Also, The Sopranos doesn't just focus on them doing hits and mob business.
I know. I just wish for a show that has the sophistication and intelligence of the Sopranos that focuses on people who aren't gangsters. If it's about their human side, why does it have to be about killers?
That exactly sums up this whole thing that I have with The Dark Knight. I thought it was great and certainly the best superhero movie I've ever seen (well, along with Superman II,
obviously). But I couldn't help but notice how all the praise around it - including mine - centered around the fact that it was so NOT like a superhero movie, all the great pains that Nolan et al took to make it "realistic" and not like a "regular" comic book thing. I remember reading an interview with Nolan about developing the costume and makeup for the Joker where he said that, basically they worked backwards from the concept of someone who was just a regular non-supervillain criminal, and then added just barely enough "Jokerness" to it to make him The Joker - it seems like that was the general concept for the rest of the movie, too.
My question the whole time, though, is - why not just take the superheroes out of the equation entirely? If all that's making these movies good is how much we can downplay and minimize the "super" elements to these stories, why even bother with that part in the first place?
I've never seen the Sopranos so I can't say if this applies to it, but it sounds like that's your basic compaint with it, too. I dunno... it's just frustrating to see stuff sometimes get hamstrung by the chore of having to remain within arbitrary 'genre' boundaries. Sometimes I think it feels like we're getting back in the 30s and 40s mode of
Barton Fink-style filmmaking, when you'd have cigar-chomping studio heads reading scripts and going "It's great! Just shoehorn an orphan and a war hero into it and we're golden!" Only instead of orphans and war heroes it's hitmen, serial killers, and sexy doctors.
But then again, maybe I'm just a dummy for expecting mass-market TV shows and movies produced by gigantic studios to
not be within super-popular genres, like complaining that the script for Armageddon focused too much on the asteroid.
