Movie snobs (those who look down their noses at TV for not being movies) trumpet commercial narrative cinema’s preference for a forward-moving, goal-directed story in which characters face problems, learn something about themselves and change (usually, but not always, for the better); they contrast this tendency with TV’s open-endedness, its cyclical repetitions, and its addiction to what might be called kinetic stasis — the dramatic equivalent of running in place. And it’s true: Kinetic stasis is TV storytelling’s DNA. On TV, characters do things and have things done to them; they go through dark nights of the soul, or get married or divorced, bury a child, go back to school and drop out, convert to Catholicism or buy a new boat; but in the end, they don’t really change all that much, because if they did, viewers that tuned in each week to be reassured by the sight of familiar characters and situations would get irritated and stop watching, the ratings would fall, the sponsors would pull out, and soon there would be no show. Every now and then comes a show like The Wire and Deadwood, where there’s a continual sense of collective forward motion, and key characters change so drastically that from one season to the next that they truly seem to have become different people. But these exceptions don’t disprove the rule.
Intriguingly, though, some of the most memorable TV shows — usually comedies like The Honeymooners and All in the Family and Everybody Loves Raymond — don’t bother depicting characters that grow and change because they aren’t interested in that process and perhaps, on some level, don’t believe that it happens as often as movies and plays and novels would have us believe. These series would rather show us the many ways in which human beings don’t change — the ways in which they stay consistent, true to form or type, from cradle to grave, despite occasional flurries of effort designed to convince themselves and their loved ones that this is it, they’re really changing, and from now on everything is going to be different.
The Sopranos is the ultimate example of this. It takes the kinetic stasis that’s an incidental quality of other shows and puts it right in the foreground. On some level, The Sopranos is often about characters becoming the thing that their subculture requires them to be, or the thing they were born to be. Anyone who goes against preconditioning, whatever its form, suffers. Eugene Pontecorvo wanted out, was told he couldn’t leave, and hung himself; Vito Spatafore came out of the closet, found the beginnings of a new life, then tried to return home a changed man and got beaten to death in a cheap motel room. Christopher keeps trying and failing to kick drugs, but his real drug is Da Family. He gave up his true love to appease it — a gangster to the core. A.J. can’t really force himself to break away from the family; he gestures toward creating a new life with Blanca and her kids, but under his parents’ roof. (The episode has a good laugh at the expense of A.J.’s identifying with Blanca’s culture when Tony comes home from jail and A.J. says, “in my neighborhood people don’t get out right away.”) Meadow has spent the entire series trying to be something other than a godfather’s daughter (rather comically — the show rarely takes her aspirations seriously) and now seems to have grown closer to her parents than ever before. (When the cops roust Tony in “Soprano Home Movies,” she complains to her mom, “That show of force — was that all about humiliating dad?” Yep — just like the feds hauling Johnny Sack away from his daughter’s wedding.) And Carmela and Tony’s marriage is an affectionate bond that rests on a bedrock of lies, trades and compromises; she’s a mob wife and he’s a mobster, and that’s that.
I can’t help but agree with David Chase’s cynical view. People don’t change.
The House Next Door: Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 13, “Soprano Home Movies”