The Handsome Camel

I finally watched the first couple of seasons of The Sopranos. When it first came on, in 1999, I was getting steady film work for the first time and wasn't watching a lot of TV. More recently, I just haven't had cable. I think I caught one or two episodes during the whole run of the show -- one of them in a hotel room a couple of years ago. Partly, too, I'm sometimes resistant to seeing something that too many people have praised; to this day I haven't seen The English Patient. I admit this is an immature tendency.

But there's another reason I've always been hesitant to watch The Sopranos. I think I've always been secretly afraid that perhaps the critics are right -- that perhaps it is the best show on television. I wouldn't be surprised -- it's on cable, where most of the best shows are these days, and some very smart friends of mine love it. But I've been concerned because it appears to be a straight-ahead drama whose biggest twist is that it's about mobsters -- ER, but in the Mafia. This bothers me because I have great love for television as a medium, and if its flagship program, the best it has to offer, is a well-constructed but fairly conventional drama, then I'm frustrated and disappointed.

I like The Sopranos a lot. In fact, between this and Battlestar Galactica I'm inclined to think that critics and audiences are much better at finding excellent TV shows than they are at finding excellent movies. The shows generally considered "The Best" over the past fifteen years -- Northern Exposure, Seinfeld, The West Wing, The Sopranos -- are all excellent, solid, sometimes even bold work. They don't chafe at me nearly the way, for example, recent Oscar winners do. Forest Gump? Over Pulp Fiction? And how, by the way, is it possible that we've come to expect so little from our mainstream film culture that Gladiator, a B-movie in Manolo Blahniks, got mistaken for some kind of serious drama? Our best-known and most-praised TV series are far better, on average, than our best-known and most-praised Hollywood films.

So it's not that I don't think there's truly excellent television out there. Television is not the vast wasteland of the 1960s; not only are the best programs better than they were then, but there is so much more programming overall that the total amount of good-to-great TV available is now probably more than anyone can watch, even taking Tivo into account.

My concern is for the additional tier of truly daring, difficult work. Granted that such work, for the most part, never shows its face in Hollywood films anymore. But it has frequently been there in the past, still makes the occasional appearance, and has maintained a healthy if at times besieged presence in the independent and quasi-independent world, to say nothing of international cinema. And the cost of entry has fallen so low that any really determined filmmaker can create something of merit for mere thousands -- although, to be fair, if his vision involves spaceships or magic he may still need to wiggle into the Hollywood system.

But serial television is not something that can be made for ten bucks and a book of matches. For one thing, the common independent filmmaker approach of doing every film as a one-shot that could potentially be your last won't work in a medium that depends on continuity. For another, there is, as yet, no television equivalent to the seedy art theatre downtown that's always flirting with bankruptcy -- though YouTube and its presumable descendants may be about to change all that. For now, though, serial programming is distributed via television and cable television, which means dealing with the large companies, who understandably want dependable earners. It's easier for cable networks to take chances, because they aren't accountable minute-by-minute to advertisers. But at the end of the day, most of them still have responsibilities to shareholders. Even the most brilliant and innovative of shows -- an Arrested Development, Firefly, Family Guy, or Sports Night -- will end up in the trash, much to the regret of those at the network with taste, if it can't support itself and turn a profit.

And -- here is the fundamental difference between film and television -- that alters the work itself. If a film eats dirt at the box office, the filmmaker's reputation may be tainted and it may be hard for him to make another film, but in most cases the film itself is not damaged by the commercial failure (though it may disappear for a while -- the video afterlife is not guaranteed). It still exists as a completed work -- its arc of creation has not been cut short. But if a TV series starts to fail, it may be brought to a close before the artists have had a chance to finish what they started. Granting all the ways that interfering executives and financial constraints can limit an artist's choices, this additional burden, unique to television, goes a long way towards explaining why the medium tends toward new twists on conservative formats, rather than genuine experimentation.

This explains, to some extent, why mini-series may have more license to be daring. The two best examples I can think of, Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective and Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, are both from overseas, and in general I think European television, especially British television, has been quicker to catch on to the idea of a limited-run series being a lower risk, and therefore a better way to take chances, than an open-ended show. (Other British examples include the original Traffic and the general practice at BBC of producing short seasons of six to nine episodes: Coupling, Hustle, and so on.) On the other hand, the American cable networks seem to be picking up on the mini-series as a way to test new ideas: Battlestar came from a mini-series, and it set the tone of untrustworthy reality and heightened, paranoid emotion for the whole show.

A final reason difficult and brilliant work rarely gets on television is that there are few advocates for it. Lacking an independent distribution system like the art houses, it also lacks aggressive, knowledgeable promoters and independent distributors like Ben Barenholtz and John Pierson, who can flog and push a film they love for months or years, taking it to festivals, bringing it to the notice of theatre owners, keeping young filmmakers alive until the movie finally sticks. When a television series has a single creative mind or a united team behind it, the filmmakers themselves can sometimes become advocates for their own shows. But artists are notoriously not as convincing about their own work as an "objective" outside party, and they're also often too emotionally involved to make smart decisions. Look here for the depressing story of how Aaron Sorkin lost Sports Night, despite offers to keep the show alive.

