Woke Up This Morning, Sat Down And Wrote This Blog

 There's a scene in Bojack Horseman in which major character Mr. Peanut-butter admits to his date that he has never seen The Wire, and doesn't think he's going to.

With that in mind, I too have a TV-related confession to make and appropriately enough, its related to another much celebrated HBO-title. What I'm about to tell you is something that I've kept to myself for a long time, but now, I've decided that the time has come for me to come clean and admit the truth:

I've never finished The Sopranos and at this point in life, I have no interest in doing so.

Because of its immense reputation, not to mention the fact that it was one of the first major hits for HBO (a network which are responsible for many shows I like, certain missteps aside), I've attempted more than once to watch The Sopranos all the way through, only to end up losing interest down the line. At this point, I've decided to stop trying. Over the years, I've come to realize that this show really isn't my kind of tortellini. 

Why is that? You may wonder. Well, it all comes down to the characters and the fact that I didn't give half a canelloni for most of them (OK, that's the last reference to Italian cuisine, I promise). Some of them are played by talented actors, but I didn't find the majority of them interesting as characters. Come the fourth season, the entire cast could have been moved down by machine-gun fire and my only reaction would have been to shrug. At that point, even Tony himself had grown stale to me, despite James Gandolfini's performance. 

One character I found genuinely intriguing was  Livia Soprano; Tony's  horrible, scheming mother (is it just a coincidence, I wonder that she shares name with Sîan Philips' character in I, Claudius aka the best female villain I've ever seen?). Livia is essentially a ruthless gangster, stuck in the body of a decrepit old woman. Nancy Marchand delivered the best performance in the entire show, by far (even more so than Gandolfini).The Scene in which Tony confronts Livia at the hospital was one of the rare moments in my eyes, when The Sopranos actually lived up to its reputation.

Sadly, Marchand passed away early in the show's run, leading to her character being written out (for obvious reasons), bar a cameo-appearance in a dream-sequence. Her absence from the rest of the show is felt.

I will also give praise to the opening theme-song. Easily, one of the best, most memorable theme-songs ever. 

The Sopranos is not the worst TV-show I've seen (its not even the worst one from HBO), but it is certainly among the most overrated. While I may have initially got caught up in the hype surrounding it, ultimately the show did not manage to keep my interest in the longer run, whether in its capacity as a family-drama or a show about organized crime. Admittedly, stories about the mafia doesn't excite me as much as they used to. Even so, I'll take movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas, or even Carlito's Way over The Sopranos any day.