@E_Zed_Eh_Intern @Axel - Thanks fellas! You're too nice.
Per The Wire vs The Sopranos, I'm definitely in team The Sopranos but they are different enough and achieve such different things in their own right. I think The Wire rightly gets so much praise for being the first and possibly only show to actually tackle the intrinsically complicated nature of power, race, policing, and capitalism all through the lens of a believable scenario.
But I really think The Sopranos doesn't get enough credit for its extremely tight and simple storytelling. Watching an episode is like watching a 40-60 minute play with its own beginning, middle, and end. There aren't any gimmicks with this show. It doesn't pull a Breaking Bad where every episode ends with, "Are they gonna catch Walt next week?!" It just has strong characters and New Jersey as a back drop and that's it. Take in the fact that they use 4:3 aspect ratio and the storytelling still feels intimate and cinematic. Just sit that camera on a tripod and watch the scenes play out. Another thing I love about The Sopranos is that it isn't always dangling some cliffhanger ending over your head about what's going to happen next. Every episode has it's conclusion and the next episode is rarely connected to the previous episode. There is a bit of connecting tissue like Big Pussy working with the FBI, or the FBI building a case on Tony, but those are more like things in the background as opposed to the inner workings of the plot.
Both series ask some hard questions, and again, I think The Sopranos gets overlooked for having some deeper themes. Things like men's mental health, family roles, interracial dating in a conservative family, depression, how religion affects relationships. As an Italian Canadian, I've personally seen religious hypocrisy in my own community, where people will look down on divorced families, but then live trapped in miserable marriages themselves. So the show is almost cathartic in tastefully showing these inner challenges without finger wagging. In the grand scheme of things those questions aren't as hard hitting as The Wire's exploration of policing and gangs within cities, but both series are super challenging without being on the nose about it.
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I only want to do my rewatch of the series because A) it's the best and feels like a warm blanket, and B) the prequel film The Saints of Newark is releasing in March 2021, so I may as well lead into that with a full head of steam. My expectations for the film are pretty nonexistent, but it's written by David Chase so it's probably solid.
