Re: SOPRANOS Season 6: New this week.. Episode 9: "The Ride"
Quote:
| I'm a lurker here in the Sopranos thread and you guys have completely lost me with all this classical story telling stuff and what not, but anyway... |
Just skip those posts.
They add nothing to the thread and you'll find the whole thing reads much faster that way.
What some people seem not to understand is that
The Sopranos is akin to a book or series of books that is being serialized in a magazine. Each week the writer creates, and we get, a new chapter. The writer cannot go back and edit the earlier chapters, he's stuck with those because he's publishing as he goes along, and we've already read them. So if he changes his mind about something, he either has to leave a thread dangling or cheat the continuity or he has to give up on the new idea in the name of consistency.
Unlike a novelist who writes a complete manuscript and then hands it in to a publisher, he can't go back and rewrite the earilier chapters to bring them in line with the later ones. He can't edit, he can't revise.
In addition, since this is TV, he's dependent on other people to get his story "told", and that puts a whole other set of constraints on him. Certain actors may have to get a given amount of screen time or number of episodes by contract. Other actors can be lost due to illness, contract disputes, even death. Then the producers must choose between losing the character and adjusting the story or recasting the role and ticking off some of the fans.
Finally, of course, the chapters aren't going to be self-contained, even some "volumes" (seasons) in the series may not be, just as some books end in cliff-hangers "to be continued in the next". The overall shape of the series may still be as "classical" (to use an
absolutely meaningless and still undefined term) as anyone could like. Presumably if you only read act I of
Hamlet or the first three chapters of
Don Quixote they don't seem very "classical", either.
And last of all, this is a where the writer may have an ultimate destination in mind, but where the "publisher" (and the actors and crew) have tremendous input into how many "chapters" there are. If I'm a novelist and I feel like I'm about at the halfway mark of my plot when I hit page 150 of the manuscript, I can plan on finishing around page 300. It isn't likely that the publisher is going to call me and say, "Sorry, we can only take 200 pages, better hurry it up" or "On second thought, we'd prefer 400 pages, can you stretch it out a bit? We'll pay you a whole bunch more money!"
And if I dig in my heels and say "stop" at page 300, I'm not throwing a bunch of people I've known liked for the better part of a decade out of work. That's what a producer does when he pulls the plug on a TV show. Think about it. That's like having a company you've worked for, maybe in the best and best-paying job you've ever had or are likely to have, suddenly close its doors not after a few bad quarters, but after its best sales year ever. That's why most shows end up hanging on a couple of years longer than they
should, and end up losing artistic steam and ratings until they are inglorious cancelled instead of going out on top.
Like Joe Straczynski with
Babylon 5, David Chase may have had the last scene of the last episode of
The Sopranos in his head since before he shot the pilot, and have been building toward that in various ways since then, but have to deal with all the zigs and zags and uncertainties in between. We'll know what things have been "left hanging" (or not, some things are just incidents and local color, never meant to be resolved, even in "classical stories") when it is over - not before.
Regards,
Joe
