circumstances under which Carmela and Father Phil spend a night under the same roof. But “contrivance” in that earlier context is forgiven because the payoff or pleasure trumps, for many viewers, the artifice of accident on which the plots of “College” rest. The schism of reaction between “College” and “A Hit Is a Hit” illustrates the risk/reward of abandoning televisual convention; Chase’s inclination toward a “discrete” rather an integrated hour of events, topics, or people defines what we might call the conflicted or restless television serial, a twenty-first-century phenomenon of which The Sopranos has been the most vivid exponent. The most prominent successor, in the conflicted/restless vein, may be Mad Men. That show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, was a staff writer for the final seasons of The Sopranos, and his series frequently disrupts expectations of serial momentum and narrative convention. “I don’t want there to be a formula,” Weiner has said. “I don’t want people to know what to expect ever when they turn the show on.”10
“A Hit Is a Hit” parallels “College” in terms of subject matter, and in terms of season placement. Both episodes obsessively examine art and culture, from an apt quotation from The Scarlet Letter that Tony sees on a wall at Bowdoin College during Meadow’s interview to debates over authorship and musical inspiration that occupy the later episode. “A Hit Is a Hit” intensifies the attention to art that we see in “College,” moving from a flurry of allusions to a focus on how art is made, and how art works. And structurally each episode functions as a break, interrupting a defined four-episode serial sequence. “College” follows the first quartet of shows, which depict the illness and death of acting boss Jackie Aprile and Tony’s clever orchestration of Uncle Junior’s rise to boss; “A Hit Is a Hit,” meanwhile, appears just when the conflict between Tony and Uncle Junior is on the verge of exploding. Those two placements within the season, however, are not exactly analogous. One crucial difference is that of accumulation. Four hours into cooking a serial season, when the flavors have yet to take hold, we may be tolerant of something new. But after nine hours we are much more likely to grow impatient; Chase’s commitment to the “discrete” film produces distinct problems at distinct points of a thirteen-episode story. A second difference is one of consequence, or aftermath. While “College” may have “nothing to do with” plot and character in terms of the major serial developments of the season, it has a great deal to do with character in terms of our relation to Tony; by contrast, “A Hit Is a Hit” will leave no wake of any kind. In many ways, it is the more radical of the two episodes, and the one that comes closer to performing the subversive job of rejecting serial conventions, within the guts of a singularly successful serial edifice, than anything else Chase and his team attempted. That struggle between freedom and form is explicitly addressed in “A Hit Is a Hit” when a record producer advocates for the clear, connective structure of a song like The Beatles’ “She Loves You” while the lead singer of Adriana’s band, Visiting Day, argues for something “introspective” and unschematic—another version of serial conformity contrasted with a rejection of recognizable pattern.
Even more than music, one might say that the main topic of “A Hit Is a Hit” is performance—the performance not just of songs, but of identity categories like race, class, and ethnicity. Massive Genius performs a designated street persona but has a degree in Urban Planning; Hesh declares that, as a Jew, he was “the white man’s nigger” long before hip-hop. In a third story, Tony feels that he is asked to put on a lower-class, goomba minstrel show in front of his rich neighbors, especially the Cusamanos, in order to gain access to their country club. The emphasis on performance, and on the instability of identity, connects to the episode’s focus on the destabilized meanings of capitalism, status, and art in the postmodern world—the arbitrary value of money after the disappearance of the gold standard, of status after the 1960s social revolutions, and of art after the collapse of aesthetic hierarchies. “A Hit Is a Hit” is the first Sopranos episode to begin in New York City, the American epicenter of capitalism, status, and art, and the precipitating incident of the plot is the unexpected seizure of a huge pile of cash. Even the “D” story, the smallest element of the episodic interweave, touches on money and value as Carmela gets involved in the gossipy suburban world of hot stock tips. Each of these plots points to the fluctuating, possibly arbitrary nature of worth, meaning, and desire. Christopher offers another version of the problem of distinguishing how we know what matters, what fixed values things have or lack, when he laments the imponderables of Adriana’s potential new business: “Music—it’s not something you can hold in your hands, you know. Like football betting cards, or coke.” Gambling chits and illegal drugs are the new gold standard; art, money, and status are an indecipherable mess.
“A Hit Is a Hit” essentially serves as a televisual essay on late twentieth-century culture more broadly, including treasured objects such as Murano glass, bidets, Versace clothing, and the Godfather films. The Sopranos, of course, would soon become such an object itself, a register of cultural acuity for those sharp enough to subscribe to HBO or purchase the DVDs; the episode, produced in the vacuum before the first season was aired, divined that a work of television might also turn into a valuable and tradable commodity, a nugget of knowledge that is worth something if we think it is worth something. “A Hit Is a Hit” ends with a clear gesture of viewer-teasing, as Tony—who is eventually frozen out of the Cusamanos’ social circle—asks his neighbors to do him “a solid” by hiding a wrapped box, without revealing its contents. We know that the box is filled with sand, but they regard it with terror: “What is it? Heroin?” “A weapon? Could be anything.” That box represents the uncertain condition of the entire episode, its immersion in the traumatic but inescapable state of American current affairs, where things mean what they mean only by context, or by shared guesswork. This is a world—both on- and off-screen—where the intrinsic seems opaque or antique, and we can know only by relation. Likewise, a serial episode of a television drama “means” what it means in relation to its seriality, to its relational context with preceding and succeeding episodes. An episode like “A Hit Is a Hit,” which rejects its serial place, may seem to its detractors to create a void of meaning; “A Hit Is a Hit” is unbeloved precisely because it troubles our understanding of what The Sopranos is, as a serial narrative enterprise.
FIGURE 8.1. Just as Tony Soprano toyed with his neighbors by asking them to hide a mysterious box (harmlessly filled with sand), episodes of The Sopranos occasionally presented viewers with characters and plotlines whose relationship to the serial narrative was opaque.
The episode shows us that The Sopranos is not a collection of characters, in the way that, say, Six Feet Under is a collection of characters; rather, The Sopranos is a way of thinking about serial narrative. That distillation of the show may be discomfiting. In a sense, “A Hit Is a Hit” is not so much the companion episode to “College” as its inversion. If that earlier episode appeared to institutionalize our relationship to Tony as the cornerstone of the show, the later one disrupts our sense that any single element, or even any stable cluster of elements, can define the show’s essence. One legacy of “College” and “A Hit Is a Hit” is “Pine Barrens,” a late third-season episode involving Christopher and Paulie’s pursuit of a Russian through snowy woods—a Russian who disappears and is never found. “Pine Barrens” was number two on James Poniewozik’s list of The Sopranos’ greatest hits—a fact for which he apologized, calling it the “most un-Sopranos-like of Sopranos episodes,” a “distinctly contained short story … in a series that unfolds like a novel.”11 As I have been claiming, The Sopranos does not unfold like a novel; it unfolds like A Visit from the Goon Squad, a text that hovers deliberately on the boundary between short story and novel. It is precisely the “un-Sopranos-like” episodes that most fully define the series’ narrative interests.
Within the genre of the lateral move, “Pine Barrens” may be closer to “College”; both episodes feature familiar characters in a rural setting trying to kill, in alternately comic and grim fashion, a problematic foe whom the audience has never encountered
