of Sopranos episode, one featuring a hugely important serial event. In the sixth-season “Kennedy and Heidi,” a major character dies, and Tony ends up on a guilt-ridden, drug-driven escapade in Las Vegas; the episode concludes with him in a peyote haze, staring at a Western sunrise and proclaiming, “I get it!” This grand scene of epiphany suggests a moment of reckoning; surely we’ll find out, a week later, what Tony “got.” Instead, in the next episode, it’s as if that epiphany never happened.
“Kennedy and Heidi” gives the lie to narrative nostrums of “arc” and “development,” screenwriting-manual simplifications of how people operate and how lives happen; surely, it is more “real”—to use the key term that David Chase used to justify the central plot of “College”—to suggest that we as people often end up exactly where we started, that we change very little, that epiphanies are fleeting and delusive and ignored. And which is more “artificial”: the episode that wanders off course, or the episode that obeys the authorial click-clack of plot sequencing? “A Hit Is a Hit” valorizes the disruption and the pause over the flow. Its model—the collection of singles—taps into our current moment of iTunes, and the crumbling of the album as a serial object. “A Hit Is a Hit,” as an anti-serial serial episode, in 1999 anticipated the digital atomization of culture consumption. Is a season a concept album? Or is a season a collection of singles? Can it be both at the same time?
FURTHER READING
Chase, David. The Sopranos: Selected Scripts from Three Seasons. New York: Warner Books, 2002.
Lavery, David, ed. Reading The Sopranos: Hit TV from HBO. London: Tauris, 2006.
O’Sullivan, Sean. “Broken on Purpose: Poetry, Serial Television, and the Season.” Storyworlds 2 (2010): 59–77.
Polan, Dana. The Sopranos. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Yacowar, Maurice. The Sopranos on the Couch: The Ultimate Guide. New York: Continuum, 2006.
NOTES
1 1. Boris Kachka, “A Visit from the Goon Squad Author Jennifer Egan on Reaping Awards and Dodging Literary Feuds,” New York, May 11, 2011, www.vulture.com.
2 2. The Sopranos, “David Chase Interview” (season 1 DVD; HBO Video, 2001).
3 3. Ibid.
4 4. James Poniewozik, “Top 10 Sopranos Episodes,” Time, www.time.com.
5 5. The Sopranos, “David Chase Interview.”
6 6. Peter Biskind, “An American Family,” Vanity Fair 560 (2007): 282–83.
7 7. David Chase, The Sopranos: Selected Scripts from Three Seasons (New York: Warner Books, 2002), x.
8 8. The Sopranos, “David Chase Interview.”
9 9. TV Guide Sopranos Companion (New York: TV Guide, 2002), 47.
10 10. Alan Sepinwall, “Mad Men: Talking ‘Out of Town’ with Matthew Weiner,” What’s Alan Watching? (blog), August 16, 2009, http://sepinwall.blogspot.com/2009/08/mad-men-talking-out-of-town-with.html.
11 11. Poniewozik, “Top 10 Sopranos Episodes.”
II
TV Representation
Social Identity and Cultural Politics
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