I said a bit ago I was going to make a post about The Sopranos, so
here it is. For the uninformed The Sopranos (and The West Wing) kind of
sort of revolutionized drama and story-telling for television. The West
Wing by being deliberately intelligent and snappy on the ‘vast
wasteland’ of network television, and The Sopranos for being one of the
most subtly intelligent and thought-provoking shows on TV, wrapped in a
mafia drama.
I’ll eventually get the gumption to talk
about the finale, and the themes present in that show, but one of my
favorite little nuances in that show is the concept of “Tony B.”.
Essentially, a “Tony B.” is someone in your life that shares similar
traits to you, personality and outlook wise, but for whatever reason has
gone down a different path.
Shawn has his Marty
Bret has his Owen
Walter White has his Gale
Essentially Tony B. lacked Tony Soprano’s killer instinct, and was doomed for it. Same for Owen, Marty, and Gale.
Who’s
your “Tony B.” Someone in your life you judge yourself against, or see a
lot of yourself in, but find yourself either endlessly jealous, or
endlessly annoyed with?
Fuckin’
Erda. Erda was a kid I went to college with who shared so many similar
tastes and thoughts and outlooks that if wrote us both down on paper
we’d probably come off as the same person. Our differences were that
Erda was endlessly confident and incompetent, whereas I was endless
self-conscious and somewhat competent. As a result Erda would get a lot
of gigs I was interested in, until he made a first or second impression
that kind of soured a professor on the subject. He just did insanely
stupid things like white balance on a yellow wall, or type in a
quasi-condescending tone.
Honestly the difference
between us was the Louis C.K definition of the word ‘f***y”, one of
those people who just consistently have the urge to assert their
intellectual prowess, and their ‘enlightenment’ at the expense of social
aptitude “You’re NOT wrong, you’re just an asshole”. All things I personally worry I do, but try to avoid.
Still, it was *insane* to know someone that was
quite a lot like me in almost every sense of the word, at least how I
saw it from within my minds eye. We eventually got into a Facebook
quarrel about ‘online bullying’ and we haven’t talked for several years,
which is A-okay with me.
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Blog Otter Award: Parralax1978 and OfficerFarva for reminding me how great Entourage is. I honestly forgot.
1.
I’m going to add Kirk’s “Bullshit” from the Star Trek reboot as one of
my favorite swears of all time in a movie. Spock spends about 3-4
minutes attempting to explain, how, exactly, the world got ‘rebooted’ in
a logical and somewhat competent way, and Kirk, speaking for audiences,
blurts it out. I love it.
2. Speaking of Entourage, if you ever wanted to take a gander at my terrible fiction writing prowess, click here to read my Entourage Spec,
which takes place and was written before, season 6. It’s not great, and
the formatting may be wonky, but I completely forgot about it.
3. Speaking of Tony B, it looks like I’m going to be writing over PTBN along with Caliber….which speaking of Tony B…