Culture Shock:Now that it is coming to an end, it is easy to get sentimental about The Sopranos. But it is still the best TV programme ever made, writes Fintan O'Toole.
A few days after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, George W Bush told his stricken nation that "My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers." There was, for a while afterwards, a fad for T-shirts and badges emblazoned with the slogan "Evil-Doers Suck". The phrase, in all its eloquent idiocy, spoke for an American Manichean mindset, shaped over the centuries by both religious zeal and military righteousness. There are good people, most of them American. And there are evil-doers, from whom, if we are steadfast enough, the world can be saved.
And yet, all the time, flickering on the screens in tens of millions of livingrooms, was one of the great achievements of another American culture. The Sopranoswas insinuating into so many minds the subversive thought that the evil-doers and the good people might not, in fact, inhabit different moral universes. They might indeed be the nearest of neighbours.
It is easy, now that it is coming to an end, to get sentimental about The Sopranosand to overstate its artistry. It is, after all, supremely unoriginal. Its big ideas - the Mafia as a surrogate for a Shakespearian royal family and as a critique of raw capitalism and the American Dream - come from Francis Coppola's Godfather movies. Its style - demythologising Coppola's grand epic by making the mobsters ugly little thugs in ugly suburbs - comes from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas. When it has tried to be self-consciously arty, as in the interminable dream-sequence episode early in the first half of this series when Tony was in a coma, it has fallen flat.
But it has been, nevertheless, arguably the best thing ever done on television. And it is to television itself that we must look for the greatness of The Sopranos. Whatever Coppola, or Scorsese - or, come to that, Shakespeare - did, they did it in other media. Film and theatre have their splendour, but can't match television for one thing: intimacy. You go to a movie or a play. Television comes to you. It inhabits your private space.
And The Sopranosbrought to that space something that had never been so carefully, pointedly and relentlessly inserted into it before: ambiguity. It has messed with peoples' heads by creating deep uncertainties about what is funny and what is horrible, what is glamorous and what is unspeakably squalid, what is good and what is evil. To do this in the US, all through the post-9/11 era, when people were looking for moral and political certainties, is an astonishingly bold undertaking.
The insidiousness has been directed towards two great sites of American identity: violence and the family. It is often noted that The Sopranosmade us see vicious thugs as real, complex, often likeable human beings. But it also did the opposite: making us see likeable human beings as capable of vicious thuggery. The Sopranoshas restored the capacity of screen violence to be truly shocking, not just because it shows it so graphically, but because it shows it so intimately. The most sordid, horrifying murders were committed by the people who had seemed harmless: Pauli Walnuts murdering an old lady for a few dollars; Janice killing Richie Aprile; Silvio killing Adriana.
To put it another way, the series has explored both the banality of evil and the evil of banality. It shows us how people who focus on nothing much beyond immediate gratification, and who therefore lack imaginative sympathy, can do the most appalling things. The humour of the fragmented culture in which they live (remember Bobby Baccalieri's confusion of Nostradamus and Quasimodo and of the Hunchback of Notre Dame with the quarterback of Notre Dame?) is not far from its horror. Tony's struggles to learn about himself from his analyst, and about the world from the History Channel documentaries that are playing in his house merely underline his lack of curiosity about other people.
The other subversive twist is the dizzying take on "family values". Nobody values family quite like the Sopranos. The family exerts its own gravitational pull: Christopher becomes, in effect, Tony's son, relatives such as Carmela's father are part of the action, and associates become family members, as when Bobby marries Janice. The family rituals of weddings and funerals mark the passage of time, sumptuous family meals punctuate the action, and domestic space dominates it. Yet these intense loyalties are not fuelled by love. Adultery is standard practice and the relationships of parents to children are edgy and unhappy. The real bond is a self-interested collusion in maintaining and denying the ultimate source of domestic comfort: Tony's violence.
Hard through it will be to bear, the end of The Sopranosmay be timely. It worked through the Bush era of ersatz moral certainties as a counter-current, disturbing the flow of easy pieties. That flow has run dry in the sands of Iraq, and real violence has made the fictional version redundant. Ambiguity is the new certainty, and the successor to The Sopranos, The Wire, takes it for granted. But the fact that The Sopranosmay not be needed doesn't mean we won't miss it.
The final series of The Sopranos begins next Thursday on RTÉ2 at 10pm