The Sopranos: Season 3

I'm not even halfway through this series, and already I know that I want to watch the whole thing through all over again once I've finished. In and of itself, that statement doesn't say a lot, but considering my ambition to reduce the rest of my backlog, any time re-spent on previously logged items is a sacrifice indeed. And The Sopranos seems to be worth it. There's a lot of subtle stuff going on in every episode. Everything has some kind of meaning behind it, from musical selections to the way scenes are shot to the way certain lines are delivered. Three seasons in, I think I've finally realized what this show is really "about." It isn't about a mob overlord and his family anymore than Breaking Bad is about meth or Parks and Recreation is about, um, parks and recreation. Instead, it's a show full of characters that suffer from basic human flaws such as arrogance and distrust. The young and the old, the "made" and the unfortunate, they're all just living in the decadence of turn-of-the-century America (in a pre-9/11 world, still, at the end of this season). It's not quite Wire-esque, with that show's depiction of America as a series of corrupt and inescapable institutions. It's more of a cynical take on America at its apex, if that makes sense. I'm sure it's no coincidence that the DVD box art seen above is autumnal in its color scheme; the show - and this season especially - is so full of loss, death, and darkness, that I fully expect the rest of the ride to be an ever-increasingly cold and desolate winter. How many more of Tony's friends and family members will betray him? How many more of them will Tony have to deal with in the most morbid and permanent way possible? At any rate, this may have been my favorite season of The Sopranos yet, but it was much more episodic than the previous two. Each hour-long segment of the show was more or less an independent story that could stand alone amidst the very muted seasonal arc. In that regard, it wasn't unlike a typical season of Mad Men, although that makes perfect sense since Mad Men was created by Matthew Weiner, one of the higher-ups behind The Sopranos. There's an episode where the FBI bugs the Soprano household, and we mostly observe the day-to-day lives of its four occupants. There's an episode where two mobsters get lost in the snowy woods after chasing down a guy they were supposed to whack, and nearly freeze to death. There's a Christmastime episode focused primarily on Tony's Christmastime memories of an old friend who he recently had to kill. So many different individual stories going on, and yet they all felt connected, at least tonally speaking. At any rate, the show has impressed me all along now (at least, once I got over some of the dated parts, like DVD players and flat screen TVs being high-tech stuff, and the majority of Mrs. Soprano's wardrobe in the earlier seasons) and I'm looking forward to finishing it so that I can read up on it all over the Internet without fear of spoilers and, more importantly, so that I can watch it all over again.