The New York Times, our accepted arbiter of good (upper-middlebrow American taste, hailed it as the "greatest drama ever created for television."Can an "era" be defined by a show a friend reminds me most people have never seen? Greenberg's reaction was the same as mine precisely:
The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan spared no superlative. "The Sopranos," she declared, "wasn't only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end Sunday night is an epochal event. With it goes an era, a time."
Conclusion:Goodness. I would never have known all that. I still don't.
And yet the estimable Miss Noonan's voice is not one easily dismissed. She was capable of producing some of the most eloquent of presidential phrases so long as she had Ronald Reagan to deliver them. And she remains a font of sociopolitical insights if the reader will trouble to entangle them from the occasional — OK, regular —portentousness with which she delivers them.
In the build-up to the farewell performance of " The Sopranos," Miss Noonan hit an elegiac note — and held it for 1,162 words. One expected her to declare at the end that the show now belongs, not to the DVD market, but to the ages. It was as if Shakespeare had just ended his run at the Globe, or Sophocles closed out his Theban trilogy.
ours is The Therapeutic Society. So maybe "The Sopranos" is indeed our masterpiece, our contemporary "Tempest," or at least "Great Gatsby" — the best we can do. If so, that says much more about us than about masterpieces.I enjoyed the Last Supper thesis, too, though. I find it refreshing not to be burdened with an opinion.
