David Foster Wallace, The Sopranos, and TV Art
There’s something wrong with TV. No, I’m not talking about the soul-crushing, imagination-stifling, attention span-shortening, escapist monoculture that uppity aesthetes make it out to be, but neither am I referring to the stress-relieving, boredom-dispelling, hilarity-inducing, conversation-sparking, binge-worthy, chillax zone so many simplify it into. To distill it into either harmless or stupefying terms is reductive and inaccurate. And while it is arguably all of the above, it’s important to ask what else it might be, beyond the common inferences of its capacity to entertain or debilitate. It’s been painted as either nefarious or innocuous, but its potential makes it something much more. TV has evolved in ways that are revolutionary not just for entertainment but for that lofty word - art.
It’s important to remember how the industry behind television complicates TV’s ability to remain satisfying and unified from beginning to end. Barring the recent paradigm shift of peak TV, the model has remained largely static and prosaic approaches still dominate the airwaves. The number of resources and third-parties that have to be mollified in TV production is incomparably greater than a novel or even an album, making it all the more difficult for a completed show to break away from a market defined by a gravitation to the lowest common denominator. The norm of dump-and-pump (or churn-and-syndicate) shows that crowd out good TV justifies why its detractors generalize TV as lamentably dreadful. But there are existing shows that fly in the face of bad TV. The golden age of television churns out achievements on par with the best art in modern times, and part of that is due to the accidents that came along the way. A show like Breaking Bad didn’t set the tone we remember it today by until the second season, and James Gandolfino thought The Sopranos would bomb from day one when he arrived on set. Television shows don’t know how they’re going to end because of a number of constraints such as shifts in popularity, changes in the cast, and the vicissitudes of producers that interrupt narratives for a laundry list of commercial reasons. For example, anyone who’s watched the entirety of the ABC show Lost knows what it looks like when a show is larded over with mystery after mystery and then pretends to dish out something with nominal resolution. Again, ABC (not a great track record) forced David Lynch’s Twin Peaks to reveal the show’s killer mid-season, with the remaining episodes lacking the driving mystique that preceded it. TV is often like reading a book with the novelist making up the scenes as he goes along, looking up at a boardroom to ask, “Should I keep going?” until a man with a clipboard signals he has twenty pages to wrap it up. These restrictions don’t sound like a recipe for a magnum opus, but clearly TV has proven itself as a commercial and aesthetic powerhouse. The proof, as they say, is in the pudding.
When TV works, when the stars align and a show takes off running and magically pulls everything together until that glorious finale, we the audience are treated with a feat unrivaled in all but the lengthiest of novels. Except in the case of television, we’re seeing the real world synchronized before a camera and cast into our living rooms, not just a hunched over figure with total mastery over their manuscript, but the intractable dynamics of people, resources, and places coordinated like some absurd ballet for years and years.
What’s really wrong with television is our attitude about it, where we either reduce it into brainless garbage for the plebs or a no-frills guilty pleasure to kick back to. The reality is that TV can do what the greatest works of art have ever done - endlessly entertain while challenging our sense of the world.
I like TV. You could say that TV always leaves me feeling less alone, that is, while I watch it. But when I turn it off, loneliness rushes in. Whether it be a droll sitcom, a world-building epic, or a high-brow drama series, television shows are so powerfully personal they remind me of early film when audience members reportedly jumped out of their seat to avoid the oncoming train that threatened to hurdle through the screen. In the case of television, the verisimilitude isn’t spatial, but emotional. Audiences cling to the high expectations of what friendship and love are supposed to look like because of our habituation to the interaction of actors and the witty repartee of the script. Our personal lives pale in comparison. The result is, at best, disappointment or emulation, and at worst, alienation and obsession. And the penetrating force of TV doesn’t stop there. The genuine connections we have with loved ones is also the unrecognized mimicry of TV. We unconsciously frame our experiences and relationships with that of the visual imagery we surround ourselves with, imagery that is not just looking at a person on the street, but an immersion into the narrative of other people. Often we fail to live up to those relationships, even failing at the televised depictions of failure TV depicts with supposed veracity. We’re really just people (sometimes consciously) acting out TV characters.
