David Remnick's given me the resolve to go out and buy the whole damned series on DVD:
Like John Updike’s Rabbit series or Philip Roth’s novels of the past decade, “The Sopranos” teems with the mindless commerce and consumption of modern America. The drama and the comedy are rooted in the particulars of life as it is lived from the Pulaski Skyway to Bergen Avenue, and yet the larger events of the world are never completely sealed from view. There are always televisions playing in the background––the local news in offices and hospital rooms, the “Hitler channel” in Tony’s living room—and so world politics is the undercurrent rumbling beneath the ordinary nights in New Jersey. History echoes the domestic catastrophes. As Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri put it with dire resignation, “Quasimodo predicted all of this.”