Admirable, though it does seem a bit comparable to the situation between Dr. Jennifer Melfi and Tony Soprano.  She tries to work with him on his issues, at times there seems to be progress, but by the end of the story is wondering all she’s done is make him a better gangster.  Better tools are not necessarily put to better use.  Food for thought.  (Italian is always best.)

🙂

There’s a lot of textual analysis going on there as well, in institutes of higher learning, though in my experience, most of it is headscratchingly wrong.  😉

Well, there’s no translation issue, except when they lapse into Italian.  But yeah, TV shows get analyzed to death in media studies departments.  There’s a ton of books.  One just crossed my desk.  It’s an in-depth analysis of Hannibal--the TV series that rewrites the origin of Hannibal Lector.  That lasted thirty-nine episodes.  That isn’t in syndication anywhere.  a cross between a crime drama and a cooking show.  Somewhere out there, that’s going to be required reading.  (Honestly, even the books aren’t all that much.)

As television goes, The Sopranos probably holds up better to analysis than most, has some very interesting points to make, and it’s great entertainment–but I still find it funny that academics spend so much time trying to flog new interpretations out of it.  Well, I guess that’s true of academe in all its incarnations.