{"id":7461,"date":"2004-04-19T11:02:54","date_gmt":"2004-04-19T11:02:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/sopranos_thread_1.html"},"modified":"2004-04-19T11:02:54","modified_gmt":"2004-04-19T11:02:54","slug":"sopranos_thread_1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/sopranos_thread_1.html","title":{"rendered":"Sopranos Thread"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m still trying to digest this one. On one level, I agree with one of the Slate observers who writes<\/a><\/p>\n

I think it might represent the purest distillation so far of the Sopranos ethos: to relentlessly invert the most sacred principle of TV writing, which is “Do Not Discomfit the Viewer.” Making the viewers squirm, as David Chase, Terry’s boss, recently suggested, keeps them from going out and buying stuff, which is the point of television.<\/p>\n

I mean, let me just run through it: Uncle Junior complimenting the “nice and spicy” chicken at the wake for a 7-year-old who drowned in a Jacuzzi; Tony’s father’s girlfriend mimicking\u2014in the Sopranos’ most David Lynchian moment yet\u2014Marilyn Monroe’s infamous “Happy Birthday” present to President Kennedy (thank you, Terry, for keeping Tony out of her bed, which would have been too much for me); a teenage Tony lying to his mother\u2014as she recovers from a miscarriage\u2014about his father’s infidelity; and, of course, Christopher’s beat-down of his AA buddy, the loser TV writer, for missing a payment on a gambling debt. Should I go on?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course, in the end, I think it was all about the myths we live by. Tony Soprano, even confronted with the extremely weird and discomfiting reality about his father’s life, and some possibility of his mother being humanized, even an iota, in the end, clings to the myth and even expands on it. He has to.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m still trying to digest this one. On one level, I agree with one of the Slate observers who writes I think it might represent the purest distillation so far of the Sopranos ethos: to relentlessly invert the most sacred principle of TV writing, which is “Do Not Discomfit the Viewer.” Making the viewers squirm,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSopranos Thread - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/sopranos_thread_1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Sopranos Thread - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I’m still trying to digest this one. On one level, I agree with one of the Slate observers who writes I think it might represent the purest distillation so far of the Sopranos ethos: to relentlessly invert the most sacred principle of TV writing, which is “Do Not Discomfit the Viewer.” Making the viewers squirm,…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/sopranos_thread_1.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2004-04-19T11:02:54+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Sopranos Thread - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/04\/sopranos_thread_1.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Sopranos Thread - Via Media","og_description":"I’m still trying to digest this one. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}