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Posted in: HBO, TV | Tagged: gangster movies, HBO, Many Saints of Newark, opinion, sopranos
The Sopranos: How the HBO Series Put a Hit Out on the Gangster Genre
The release of The Sopranos prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark has renewed interest in the show, not that interest ever really waned. The series dominated the TV and pop culture landscape through the early 2000s. It was the definitive and predominant gangster series of the 21st Century and just about killed off the gangster genre thereafter. The Sopranos ran from 1999 to 2007, and pretty much said just about everything that can possibly be said in the gangster story. Its themes were common themes established by the genre in movies like The Godfather and Goodfellas, the two seminal gangster movies that were major influences on the show.
Themes of betrayal, power, moral decisions, doing good vs doing evil, the damage that a life of crime does to a family, the way parents pass trauma down to the next generation, how pettiness and grudges result in murder, the glamour and horror of committing violence, the politics of power, the erosion of the soul, the precarious thrill of a life of crime resulting in comeuppance or death are all the themes of the gangster genre, and the show plays through variations of them all dozens of times. It's no wonder that the finale ended in an abrupt black screen. By the time it reached its final episode, The Sopranos had reached the point of what literary professors call "narrative exhaustion". It didn't matter whether Tony Soprano was shot dead in that last instant or not. The story had run its course. If he survived, he and the cast would just be doing the same things, over and over again, until he eventually got whacked or was lucky enough to grow old and die of natural causes.
Since The Sopranos had done everything that could be said and done in the gangster genre and dominated pop culture for 8 years, it pretty much killed off the genre. That doesn't mean there won't be more gangster movies or shows made, just that unless they find something new to say, they're just treading the same waters again. The closest fresh approach was Broadwalk Empire, which filled a gap in the genre by telling the origin and history of the corporatization of American Gangsterism. Just about every movie or show since hasn't really said anything new. This is because The Sopranos has already said it all. There haven't been many major gangster movies from the studios ever since. Ridley Scott's American Gangster, Donnie Brasco, and Michael Mann's Public Enemies might come to mind, but the majority of gangster movies since have been smaller scale and pastiches from indie studios that failed to make much of an impact. Starz's ambitious Power series and its spinoffs might offer a fresh African-American perspective on the genre, but the themes are still the same.
As it is, The Many Saints of Newark is a perfectly adequate gangster movie that doesn't really do anything new or exciting. If you're not a Sopranos fan, it's just another period gangster movie that's not as good as Scorsese's Goodfellas. If you're a fan of the show, it's a form of fan fiction, a side story that fills in certain gaps in the characters' histories and continues Chase's broader themes of toxic families passing down traumas and dysfunctions to the next generation in unending cycles of abuse. But in the end, it doesn't really say or add anything new.
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