Welcome to Michael and us. I'm Will Sloan. Here is always with Luke Savage. Hi everyone. Welcome back and folks. You're getting your goddamn sopranos episode. How about that?

We had to do it if only to get Will to watch some more of the sopranos. Although I suspect he'll still tell us he's at the end of season two and all he did was watch many saints of Newark.

That's exactly correct. I watched another entry in the sopranos franchise.

Which is not nothing. It's often said that in the neoliberal age, when history is over, we have to take these small symbolic victories. Even though we can't move forward into a future where Will watches seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the sopranos, getting him to watch the many saints of Newark isn't nothing.

I want to explain something to you and the listeners. I love Goodfellas. I think it's one of the best movies ever made. If Goodfellas were 100 hours long, I would have a problem.

I honestly don't know how you can watch two seasons of the sopranos and then stop watching. Like it's not something you put a period on or an ellipsis. You just got to keep going.

I am eventually going to get back to it. I am so tired of looking at these mic mansions, at these offices, at these strip clubs, at these hideous New Jersey highways.

I needed some beauty in my life. I got a log kung fu movies and 70s pornos and three stuages shorts on letterboxed just to give me something else to look at.

I am curious Will. We've had a lot of meta discussion on this show and in private as well. I should say off mic about your viewing of the sopranos.

It's all been about like, are you going to watch it? Have you watched it? That kind of stuff. I don't think we've actually really talked about the show.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on it now that we've, or rather I suppose, your first impressions since your two seasons in.

Well, I actually do really like what I've seen so far. It's a wonderful character study of Tony soprano brilliantly played by James Gandalfini. The whole cast is incredible.

It's a wonderful portrait of this petty bourgeois New Jersey mob world, a wonderfully textured and detailed portrait, a hysterically funny episode.

Having grown up immersed in like Martin Scorsese movies, what surprises me and challenges me and that I also respect about it is how cold the show is, at least so far.

Visually, it's very prosaic and it has this juxtaposition between extreme violence and, you know, very rye sardonic comedy.

And unlike, you know, the Martin Scorsese movies that are always sort of taking place in the heads of the characters and invite you to sort of share in the catharsis or the paranoia or the excitement of those characters.

You know, this one is so rigorously objective, which I think perhaps fuels that sensation of why I wanted to have a bit of a break from it because it's so rigorously unpretty.

It's so ugly this universe. These are some very bland observations that I'm sure everyone is made already and some not very deep observations from a soprano's novice.

I partly just asked as a way of ascertaining whether you'd actually, in fact, watch the first two seasons or whether I just kind of bullied you, me and the fans just bullied you into, you know, saying you had.

But yeah, you just said all the right things about it. So congratulations on being a soprano's novice.

Good. And just to give a little spoiler for this episode, everything I said is a reason why I was a little disappointed watching this film, the many saints of Newark, which shares certain of the qualities I mentioned, but not enough of them.

You know, going back to something you just said in the recent piece I did on the sopranos and many saints of Newark, something that I wrote and which occurred to me in thinking about them both was how much the general aura of pessimism and ugliness feels quite refreshing today.

...