I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  The question of Tony’s sociopathy was also there up front, but the people raising it were weasels and weaklings. “You know you can’t treat sociopaths! He’s scum, and you shouldn’t help him with his bed-wetting,” complains Melfi’s strutting yuppie ex over a family dinner. Later in the episode, he was clearer: “Call him a patient. Man’s a criminal, Jennifer. And after a while, finally, you’re going to get beyond psychotherapy, with its cheesy moral relativism, finally you’re going to get to good and evil. And he’s evil.”

  But then, Melfi’s ex-husband was the enemy. He was a smug insider, a condescending voyeur—one of a host of such characters, like Tony’s next-door neighbors (and Melfi’s friends) the Cusamanos, who exploited him for show-and-tell at their golf club. (Tony’s ex Charmaine Bucco was the sole exception: She judged him, but did it from the inside—making her the show’s only moral character. It was nice to see her briefly reappear in the penultimate episode, her eyes still narrowed eight years later.) It was no wonder Melfi had begun to identify with Tony. Among the yuppies and therapists who surrounded her, she felt like a misunderstood outlaw, the only one who dared to see the abused child within the monster.

  And it was no wonder that we, as an audience, identified with Melfi. She was—hard to remember, but it’s true—a perfectly decent therapist. She handled Tony’s transference gently; she gave him tools to cope with his mother and uncle (tools he used to consolidate power, but still). She even saved a life, that of Meadow’s child-molesting soccer coach. Instead of ordering the murder, Tony stumbles stoned into the family rec room, stunned with the effort of not killing, moaning to his wife, “Carmela, Carmela, I didn’t hurt nobody.”

  Back then, this scene struck me as the show’s iconic moment—it was a bravura sequence in which the decision not to commit violence was as vivid as any bloody hit. In a drama built on gore, it was thrilling. Though Tony continued to collect envelopes, order hits, screw goomars, it seemed like evidence that he could be a different man.

  And then something in Chase’s vision went black.

  Over the course of the show, Tony’s sessions with Melfi have taken on many metaphors. They are like sessions with a hooker: She takes his money and plays a seductive role. (In one sequence, he dreams her office is a bordello.) They are like sessions with a priest: She hears confessions and guides him toward meaning. They are like sessions with the FBI: By talking to her, he’s betraying his family, putting his livelihood at risk, and violating omertà.

  But most unsettlingly, they became a metaphor for our relationship, as viewers, with the show. Like Melfi, we began openhearted, proud of our empathy, and thrilled to have a character so rich to explore. Then came the countertransference, the audience crushes, the endless articles on James Gandolfini, sex symbol. And slowly, as years passed, one could feel an insistent chill, even as Melfi herself receded into the background and message boards flooded with fans aping mobspeak. The violence was growing more intense episode by episode: the assassination of Big Pussy, then Adriana, that brutal scene where Ralphie killed a pregnant stripper (a brilliantly sick sequence that caused a wave of viewer protest), the curbing of Coco. Dread, not excitement, began to feel like the show’s signature emotion.

  And Tony himself was changing, or rather, more alarmingly, he had stopped changing. In the first season, we saw Tony the struggling father, binging on whipped cream with A. J.; he beamed proudly as Meadow sang in her school chorus, squeezing Carmela’s shoulder. Even his darkest crimes—say, that witness-protection rat he strangled bare-handed in Maine—could be justified. The guy was an informer, after all; he was still on the con, manipulating junkies. It was revenge, and, hey, the rat was trying to kill Tony when Tony got him.

  But the show’s agenda was shifting. Among the earliest hints was the Season 2 finale, which concluded with a montage of Meadow’s graduation party. Pussy is dead, and the family is gathered, glowing with prosperity and peace; yet their revelry is intercut with shots of the mob’s victims from the past two seasons, from immigrants being sold fake phone cards to a junkie nodding off in the Hasidic owner’s hotel from back in Episode 3. It felt like a message from Chase to us: Don’t forget, these are the real victims.