Or at least that’s what David Foster Wallace said. Yet what Wallace leaves out when he wrote about the topic thirty years ago is that such mimicry has always been part of the human condition. Oscar Wilde’s dictum, “Life imitates art far more than art imitates life” suggests that omnipresent television did not invent the televisual game of Simon Says that Americans are addicted to, but that human behavior enacts external behaviors, especially the ones that are most ubiquitous. This means that poems, novels, plays, and films have always been a cause for such imitation. Our behaviorism is not just biological and determined but conditioned and malleable. It would seem we are what we see.
The problem for Wallace is that television constantly depicts an unrealistic and glossy version of supposedly authentic living. The year I was born (1990) was the same year David Foster Wallace published his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” where he made these mordant critiques of America’s obsession with TV. And in 1990, he was right - TV constantly relied on laugh tracks, was limited to a formulaic 30 minute episode with plotted commercial breaks, had static leading roles, and filled in the background with a barrel of stock characters. TV’s simplification of reality can be deeply tied to how television subtly modifies our view of others and ourselves. One of the main reasons we watch television, Wallace claims, isn’t to relieve ourselves of boredom so much as to feel less alienated in a society that perpetuates it at every turn. We watch television to feel less alone, but when we binge for hours at a time it has the opposite effect. It is often palliative in the same way pornography scratches a carnal itch, how social media provides a calculated but fallacious depiction of our personalities, and how some video games manipulate players into addiction without any underlying sense of satisfaction. These solutions for social insecurities are fun distractions, but the fun often gets framed as a solution rather than the stopgap that it is.
Proper entertainment doesn’t exist in the vacuum of the moment, but the development of the interaction between product and user. It’s the difference between the slow drip of immediate satisfaction and the sustained dynamism of challenging intrigue. Like all good play (and work), a little bit of difficulty means you’ve connected with something outside of yourself rather than being tricked into a satisfying connection. Selling a false sense of achievement isn’t about making you feel better so much as it is a commodity of self-fulfillment - ultimately at the loss of the buyer. How fun can art or a game be if you were to simply press a button to win or understand?
But TV’s changed a lot in the last thirty years. Several of Wallace’s complaints seem outmoded in 2020 - a list of the most-watched programs in the year of Wallace’s essay alone shows how much has changed. In 1990, Cheers, Roseanne, America’s Funniest Home Videos, and The Cosby Show were just a few shows in the top 10 slot. TV in 1990 was composed of unrealistic characters that didn’t really suffer, who instead had cheery shenanigans that resolved in a return to normal, the golden rule of all sitcoms. The argument that TV is smarter now is true - Twin Peaks, Mad Men, even Game of Thrones have a far richer viewing experience than the default laugh tracks and absent character development before the last twenty years of peak TV. Though, there is a very legitimate counterargument to be had about whether “arty” shows are a proper indication of how viewers as a whole define TV. According to Nielsen ratings, the five most watched shows in one recent year were Sunday Night Football, The Big Bang Theory, NCIS, Thursday Night Football, and Young Sheldon. Sure, a lot of great TV is accessible and all television shouldn’t be equated with mind-numbing pap, but neither should “sophisticated” television watching-habits represent the state of TV today. It’s gotten better, but the vast majority of television is just as bad as it was before peak TV. We’d like to think that ground-breaking TV defines television but for every Better Call Saul there are ten The Masked Singers.
