| How does Dr. Maurice Yacowar love The Sopranos, the HBO mob series now in its long-awaited fourth season? Let him count the ways.
There’s the brilliant writing, sizzling with New "Joisey" vernacular, sly jokes, plot twists and explosive surprises. There are the top-notch performances by James Gandolfini (as hairy-backed paterfamilias Tony Soprano) and the rest of his family/Family. There’s the oft-surprising pop soundtrack, which sonically builds mood while lyrically riffing on story themes. There are the thoughtful shot compositions, pregnant with meaning and portent. There’s the extensive "connective tissue" (to quote series creator David Chase) weaving together seemingly disparate details at a pokey pace that’s decidedly un-North American (and un-television).
And the hits just keep on coming.
In fact, the University of Calgary prof loves the show so much that he’s crowned The Sopranos "television’s greatest series." Heck, he even wrote the book about it.
The Sopranos On The Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series is exactly what the show deserves: an immensely readable, tack-sharp episode guide, written by a rabid fan who just so happens to be an ex-film reviewer (15 years with the St. Catharines Standard) with a Ph.D. in English Lit and a CV boasting books about Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Paul Morrissey.
Hip to the stateside hype preceding the show’s delayed Canadian debut, Yacowar found himself glued to the tube during CTV’s anti-Olympics Sopranos marathon. He was, he admits, "hooked immediately by the complexity, characters, language, polish." An offhand comment to a colleague ("Someone should write a book about it!") stuck with him, and Yacowar soon found himself angling for a complete set of third-generation bootlegs on eBay. (He’s since replaced ’em with the snazzy Season One and Two DVDs.) Thus began the marathon La-Z-Boy session – errr, intensive research process.
Yacowar took just five minutes to peg The Sopranos as the best thing currently on the box. His "greatest series ever" assessment, however, arose from "doing my close analysis and marveling at the connections, subtleties, new fruit of multiple viewings, etc." He says the show’s first three seasons amount to "a 39-hour drama richer, denser, more resonant than any TV series ever and most films," rivaled only by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 15-hour TV adaptation of Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. ("And maybe Dennis Potter’s Pennies From Heaven.")
The Sopranos On The Couch subjects the show to the kind of critical analysis "routinely accorded good literature, drama, and films." Yacowar’s structural criticism (with a social-cultural context chaser) doesn’t miss a trick, as he lovingly picks apart the show’s plot, language, music and visuals (the name of Tony’s illicit loveboat means "balls" in Italian!), and offers relevant bits of "meta" trivia about the cast (the guy who plays Paulie "Walnuts" Galtieri really is a thug!). Particularly fascinating is his detailed analysis of how the series posits the Godfather trilogy as its "esthetic and moral benchmark," a debt cleverly acknowledged by the characters’ explicit (and, often, hilariously faulty) quotation of Coppola’s films.
Yacowar’s book should handily convince non-believers of the show’s brilliance, and give fanatics even more to chew on during mandatory re-viewings. It’s a fun read unto itself, too, with the author’s trademark punning in full effect – this is the same man, after all, who dared type the words "There but for the grease of God go I" in his 1999 Biblical yukfest, The Bold Testament. But fun needn’t mean dumbed-down – Yacowar doesn’t shy from academia-friendly terms (e.g., the show "humanizes the Other" by portraying quotidian mob family home life), but he does so with refreshing lucidity.
"I have a gag-reflex against academic jargon and pseudoscientific pompousness that tends to obfuscate more than to reveal," he says by way of explaining his smart-but-zippy style. "I write for an informed lay reader, who is open to new ideas and can be excited to analyze something she/he is used to receiving passively."
Yacowar is currently teaching a film course on "The Sopranos in the Gangster Tradition," and is thoroughly engrossed in the new episodes (seen locally via the cable-rific miracle that is Movie Central). "I'm not disappointed at all," he says, citing a recent episode in which elaborate wordplay involving a plate of veal (Osso Bucco) and a character’s name (long-suffering chef Artie Bucco) is used to illuminate the uglier points of Tony Soprano’s predatory business practices. You just don’t get this kind of stuff on Boston Public.
"Season Four continues as rich and coherent as ever," Yacowar adds, "and there's incredible detail. Nothing else on TV excites me as much." |