  As for Tony, it had become harder to make excuses. When he was depressed, we could hear Livia speaking through him: “Poor you,” he’d snap. He stalked Carmela; he nearly seduced, then coldly ordered a hit on Adriana. He corrupted and abandoned his closest companions, from Bobby to Hesh, while soaking in self-pity and a kind of poisonous nostalgia. At times, David Chase’s frustration seemed to beat behind the scenes: You like strippers, think misogyny is funny? How about watching a goomar beaten to death? That fun, too? He even created a parody of what some Sopranos fans seemed to want the show to be: Cleaver, that Saw II of mob flicks.

  But the moment that really wrenched the show off its axis was a brief, almost throwaway scene in the third season, in an episode titled “Second Opinion.” I remember the first time I watched it, the way it seemed to invert everything that came before. Carmela goes to a psychiatrist we’ve never met before, a Dr. Krakower. She is eager to make the session a referendum on personal growth: She wants to “define my boundaries more clearly.” From her perspective, the issue is that she’s unhappily married. She’s toying with divorce.

  But Krakower cuts her off. With riveting bluntness, he addresses Carmela not as a seeker but as a sinner. She is not Tony’s wife, he informs her; she’s his accomplice. She needs to leave now, reject Tony’s “blood money,” and save her children (“or what’s left of them”). And he adds a remark that might serve as a punch line for the series: “One thing you can never say, that you haven’t been told.”

  Of course, it doesn’t work. How could it? Carmela does leave Tony, but she goes back, and when she does, she becomes something far worse than she was before: a woman who has consciously decided to become unconscious. To me, Krakower is Chase, and we are Carmela. He told us who Tony is, and each episode, he became crueler in delivering that message. This shift narrowed Chase’s artistic palette, cutting out the warmer shades of the early episodes. But it also lent the show an acid originality, a sadistic narrative engagement with the audience and our own corruption.

  Meanwhile, what began as a valentine to talk therapy transformed, by increments, into a condemnation. Each season, Tony knew himself better. He gained more sophisticated tools to cope with life. But he became a better mobster, not a better man. Every crime left him receding into his most charmless self: menacing, piggish, a wall of flesh topped by a smirk.

  And yet, he continued to make breakthroughs. The first, of course, was that famous revelation about the ducks. In an early session, Tony tells Melfi about a dream in which his penis falls off and a bird flies off with it. What kind of bird? Melfi pries. The exchange feels like psychobabble at its goofiest, and then suddenly, it works: Tony breaks down—a moment of shocking poignancy. “It was just a trip having those wild creatures come into my pool and have their little babies,” Tony says, his voice cracking. “I’m afraid I’m gonna lose my family, like I lost the ducks. That’s what I’m full of dread about. That’s always with me.”

  It’s a full-fledged, A-1 psychotherapeutic breakthrough, and in Gandolfini’s performance, intensely affecting. But with each season, such insights became more suspect. There was the shock of acknowledging that his mother was trying to kill him—another life saved by Melfi. (For Tony Soprano’s brand of depression, death threats have always been the equivalent of electroshock.) There were the insights he gained in love affairs—the melodrama with the suicidal car dealer, the bonding with the one-legged Pole. There was his coma dream of a life as a peaceful man and the New Age mellowness that followed, when he fixated on the Ojibwa koan on the hospital wall: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while a great wind carries me across the sky.”

  But by the time Tony was howling in the desert like Jim Morrison, high o
n peyote and screaming, “I get it! I get it!” we’d had our own revelation. Tony’s life was just a series of empty epiphanies. Sure, he was capable of guilt and anger and sentimentality—of deep emotion and loyalty. But no catharsis resulted in any true action. Instead, he was becoming his real self: the empty golem.

  And this was true for all the characters. Each was eager for greater self-esteem, more spiritual mojo, but in their hands, self-knowledge had zero correlation with ethical action. Carmela gazed at cathedrals in Paris, dizzy with spiritual longing, but her capacity for questioning had dwindled to a nub, a carapace of false piety and clichés. (“It’s better to have loved and lost!”) Tony’s sister Janice used yogic wisdom as a cosmic switchblade. And in the show’s most remarkable case, Christopher became a sincere AA member while continuing to shoot people in the head—his sobriety impinging barely at all on his livelihood, other than his losing the ability to bond with Paulie Walnuts over sambuca.