However, how fair is it to equate an entire medium to the dustbin simply because most of its fare is at best subpar? If I were to examine book sales at any time in recent memory, it reliably indicates that boatloads of mystery novels, romance paperbacks, and espionage thrillers top the bestseller list. New York Times Best Seller sales still pale in comparison to the pulp you see in a grocery store checkout line. TV on the other hand, has reversed the trend that’s happening to literature. By popularizing high-brow TV in place of a market dominated by easy-viewing, TV has taken the place of literature in many regards. Television might have been a numbing-agent in 1990, but nowadays, a lot of what you watch has the same beauty and power of a Nobel Prize winner or an Oscar-nominated film. If you want to tear down the value of TV because it’s generally crapola, you would have to use that same logic to tear down literature as well, throwing the baby out with the proverbial bath water.
Rather than saying that video games, movies, and, yes, TV are just hegemonic devices that fry our poor little cerebellums, they all have the ability to be art forms that reward complexity and not immediate gratification. I say this not to elevate aesthetic elitism, but delineate real enjoyment. Roland Barthes separated entertainment into two categories: plaisir and jouissance. Plaisir is a straightforward endorphin drip while jouissance is a delayed gratification that makes the eventual ecstasy even better. Consuming video games or a poem would be considered jouissance, while a sitcom or top 40 hit would be plaisir. Jouissance benefits the user by combining difficulty with pleasure, an amalgamation that complements the reality of our relationships with others, the world, and ourselves. Pretending as if the world is simple and accessible is a comforting lie that obviously attracts those unwilling or incapable of fathoming its most hideous or complex sides. The riposte to this last point is often, “Why should people have to work to enjoy something if life’s hard enough?” Jouissance doesn’t mean something is hard, rather that the gratification is not direct. Just like navigating a conversation or learning how to play an instrument, the payoff requires a bit of pain. Improving our lives often means accepting ambiguity, difficulty, and complexity rather than simplicity, ease, and comfort. Art and media should not function to simply relieve boredom and we should ask for more.
If an exhausted humanoid with a day job wants to zone out in front of the boobtube, then of course that’s understandable. But to normalize or celebrate the amusement park side of television as art makes it harder for legitimate art and entertainment to ask the hard questions that nudge us towards self-examination in the guise of a TV episode. If there’s such a thing as bad TV, it’s something that creates a culture more intent on protecting thoughtlessness, that reinforces structures of dominance, and treats sustained ignorance as virtuous. Escapism that gratifies a rejection of others is not noble, it’s irresponsible.
For all the canned laughter, cloying character arches, and paint-by-numbers sitcoms in the early 90s, TV has changed in a big way. When novel approaches to TV production were starting to blink open their eyes upon birth, the show that handedly marked the end of DFW’s critique of TV came with HBO’s paradigm-shifting show, The Sopranos. Maybe it was the lack of commercials, the honesty of its R-rated material, or maybe even the most believable acting cable had staged that made it so groundbreaking. Maybe so, but what the show really did differently was upstage its older visual brother, film, by catching up with the more revered medium for the first time. What do I mean when I say this?
Let’s look at the episode “College” from the middle of the show’s first season. For the unfamiliar, The Sopranos portrays the trials and tribulations of one Tony Soprano as he balances the banality of his family life with the politics and rivalries of other hot-headed mobsters in north Jersey. There’s also the authorities that Tony constantly contends, along with the possibility that his own crew might be wired by law enforcement or working with a rival family. The first four episodes of the show are fairly typical Sopranos episodes: several subplots, a lot of exposition, the building up of characters by order of importance. With so many characters and their respective arches, it makes sense that it took 83 episodes for the show to reach its finely-executed finale. But on the fifth episode, the show slows down and does the heavy-lifting of paralleling not four or five subplots per usual, but just two, Tony’s tour of Maine colleges with his daughter Meadow, and Tony’s wife Carmella spending a sexually tense evening with the community’s attentive priest in the privacy of the Soprano home. While enjoying the country air, Tony sees an ex-mafioso Fabian Petrulio who narked on the “family” years ago and is now enjoying a pastoral life in the witness-protection program. In a wonderful distillation of the show, Tony tries to identify and whack Fabian while also maintaining appearances for Meadow.
