new addiction

It may be too early to tell (and too late to share), having just watched the third season of “The Sopranos,” but it seems this show really does deserve all the hype I’ve heard and read in the late 90’s until the mid 2000’s.

Setting aside the (sometimes) gratuitous scenes, ‘brilliant’ and ‘great’ could not simply contain my thoughts about the television series. It has become my latest crack.

Never had I been into such mobster dramas. Heck, gas up the stakes, I haven’t even seen “Goodfellas” or one film of “The Godfather” trilogy yet. But what plays on the screen just backs up Norman Mailer’s assertion that it is the successor to the “Great American Novel.”

Television as literature. That’s one big, if not questionable, accomplishment.

The show touches parenting, the economy, the dynamics of moral values, the rise and fall of clans, the divide between races, the complexities of the human psyche, the references to literary texts like Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” the meaning or the absence of dreams, the ducks in the swimming pool. It is a hodgepodge of random things but nothing could be more human or real than an unorganized setup.

In a New York Times interview back in 2004, the show’s creator David Chase said, “I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don’t add up. I think there should be dreams and music and dead air, and stuff that goes nowhere. There should be, God forgive me, a little bit of poetry.”

Bless the heavens for people with such proclivities! I didn’t know they still exist, more so in the restrictive medium that is the television. A little bit of poetry. I guess this is the very ingredient that got me engrossed with series like “Carnivalé,” “Six Feet Under,” “Dexter,” and maybe even, on certain points, “True Blood” and “Sex and the City.”

Now don’t get me talking about the absence of Filipino series in that enumeration. That probably deserves another post. Or none at all.

Before I go rant about the black hole in Philippine entertainment, I might as well finish this Sopranos saga and look for the Godfather films next. I think it is high time for guns to be included in my list of favorite things (theoretically).