  Each drama of self-discovery met its shadow version late in the series. Tony’s epic depression was miniaturized in his son—who was at once more pathetic and more swiftly manipulative—then cured by a shiny car and a decent script. (In one bitter little sequence in the show’s finale, A. J.’s therapist is a leggy Melfi doppelgänger; meeting her, Tony goes off on a rant about Livia, now long dead. Carmela’s deadpan gaze is priceless: Her husband is stuck in a time warp, his once-affecting rants now toxic parodies.)

  Even Melfi’s first encounter with Tony’s soft side seems, in retrospect, a red flag, mere manipulative sentimentality about babies and animals—a hallmark (at least according to The Criminal Personality, the study that pushed Melfi into her ex-husband’s camp) of a sociopath who can’t be saved.

  A friend of mine watched the Sopranos finale having never seen any of the rest of the series. He was understandably thrown, not so much by the final blackout but by the characters. Who were these people who had fascinated so many devoted viewers? What he couldn’t see, of course, was that each had become a shrunken version of his or her former self: Tony grimly arranging hits, Carmela ogling real estate, a Meadow who had drifted so far from the savvy girl of Season 1 that she could tell her father, with apparent earnestness, that his oppression by the FBI had motivated her to enter law school.

  By the final episodes, we seemed to be heading toward the conventional ending for a mob story: a bloodbath. But perhaps it was appropriate that the most brutal rubout was Melfi’s hit on Tony. After enduring endless needling from her smug therapist, Elliot—like her ex-husband, a truth-telling bad guy, hard to listen to but essentially correct—Melfi confronts her own complicity. As she lies alone in bed, the words of that Yochelson and Samenow study flash up at her—and, more alarmingly, at us, centered and bold on our screens: “For the criminal, therapy is just another criminal operation.”

  Some viewers thought the scene that followed came out of the blue, but I bought it 100 percent: not just the breakup with Tony but Melfi’s incompetence at ending it, the rupture of her emotions through a once-professional wall. Melfi feels exposed as a dupe; her pathetic countertransference has endured for years (“Toodle-oo!” she told Tony flirtatiously in Season 2, running into him after terminating therapy the first time), and she is humiliated and furious, no brave renegade but the woman who built a more functional evil person. “But we’re making progress!” Tony protests. And he adds a resonant punch line: “As a doctor, I think that what you’re doing is immoral.”

  It’s understandable many viewers wish they could go back in time, back to the first season, which ended on a comparably heartwarming note, when the show seemed like it might be just a metaphor about the value of family. A thunderstorm was drenching New Jersey, the electricity was out; Tony and Carmela picked up the kids in their car, and they were wheeling around town, looking for a place to land. They wound up at Artie Bucco’s new restaurant, where Artie, after a moment of hesitation, invited them in. By candlelight, they shared some pasta made on the gas stove in the back.

  Tony was surrounded by members of both of his families. At one table, Silvio and Paulie hashed out the revelation that Tony was in therapy, preparing for the new regime now that Junior was in prison. Chris and Adriana canoodled at the bar. And Tony raised his glass: “I’d like to propose a toast, to my family. Someday soon, you’re gonna have families of your own. And if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments, like this. That were good. Cheers!”

  This was the scene that Chase repurposed for the finale. With the family gathered once again for a meal, A. J. harks back to what used to be, saying “You once told us to try to focus on the things that are good.” But this final scene has none of the earlier’s warmth, no sense of shelter. Instead, we see a family of bad guys—dim, dwindled, corrupted, contentedly sharing a plate of onion rings. And then the door slams shut.

  Looking back, we, too, can think about the good times: that first truly brilliant episode, “College”; the wrenching sight of Big Pussy sobbing in the bathroom of Tony’s mansion; Season 4’s marital dissolution in “Whitecaps”; the tragic tale of Adriana; the perverse tale of Vito; and in this season’s opener, that quiet scene of Tony’s brooding at Janice’s lake house, while all the while a great wind carries him. We can take pleasure in our favorite series and how much we’ve enjoyed it, how much we loved Tony; what a fabulous character, wasn’t he? And remember how cool that scene was, the one where Pop-Pop’s head got popped beneath an SUV?