For all these reasons, I've wondered for some time whether it is possible that there will ever emerge, for example, a Kubrick of series television. I could pick one of a large number of great and challenging filmmakers -- Bunuel, Welles, Godard, Oshima, Ruiz, Kiarostami, Burnett, Wong, Tsai and more -- but Kubrick strikes me as a more realistic possibility. Kubrick's narratives were always clean, precise, and unfractured, and his imagery, though deeply disturbing, was rarely incomprehensible. And even when it was incomprehensible -- the old man eating dinner at the end of 2001, the costume shop/brothel scenes in Eyes Wide Shut -- it was provocatively so; the images left people excited and wanting to talk at least as often as it bored and annoyed them. His films weren't always profitable -- Barry Lyndon cost 11 million and made 9.5 -- but the ones that were profitable were sometimes hugely profitable -- 2001 made five times its worth in its US grosses alone, and A Clockwork Orange drew an astonishing ten times its tiny budget. By contrast, Titanic, trumpeted as the highest-grossing film of all time, made back only three times its fatty budget.

So Kubrick, it seems to me, is as close as the pantheon of great art filmmakers has to a safe bet for television networks. Let's say Kubrick had decided, in 1970, after the runaway success of 2001, to go into series television. I'm sure there were offers. The question is, would he have had the opportunity to make anything as risky as Barry Lyndon or Eyes Wide Shut (okay, not sparkling commercial successes) or Full Metal Jacket (a rather good money-maker, especially when you take into account video sales)? Probably not -- television in the 1970s was pretty conservative.

But what about today? If the Sopranos really opened the door to ambitious serial television, does that mean today's young Kubrick has a better chance? I freely admit I don't know who that might be -- I'm hard-pressed to think of an American filmmaker working today who can work with such risky material and still attract large audiences. The "art" filmmakers who can draw a big crowd -- Tarantino, Fincher -- are exquisitely talented but content to play in the shallow end, while the ones doing more -- Terence Malick, Phil Morrison, Miranda July, Ryan Fleck -- are garnering notice in the film community but not touching the culture at large. Some -- Spike Lee, Terry Gilliam, Richard Linklater -- are remarkably inconsistent in both profitability and artistic endeavor (though Linklater has at least figured out the trick of swapping one for the other). Alfonso Cuarón and Keith Gordon have potential.

Of course there are already examples of this kind of experiment floating around out there -- David Lynch got to make not one but two network television series in the early Nineties, while Robert Altman had collaborated with Garry Trudeau on a series for HBO a few seasons earlier. I wouldn't put Lynch or Altman in my top tier of filmmakers, but Twin Peaks has a sterling reputation (I admit I've never seen it), while Tanner '88 is still one of the best things ever put on television. (Though, to be fair, it was not an open-ended series -- Election Day was a pretty firm end-of-series deadline.)

Now let's imagine again. Suppose that instead of even making The Killing or Paths of Glory (let alone that one in outer space), the young photographer from Look magazine had turned his awesome intelligence toward series TV. Couldn't have done all that creepy, violent stuff in the Fifties or Sixties? Okay, shoot him forward into the future forty or fifty years. Now, what does he do? Does he take the leap and drive forward, hoping against reason that he'll be able to get his bizarre, cold, inhospitable (if fascinating) vision across in a medium that craves a stable audience and can't tolerate the wild ups and downs of a finicky public? Or does he opt, again, for a medium which, though just as dependent on profit, is less likely to strangle a product in the midst of its creation?

To return to the Sopranos: as I said, I like it. It's a good show, and if it doesn't create the same compulsive need in me to found out WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN NEXT that Lost does, it's got its own pleasures -- chief among them, that it's a deflation of the Coppola/Scorsese/De Palma glamorization of mobsters that's been going on for the past thirty-five years. Two generations of men have given themselves secret mental erections fantasizing about being Tony Montana or Michael Corleone, depending on whether they run to the flamboyant ("Say hello to my little friend!") or the icily dismissive ("My offer is this: nothing.") Tony Soprano is complicated and interesting, but you never want to be him, and he's not, thank God, quotable. The name of the strip club in The Sopranos, the Bada Bing, is a reference to a line in The Godfather, but Tony himself complains irritably about all discussions of the film. This is a nice touch and won my respect.

The other good thing about the show is that it at times veers so far off into normalcy -- Meadow applying for college, Carmela's flirtations with the overly friendly parish priest, Christopher's unlikely dreams of going Hollywood -- that we begin to forget what venal, violent people these are. But the writers are very good at reminding us sharply of exactly who we're dealing with. In particular, the second season's extortion arc, in which Tony cheerfully ruins an old high school friend, is ugly and disturbing in a way I'm not sure we've ever seen in even the best gangster films, let alone a TV crime show.