The unifying theme is fidelity. Fabian’s infidelity to the mob family and Carmella’s potential infidelity to Tony. Even though Tony has a secret goomah (mistress), he would never allow Carmella to have an extramarital affair. His double-standard is also offset by the revenge-plot that not only puts Meadow at risk of verifying that Tony is in the mob, but also puts her physically at risk of potential violence. Trust in the family in the traditionally familial sense and the criminal sense is absolutely essential, but the question is constantly which family comes first. When we root for Tony whacking Fabian or Carmella reversing roles by cheating on Tony, there’s an element of cognitive dissonance occurring, an antinomy par excellence. This isn’t anodyne comfort food. This is paradox and ambiguity, love and hate looking uncomfortably similar. In the end, Tony does exact revenge and strengthens fealty (even after seeing Fabian has a child just like Meadow) and Carmella does not cheat on Tony, maintaining that fidelity. As the show teaches us, established power structures almost always win.
Another example of rippling causality is in a later episode titled “Eloise,” which concludes a season-long infatuation between Carmella and Tony’s reliable tough, Furio. Though no explicit mention of their feelings for each other are articulated, their love for each other defies their dedication to Tony, the same man who evinces his selfishness towards arguably everyone in his life. After Tony and Furio get drunk away from home at a luxury casino, Furio, realizing an opportunity, almost tosses Tony into the tail rotor of a helicopter. The next day, Furio spontaneously leaves the country without a word and returns to his home in Italy, dashing Carmella’s dreams of being loved by an attentive and beautiful man. Afterwards, Tony’s son Anthony is reading Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and when the family talks about the book at dinner, Carmella aggressively dismisses the gay subtext of the novella, that is, the repressed desires the master-at-arms Claggart has for the popular and lovable Billy Budd of the story. Claggart is lead to attack Billy Budd and when Budd retaliates he accidently kills Claggart. Billy Budd is still loved by the crew and captain but the law requires he is to be executed, which he is to the crew’s sorrow.
Now you would think that the inclusion of Billy Budd functions as a parallel between Tony Soprano, as the spiteful Claggart, and the handsome Furio/Budd whom he opposes, but later during Meadow and Carmella’s lunch date, it is Carmella who spites Meadow’s newfound happiness and romantic endeavor. We come to realize that Carmella is actually the metaphorical Claggart, even though she is also a victim of Tony’s domineering. Though her victimhood is apparent, the resentment of her unsatisfying marriage causes her to begrudge Meadow’s flowering love. If the show teaches any tragic truth, whether it is organized crime or the American way, you survive by being the victim of someone’s game or you fight back and get destroyed. Carmella is Tony’s wife and there is love there, but the wake of losing Furio devastates her to the point that she’s unwilling to allow others happiness. The true question is whether or not she does this out of vengeful spite to her daughter, or whether she’s protecting Meadow from the disappointment that trusting in a relationship leads to the same disappointment her husband inevitably returns to. “This thing’s a pyramid since time immemorial,” Tony quips in one episode, “shit runs downhill, money goes up, it’s that simple.” Obviously it’s men like Tony who are taking the shits, complicating the pursuit of happiness his family and his community strive for, often justified by tired appeals for tradition, history, or moral ambiguity. Just as our lives do not exist merely in a moment, a day, or a year, actions in The Sopranos are not contained to an episode, which is what makes this new era of TV so much stronger than anything that came before.
In predictable ways, television has the capacity to be the most impactful story-telling device since either cinema or the novel. While TV like The Sopranos operates effectively within the context of an episode, what it does with greater effect is deeply connect us with the characters throughout the length of the show. The main reason: time.
The same reason TV shows often fail is the reason they triumph even over film. After having watched far more television shows from beginning to end in recent memory, I consider character far differently in a movie than in TV. In film, I have a harder time connecting with a character I just met when I know I’ll never see them again in two hours. Being invested in four, five, six seasons of Tony Soprano and Co. is far more compelling in terms of character, especially when we consider how much waking life is spent with these people. Not only are we emotionally invested, but we sacrifice dozens of hours of our lives to be with these people. It’s almost as if we give a little bit of our mortality for a bunch of actors and a story that could end without a satisfying resolution. In this way, television has the ability to run alongside our own lives, and it’s especially effective when the show exists in a domestic space similar to our own such as in The Sopranos, Mad Men, or Breaking Bad.
