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Old 04-14-2014, 02:29 AM   #1
McSweeney
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Location: Saskatchewan, Canada
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Who ate all the gabagoul?! The Sopranos (and how it compares to Breaking Bad)

THE GOUL A.J., THE GABAGOUL!

I've never seen anybody talk about this show here, so I'm not sure how many people have seen it. Maybe because it was on HBO? We Canadians were lucky and got to see it on network television ... however, the one time I did decide to check the show out, I had the extraordinary bad luck of coming across the most boring episode of the entire series (the priest guy stays over night with Carmela during a rain storm). I concluded that the show was overrated crap and ignored it for over 10 years. I gave it a second chance though, and I've now watched the whole thing over the past couple months.

It tells the story of Tony Soprano, a feared mobster who seizes control of a mafia family with his aggressive, alpha male type personality ... however, these same traits that allowed him to rise up the ranks and earn the respect of other mobsters also threaten to alienate everyone he knows and lead to his downfall (like Xiang Yu!). It's an impressively unconventional and hard to predict show. At several points in the story, something will happen, and you'll think, "Aha, I know where THIS is going" but you'll be wrong! Honestly it's pretty hilarious at times, and even the heavy stuff often has a comedic bent to it (guy casually chops up and decapitates a body ... is horrified and grossed out when he finds out that he was wearing a toupee!)

As for how it measures up to Breaking Bad ... my personal preference is Breaking Bad, but if someone thinks The Sopranos is better, then I respect that and I completely understand why they would think that. Even though they're both crime serials, they have very different styles of storytelling. Breaking Bad is more exciting and plot twisty, but at the expense of having some incidents of sloppy/lazy writing. For example, the writers admitted that they had no idea what they were going to do with the machine gun, they said they'd figure it out later. It also becomes really cartoony and Death Note-like in the later seasons. The Sopranos on the other hand has rock solid and very tight writing. At no point did I think, "This is retarded. This would NOT happen in real life" but it's not as thrilling. Almost all Breaking Bad episodes ended on a cliffhanger that left you begging to see the next one. That's not to say that The Sopranos isn't addicting, because it still is.

If somebody asked me to recommend them a crime drama, I'd go with Breaking Bad because it's just a safer bet that it would grab their attention right from the start and hold it all the way to the end. With The Sopranos, there's a danger that they'd watch a bunch of episodes, then ask me, "Sooooooo, when is this supposed to get good?" Season 1 is indeed the weakest, but it's by no means bad, and it's not like there's a definitive point where the show "gets good." If you're not at least intrigued by the developments and amused by the black comedy right away, you may never like it.

For you anime fans, I once made a comparison between Madoka and Princess Tutu, saying that Tutu is less of an exhilarating experience, but better from a literary perspective, and I feel like that's an appropriate analogy to make here. Madoka is Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos is Princess Tutu. Breaking Bad is more spectacular and gripping, but it's also stupider. Does that make sense or no? lol

Not that The Sopranos is without flaws. I found the psychology sessions to be very boring, and I think the show would have worked just as well without them and the panic attacks aspect (although I DID like the payoff of how the psychology stuff all turned out in the end). I also wasn't a fan of the dream sequences. Some people claim that The Test Dream is their favourite episode of the series, but those people must be idiots/hipsters.

I'd love to discuss certain HAPPENINGS in the show, but first I need to see if anyone has even seen the damn thing!
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