Hi Culero,
Originally posted by culero
Gotta disagree. I like The Sopranos, and its never been about shock value. Its about re-living memories of the sinful ways of my youth, with the attendant warm/fuzzy way that makes me feel 
Actually even the cast, producers, and writers have written about consciously using images and events to "shock" the audience. For instance, there was a lot of discussion about how graphic the rape scene involving "Dr. Melfi" was and there was a perception especially amongst critics that they had "gone too far," so the response was to tone down the violence and add more plot line the next season. The response to the "kinder, gentler" season was uniformly negative -- "someone needs to get whacked!" said the viewers. Accordingly the menu was once again changed, to suit the viewer's jaded palate.
Now don't get me wrong, nobody is saying that the Sopranos is
just about shocking the audience with graphic images and language, obviously its well acted, the characters are interesting and well developed, and with a few rare exceptions the plotlines are well constructed. What people are noting however is that at one time, a show like the Sopranos would have been universally villified. Not only because it dwells on that which is low, base, carnal, and depraved about people, but because the show itself is uniformly amoral in its presentation of these elements. These are things that are not good or bad, they just
are. The show is one long presentation of
is and whenever
ought comes up, it is almost always subjective, baseless, and hypocritical. If there is any "ought" at all, the audience is lead to conclusions that cut across the grain of any coherent ethical system. Big Puss needs to get whacked because he betrayed his friends by helping the police and he could get our anti-hero, Tony, whom we like, in trouble. We make this decision without considering that we are actually saying Big Puss needs to be brutally murdered because he was helping law enforcement to shut down an illegal racket. It's akin to rooting for a mass murdering drug lord like Pablo Escobar instead of the police.
We buy this criminal anti-ethic because we are encouraged to pretend we are friends of the anti-hero, but we don't stop to consider what the universal application of such a system to society would look like or if we would actually fare very well under it.
I don't often quote Bill Buckley, mostly because I find his writing style to be absurdly pretentious, but he got it mostly right when he wrote the following about the Sopranos way back in 2001:
The experience (not new; I had seen most of Year One) was instructive for technical and artistic reasons (the program is justly acclaimed for polish, ingenuity, and superlative acting), but is most interesting in its confirmation of the psychological depravity of the viewing audience. They see it (we see it) because of its shock value as exhibitionistic entertainment, but the question arises: Does it tell us more about the awful human behavior, or about the disposition to transform depictions of it into rip-roaring entertainment?
...
The wonder isn't that The Sopranos is so marvelously conceived and executed, but that it is so widely viewed and enjoyed without any hint of concern over the depravity it relies upon. A search of newspaper notices given to it on the opening of its third season (my search was not exhaustive, but not tailored either) reveals not one question, let alone reproach, on the matter of the arrant exploitation of sex, exhibitionism, murder, sadism, cynicism, and hypocrisy. ... And we wonder about public indifference to crime and lechery and workaday infamy.
BTW -
click here for a look at what the Sopranos would look like without the offensive elements