But does The Sopranos rise to another, more transcendant level? Does it ever come close to being, as Orson Welles labeled the Chartres cathedral, "the premier work of man"? Is it "a celebration, to God's glory and to the dignity of man"? Is it that "which we choose when all our cities are dust; to stand intact, to mark where we have been, to testify to what we had it in us to accomplish"? Perhaps these seem grandiose things to demand of a television show -- which is exactly the point. There are films, including a couple of Welles's, that I would choose to stand when we are all forgotten. Probably most people who love film have their own. But what do television critics point to? The blurbs from the packaging of the second season underscore the problem: Variety raves, "Writing remains crisp, photography is sharp...." Sharp photography is the highest virtue in furniture catalogs, not great television, and "crisp" is a word that suggests excellence without brilliance. No one calls the dialogue in The Sweet Smell of Success "crisp."

The Sopranos does what it does very well, but it rarely takes risks with what it does. Compare, for example, the dream sequences that comprise much of the last episode of the second season with similar sequences in contemporary shows. Tony's dreams, brought on by comically ambiguous food poisoning, are obvious dreams -- I knew I was in a dream sequence from almost the first second. They conform to every bad film stereotype of dreams: off-kilter photography, normal places turned spooky, stilted dialogue, visits from the dead. All they lack is a dwarf.

The second season finale of House, M.D., by contrast, is not only more subtle about its dreams -- it eases us into them gradually, only admitting to them when logical inconsistencies start to creep in -- but actually keeps us uncertain right up to the end exactly what constitutes reality. House is shot by a vengeful ex-patient at the beginning of the show, and spends the rest of the running time alternately drifting through dreams and trying, from his bed, to help his staff figure out what's wrong with a patient. By the end, he's forced to consider that the man he's trying to help may also be a figure in his delirium; unable to live with the idea that he might be permanently mentally disabled and no longer able to accurately diagnose patients, he resolves to kill this patient in an effort to force reality's hand. The episode ends with House using a surgical robot to cut the man stem to sternum; it's a showstopper, and even the last shot, which symbolically resolves the mystery, doesn't keep the ending from feeling like a cliffhanger. An eerie, "what-just-happened?" awe lingers long after the screen goes black. And that's how you end a season.

Or take a lighter example. Season three of BBC's bubbly caper show Hustle, about a genial bunch of London con artists, featured an episode about about the gang trying to hustle an icy businessman with a secret passion for Bollywood musicals. At the climax of the show, the evil character has had a change of heart -- and we discover it through an elaborately and beautifully staged Bollywood musical number. What makes this fantasy/altered-reality sequence more interesting is that it's not just a gimmicky way of achieving something that could have been done through normal dramatic means. The heightened and simplified emotions of the dance sequence allow us to believe a character shift that might not come off otherwise; the very storytelling medium itself makes certain bold plot devices more believable. It's functionally similar to the ballet in the middle of Oklahoma! or the deliberate flatness of Rohmer's Perceval: it brings us into a heightened, more visceral, less defended state, and though it is patently aritficial it brings us into more direct contact with the characters' emotional states.

Of course, Hustle is a silly show, about nothing, and House's ambitions are deep but limited -- no one on the show but House and, occasionally, Wilson is allowed any real soul. Yet both those shows were more willing to take chances with their formula, play with their own established conventions, than the supposed "best show on television." The Sopranos has everything in the world -- three-dimensional characters, real moral weight, and an ambitiously large story -- yet its writers are afraid to take any chances with form, have a go at the goose laying the golden eggs. I found myself profoundly irritated by the half-hearted gesture of those dream sequences.

Here is my small list of television shows that have tried and failed and reached and grasped at something great. I'm not sure any of them approaches The Trial or Underground in sheer mind-blowing greatness, but they all strive to provide us with something new, untested, and thrilling. They also all use the ongoing, long-arc possibilities of television to try to break new ground in narrative filmmaking. I am being deliberately narrow here, only including open-ended fiction shows that revolve primarily around recurring characters -- hence no sketch shows, like The Upright Citizens' Brigade or The Ernie Kovacs Show, and no anthologies like The Twilight Zone, and no mini-series like those discussed above, and finally no shows from overseas (sorry, The Office). I have also leaned heavily, though not exclusively, toward shows whose characters and situations change over time, rather than homeostatic shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons. The one show I have included here whose characters do not change -- not coincidentally, another cartoon -- I have allowed because it is a show about the pain of living in a static world with no horizons.

Roseanne
Northern Exposure
Beavis and Butthead
The West Wing
Battlestar Galactica (the reimagining)
Sports Night
Firefly
Dead Like Me
Boston Legal
Sleeper Cell
Lost
Deadwood
Rescue Me

And here is a list of shows I love for their determined ambition, even if I'm not quite convinced they're among the very best:

Moonlighting
Miami Vice
Cheers
Chicago Hope
Freaks and Geeks
The Garry Shandling Show
Greg the Bunny
Dr. Who
Arrested Development
Lucky Louie
Seinfeld
Dream On!
The Mind of a Married Man
NewsRadio
and, yes -- The Sopranos.