the second is one of the least beloved. That gulf in reception illustrates the attractions, perils, and effects of rupturing serial conventions.
Egan’s diagnosis would undoubtedly please David Chase, creator and showrunner of The Sopranos, since his aversion to the traditional television business drove the design and ethos of the show. Chase described his early creative differences with the channel:
There was a little bit of friction the first season between myself and HBO, because they were more interested in the serialized elements and I was not. “What’s going to happen from one episode to the next?” “Are they going to kill Tony or not?” “Who planned it?” Or: “What’s the result of what happened in episode 2?” I was more interested in discrete little movies.2
If Egan uses a metaphor of movement—the “lateral” rather than propulsive tendency of a narrative—Chase offers an arboreal image:
If you look at a Christmas tree, people don’t care about the trunk of a Christmas tree; they only care about the lights and the balls and the tinsel. But the trunk has to be there. So we always referred back to that; we had this continuing story, which people seemed to get involved in. I didn’t intend to do a soap opera.3
Chase’s notion of “people” here is helpfully contradictory. On the one hand, “people” got involved in the continuing story—namely the trunk of the tree; on the other hand, “people” care only about the surrounding baubles, those visual delights that make the trunk pleasingly invisible. This conflict between what “people” want—perhaps different kinds of people, or more likely the same people in different moods of narrative consumption—speaks directly to The Sopranos’ self-conscious shifts between satisfaction and dissatisfaction.
The most famous hour of the series, and Exhibit A of Chase’s stand-alone storytelling preferences, is “College,” the show’s fifth episode. Composed of just two storylines, rather than the typical model of three or four, “College” follows Tony and his daughter, Meadow, during her college tour in Maine and Tony’s wife, Carmela, during her dangerous flirtation with Father Phil Intintola back in New Jersey. The dramatic core of the episode is Tony’s discovery of a former mob informer, ensconced in rural New England thanks to the witness protection program; Tony tracks the “rat” down and garrotes him while Meadow is being interviewed at Colby College. Time’s James Poniewozik reflected a critical consensus in 2007 when he ranked “College” as the best episode in the series’ history, citing its riveting opposition “between the family and Family parts of Tony’s life.”4 “College” precisely fits Egan’s sense of The Sopranos’ commitment to “lateral” movement, since the psychiatric environment and particular Mafia conflicts of the show’s first four episodes are absent. Chase deemed it the show’s “most successful episode … a film noir in and of itself”; critically, “it has nothing to do with anything that happened beforehand, and it has nothing to do with anything that happened later … To me, that was the ultimate Sopranos episode.”5
In terms of the show’s central figure, “College” produces ripples neither in the area of plot—there is no event-consequence to Tony’s actions here—nor in the area of character—Tony does not “discover” something about himself at this point, and there appear to be no psychological aftershocks. But if we think of “character” not just as a fictional person’s mental or emotional conditions, but as a relationship between that fictional person and a viewing audience, in fact “College” had significant ramifications for what “happened later.” As Chase tells it, this storyline represented another major conflict with HBO in the inaugural season; channel executive Chris Albrecht worried that the gruesome, hands-on execution of the informant would harm Tony’s “relatability,” destroying the audience’s ability to connect with the series’ main character. Chase stuck to his guns, on the grounds of verisimilitude, saying that “if we’re really gonna believe this guy is a credible mobster, he’s gotta kill people. In real life, that’s what these people do.”6 That conflict between creator and channel illustrated how “character” can mean something very different in two different contexts, whether in the show’s internal world or diegesis, as championed by Chase, or in the world inhabited by the shows’ viewers, foregrounded by HBO.
Five weeks after “College,” another episode of The Sopranos would also enact the lateral move, Chase’s preference for the “discrete little movie”: “A Hit Is a Hit,” the show’s tenth hour. The chief preoccupation of “A Hit Is a Hit” is music, and specifically the music industry—as advertised by the title, which reflects the impossibility of understanding why some music succeeds commercially, and why some does not. The two chief storylines are bridged by the gangsta rapper Massive Genius—someone who truly has nothing to do with what happened beforehand, or with what happened later, since he appears nowhere else in The Sopranos. One of the two plots involves his attempts to get “reparations” from Tony’s friend Hesh Rabkin, a Jewish mob associate who exploitatively managed R&B bands in the 1950s; the other involves Christopher Moltisanti’s attempts to get his girlfriend, Adriana La Cerva, started as a music producer, with Massive operating as an advisor who is frankly more interested in Adriana herself. Massive essentially takes control of The Sopranos at this juncture, operating as the central agent of plot and serving as the focus of tension and desire. Structurally, the show borrows here from the anthology format, a televisual genre wherein each episode produces a self-contained story, with no relation to predecessor or successor episodes. Contemporary viewers of The Sopranos would have been uncertain about how much to invest in Massive’s character and storylines. Does he matter, in the grand scheme of things? The answer to that question depends on what we imagine The Sopranos to be.
Given the central role of music in the episode, it is worth noting that music in The Sopranos was a defining authorial concern for David Chase. He made clear that getting a significant music budget was critical to his original deal with HBO, and that “music and this particular cast of actors” were his favorite parts of the series.7 The show’s use of diverse, preexisting musical sources—from Bruce Springsteen to Radiohead to opera—meant that each song or selection required no direct reference to the preceding or succeeding one; each musical cue was “discrete,” just as Chase wanted for the episodes themselves. A familiar score in a series, with familiar melodies and practices, helps create continuity; we might think of the recurring musical intensification that typically led to commercial breaks on Lost, giving that show—which roamed across many genres and styles—an auditory serial thread for the audience, a welcome contact with the familiar. Chase’s aversion to this kind of continuity even applied to his original plan for the title sequence, where he wanted to feature a different song every week. He characterized the televisual convention of using a single initial theme every week as “bourgeois”; but HBO insisted on “something identifiable” at the start of each episode, and he relented.8 Music’s ability to signal familiarity or change, in other words, represents another version of the continuous and the discontinuous. The cluster of material that we call an album offers a musical parallel to the structural tension between the novel and a series of short stories. A “concept album,” like a novel, promotes connectivity, the promise that the order of the songs is crucial, that everything is linked—a start-to-end logic that mimics one version of serial drama. A collection of singles or separate pieces, like a series of short stories, fractures connectivity, minimizing the importance of sequence and allowing individual songs to be freely excerpted from the group. The first season of The Sopranos tested the boundaries between novel and short stories, between concept album and singles collection, and “A Hit Is a Hit” proved to be a particularly problematic case.
“A Hit Is a Hit” appears nowhere in any roll call of the show’s most cherished moments. The TV Guide Sopranos Companion summarized and lamented it thusly: “Gangsta rapper meets boy gangster in this rather contrived episode of culture clash that pulls us away from the compelling intrigues of recent episodes.”9