  But we can never say that nobody ever told us.

  THE GREAT DIVIDE

  Norman Lear, Archie Bunker, and the Rise of the Bad Fan

  The New Yorker, April 7, 2014

  Although this essay is about Archie Bunker, Bad Fan Theory is something that evolved out of my recaps of Breaking Bad, when I was struggling to reconcile the show I thought I was watching—an artistically wrenching drama about the nature of evil—with the show a lot of my fellow online fans seemed to be watching—a fun thriller about a badass in a black hat. The show, I began to believe, was made to be read both ways.

  Over the years, I’ve heard the theory applied to many other shows, and also the 2016 presidential election.

  “The program you are about to see is All in the Family. It seeks to throw a humorous spotlight on our frailties, prejudices and concerns. By making them a source of laughter, we hope to show—in a mature fashion—just how absurd they are.”

  This nervous disclaimer, which was likely as powerful as a “Do not remove under penalty of law” tag on a mattress, ran over the opening credits of Norman Lear’s new CBS sitcom. It was 1971, deep into the Vietnam War and an era of political art and outrage, but television was dominated by escapist fare like Bewitched and Bonanza. All in the Family was designed to explode the medium’s taboos, using an incendiary device named Archie Bunker. A Republican loading-dock worker living in Queens, Bunker railed from his easy chair against “coons” and “hebes,” “spics” and “fags.” He yelled at his wife and he screamed at his son-in-law, and even when he was quiet he was fuming about “the good old days.” He was also, as played by the remarkable Carroll O’Connor, very funny, a spray of malapropisms and sly illogic.

  CBS arranged for extra operators to take complaints from offended viewers, but few came in—and by Season 2, All in the Family was TV’s biggest hit. It held the No. 1 spot for five years. At the show’s peak, 60 percent of the viewing public were watching the series, more than fifty million viewers nationwide, every Saturday night. Lear became the original pugnacious showrunner, long before that term existed. He produced spin-off after spin-off (“cookies from my cookie cutter,” he described them to Playboy in 1976), including Maude and The Jeffersons, which had their own mouthy curmudgeons. At the Emmys, Johnny Carson joked that Lear had optioned his own acceptance speech. A proud liberal, Lear had clear ideological aims: He wanted his shows to be funny, and he certainly wanted them to be hits, but he also wanted to purge prejudice by ex
posing it. By giving bigotry a human face, Lear believed, his show could help liberate American TV viewers. He hoped that audiences would embrace Archie but reject his beliefs.

  Yet, as Saul Austerlitz explains in his smart new book, Sitcom: A History in 24 Episodes from I Love Lucy to Community, Lear’s most successful character managed to defy his creator, with a Frankenstein-like audacity. “A funny thing happened on the way to TV immortality: Audiences liked Archie,” Austerlitz writes. “Not in an ironic way, not in a so-racist-he’s-funny way; Archie was TV royalty because fans saw him as one of their own.”

  This sort of audience divide, not between those who love a show and those who hate it but between those who love it in very different ways, has become a familiar schism in the past fifteen years during the rise of—oh, God, that phrase again—Golden Age television. This is particularly true of the much-lauded stream of cable “dark dramas,” whose protagonists shimmer between the repulsive and the magnetic. As anyone who has ever read the comments on a recap can tell you, there has always been a less ambivalent way of regarding an antihero: as a hero. Some of the most passionate fans of The Sopranos fast-forwarded through Carmela and Dr. Melfi to freeze-frame Tony strangling a snitch with wire. (David Chase satirized their bloodlust with a plot about Cleaver, a mob horror movie with all of the whackings, none of the Freud.) More recently, a subset of viewers cheered for Walter White on Breaking Bad, growling threats at anyone who nagged him to stop selling meth. In a blog post about that brilliant series, I labeled these viewers “bad fans,” and the responses I got made me feel as if I’d poured a bucket of oil onto a flame war from the parapets of my snobby critical castle. Truthfully, my haters had a point: Who wants to hear that they’re watching something wrong?