woman who cleans the Sopranos’ home, and delivers a small, appalled eyebrow raise. The gesture is just as class-conscious and judgmental as the pained “I love the coziness!” Carm offers up in her attempt to compliment the Buccos’ new home — it’s just that her judgment is factually and morally correct. In fact, during the party itself, we realize that Charmaine has not been judgmental enough, as Carmela applies the exact same I’m-your-employer condescension to her, summoning her from across the living room with a wordless wave of her manicured hand:

Carm’s nails — fake, french-tipped, absurdly long, a shape no amount of filing could force onto a natural human nail — are such a perfect symbol. (And a symbol that will haunt her later in the show’s run!) They signify the unique tackiness of a particular time and place, of course, but also the aesthetic possibilities available to women with no pragmatic concerns. Nothing says “I don’t do a single thing with my hands” like a set of long acrylics worn casually on a weekday, and every woman who regularly has to scrub a dish, or tend to another human being, or even type on a keyboard knows it. (If you don’t believe me, scroll through the comments on any post on Kylie Jenner’s instagram in which her hands are visible. It’s “there’s no way you’ve ever changed a diaper with those nails” all the way down.) Long fake nails are a way of flaunting not only your femininity but also the fact that you’ve achieved that femininity without the burden of any of the labor traditionally associated with it — which means that you’ve likely reassigned that labor to other women.

And while they’re certainly my favorite detail, the acrylics are just one way in which this episode reveals a lot about these people with very little content. For example, Charmaine’s brief monologue in one of its final scenes, in which she tells Carmela that she dated Tony and decided “it wasn’t for me,” is only a few lines long, but it complicates everything we’ve already seen. It looks catfighty laid out on the page, but on screen, there’s far more nuance. Charmaine isn’t just rubbing Carmela’s nose in the fact that her past rejection of Tony enabled the life Carm now feels so smug about. She’s trying to make Carm understand that she made a concerted choice to build the life she currently has, and maybe consider how her obliviousness to that fact reflects back on herself. Money is not what makes Charmaine and Carmela’s lives so divergent; introspection is.

Which doesn’t mean that money doesn’t matter, or even that Carm walks away grasping that it matters less than she believes. Edie Falco’s performance in that final scene is some of her greatest work in the entire series (tied with, you know, a thousand other moments.) She’s clearly stunned by Charmaine’s confession — and a tiny bit impressed with and/or jealous of her assertiveness — but she doesn’t telegraph which specific part of the monologue has knocked her off-balance; each time I rewatch the scene, I identify a different point of impact. That ambiguity is perfect because “Denial, Anger, Acceptance” isn’t a straightforward morality tale in which Carmela is forced to understand the shallowness of her materialism or to reexamine her pitying condescension toward those she sees as beneath her. She’s given the opportunity to learn those things, yes, but it’s unclear whether she’ll take advantage of it — a recurring pattern for every character in the show.

Including Charmaine, who’s granted a learning opportunity of her own, a gentle reminder that there’s no innocent space to be carved out here. After she accepts the job, Artie picks a minor fight, demanding that she explain why it’s fine to cater the party but unacceptable for Tony to be a partner in the restaurant. She argues that a partnership is too amorphous, that it opens up too many possibilities for strings to become attached, while the catering job is an exchange of above-board money for well-defined, honest work. And, in theory, the distinction she makes is correct — correct in a way that Artie can’t fully grasp because manhood has made him less accustomed to negotiating the world’s limitations and trapdoors. But in practice, she’s overestimated the fairness of that exchange, and when the gulf between her perception and reality is exposed, it reinforces one of the show’s harshest ideas: you can be as good and as diligent and as hardworking as they come, but your effort will still get cannibalized by a system that’s built on the degradation of those who actually keep it running.