CRITICS OF THE SOPRANOS

by Hariette Surovell

No one is a bigger "Sopranos" fan than yours truly. I've been following Edie Falco's career since she starred in Nick Gomez's indie flick, "Laws of Gravity"; Lorraine Bracco's since the Hollywood mainstream thriller, "Someone to Watch Over Me" and watching the heart-breakingly terminally ill Nancy Marchand act is to witness greatness. I agree with all the television critics, and all the Awards dispensers--"The Sopranos" is the hippest, funniest, best-acted, best-written drama to emerge since "Wiseguy". What is incomprehensible to me, however, is that every television critique I've read says exactly the same thing, as if the writers were clones: "The Sopranos" touches us because it represents a typical dysfunctional American family. I beg to differ. "The Sopranos" represents a typical dysfunctional American MAFIA family... a Hollywood image of one. In most dysfunctional families, Dad does not fatally shoot an old business adversary while his daughter is checking out potential colleges. I would hope that in most dysfunctional families, fathers are not out murdering people, period. Yet even the usually harmless, benign Joyce Millman, the politcally-correct television critic at salon.com, thinks that murder is acceptable.

In her 1/14/2000 review, "We are Family", she writes, "The Sopranos are no more dysfunctional than any other upper middle-class surburban brood, and in one enviable way, they may even be less dysfunctional--at least this family sits down to eat dinner together every night."

Is she implying that a family is exempt from moral bankruptcy simply because they break bread together (bread which has been purchased through spilling the blood of people from other families)? Millman continues with, "Chase's best joke, though, is that even the guys in Tony's crew look to the movies, 'The Godfather' in particular, for a whiff of the lost machismo and GLAMOUR of La Cosa Nostra." La Cosa Nostra, on celluloid and in reality, has never been "glamorous". It is an organization of criminals who also murder people. I guess murder is considered politically-correct, then, as well as glamorous, at salon.com.

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