That same decade-long movement through time also means we’re reading an entire show like we do an epic novel. Motifs draw parallels in future episodes, actions reverberate across seasons, characters fall, rise, and die. In a show like The Sopranos, the butterfly effect of a homophobic remark causes a rift that, without ever directly telling the audience, will have ultimately disastrous consequences. The effect of a snide remark or a minor betrayal might be isolated to the arch of a season, but the show reveals its greater intentions by juxtaposing previous events and dialogue, never heavy handedly, sometimes a decade down the road. Other than being a narratological tool utilized masterfully, it mirrors the same mimesis we see in our personal lives - how one stupid gesture in a fit of rage, a passive-aggressive insult can bite us in the ass due to our callousness months or years later. Film does this, but never without the long and lived amounts of time in-between events that feel like our own lives. For example, in the climax of the movie Marriage Story, when we see all the pent-up anger and frustration spewing out as ugly as ever in one shouting match, we have to infer through two hours of select, albeit telling, moments between these two characters, what T.S. Eliot called the “objective correlative.” This is certainly its own art form and it is done with the utmost poise in Marriage Story, but it’s the intensity of the acting that makes it so believable. Without that power behind the emotions, the scene would never hit so hard. The Sopranos doesn’t need such gravitas because we know the truth - because we’ve seen these people for so long that we know whom they are, how they love, how they lie.
Film works best when it narrows in on a focused meaning, just as Hamlet focused on choice and revenge or Apocalypse Now on the absurdity of war or absurdity as war. Making these into television shows would force us to look less at the ideas and more on the characters, which would be fine if that was the intention of the work. But television works best when it explores people. They are narratives driven by characters not ideas. MFA programs now focus on character more than style or theme, the idea being that it’s in developing individuality where we get the most rich understanding of life’s complexities. Instead, I see it as one way to approach understanding of others, character just as essential as the ideas that govern character. Television shows that eschew the previous structures of cliffhangers and melodrama that plagued TV in the 20th century to instead adopt cinematic seriousness and tight-writing can have their cake and eat it too. The Sopranos started a revolution that has directly influenced essentially every great drama in the golden age of television. Art’s ability to replicate our experiences is done successfully when it deviates from established paths, this replication meant to bridge the real world and the malleable world of representation where reality can be modified. The verisimilitude of TV like The Sopranos is not one of the comforting sitcoms DFW speaks of, but a real, breathing world where the effects of toxic masculinity, rape, violence, crime, infidelity, suicide, and death are given ample room to be anticipated, to occur, to resonate and linger for years. This is not just “TV” but a relatively new way art can believably show us how humans deal with trauma and tragedy, depression and death.
None of this is limited to just The Sopranos but to all great television. TV’s reproduction of the effects of time on characters while having its audience undergo that same temporal movement is an astonishing feature to a medium once limited to the sitcom code where there was no arch or narrative - it was simply characters returning to normal each episode. The Sopranos didn’t invent the combination of the narratological arch and audience-character familiarity, but what it did do was raise very serious questions about identity, relationships, and morality that no show previously came close to doing. This was not just West Wing drama or Twin Peaks surrealism - this was life. TV mimesis is something that has permeated our lives even when we don’t realize we experience it and has set a new benchmark for what artistic representation can do, which is make art speak to us more powerfully than ever before. TV makes us forget reality, but if utilized properly, it brings us closer to it than any other art form can.
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Jordan Finn lives and works between Billings, MT and Brooklyn, NY having just competed his M.A. in English and is figuring out how to avoid a real job. He spends his time writing short fiction and essays, playing drums for a number of bands, and reading the works of Philip Roth. He also has a love-hate relationship with video games and television that he’s working out.