The BEST-REGULATED FAMILIES

Two great television drama serials have just ended their runs. The Sopranos, the New Jersey mob family saga, came to a formal conclusion after six seasons last week on Channel 4 (though it had already run on the satellite channel E4; see below). Shameless, the story of the Gallaghers and their successive neighbours on the fictional Chatsworth Estate in Manchester, finished its fifth run on Channel 4 this week and, while it gave every indication that all was wrapped up and that there was no more to say, a sixth series is evidently already in pre-production. I’m not sure if they shouldn’t call it a day while the going is still good.

In the British show’s finale, the remarkable parallels with The Sopranos were reinforced, quite possibly unconsciously. As Tony Soprano had done in a previous run, the flawed paterfamilias Frank Gallagher suffered a grievous accidental wound that left his survival in doubt. And he too experienced a strange vision of himself in different circumstances while comatose.

Frank and Tony are, along with Homer Simpson, the medium’s greatest modern depictions of family men. Flawed as they are, their characters compel attention and even – or do I mean “especially”? – empathy. All three (though only vocally in Homer’s case) owe a great deal to the acting as well as to the writing and original conception. All have developed in subtle, subterranean ways while staying essentially the same. That’s because they were conceived in a fully rounded state.

It’s the essential difference between, on the one hand, one-off drama and finite serials (what the Americans call mini-series) and, on the other, series (discrete stories about recurring characters) and continuing serials (soap operas and long-time open-ended dramas like the two under consideration). In the former form, a character needs to go on a journey of some kind and to be changed by it. In the latter, a character who is to stay the distance needs to be anchored in stable situations and characteristics. The Simpsons is an oddity here in that it appears to be built like a serial and yet the characters, being cartoons, don’t age and so it functions like a series (which means that in practice you can watch episodes in any order).

Shameless and The Sopranos (The Simpsons too, to a lesser extent) caught the imagination of a large public, I believe, because they both had as their macro-subject the most important and pervasive theme of the early years of this century: the need to take responsibility for what you do. This was never so true as in the last episode of Shameless. Monica, about to give birth, refuses to go to hospital because Frank has promised to accompany her and she believes it is his responsibility as the father to do so. Frank is in fact unable to be there because of the aforementioned accident, thrown from his barstool by an earth tremor, the publican and his wife washing their hands of his fate. Ian, Monica’s gay son by a man other than Frank, manages to be there for her and Frank, learning this and also influenced by his dream, finally embraces him as his own.

Meanwhile, Ian's half-brother Carl, rushing to the hospital, leaves his toddler niece with a girl he barely knows (but fancies) and then has to calculate how to handle the toddler’s mother’s murderous family when the girl absconds with the kid. All ends happily in the sort of expression of communality that, from time to time, Shameless has shamelessly but not over-sentimentally indulged, before a final outrageous joke. This run has contained some of its finest episodes along with some developments that teetered on the edge of being contrived and convenient. But I do feel, until the sixth (inevitably) proves me wrong, that five series have covered it.

How The Sopranos would end was the subject of endless speculation and then endless discussion. No show with such a reputation could possibly just peg out. Would it be a blood bath? Would there be a stunning twist? In fact, it ended at a family diner with daughter Meadow running late and Tony looking up, partly in expectation, partly in apprehension, every time something jangled on the soundtrack. In the last shot, we heard the street door thrown open and saw Tony look up, his face unreadable. We cut hard to black and bottomless silence and this was held long enough for one to begin to fear a break in transmission. Then the credits rolled in silence, though of course the linkman broke in with some irrelevant remark (actually, half the Shameless end-credits also passed in silence but mercifully without interruption; perhaps someone had spoken to Presentation).

Some viewers seem to have felt cheated out of a clear-cut resolution because the end of The Sopranos was, to them, ambiguous. In my view, it’s simple-minded to demand to know “what happened next”. The answer of course is “nothing: that was the end”. What it conveyed, at least to this viewer, was that Tony Soprano would spend the rest of his days looking up in expectation and apprehension every time an intrusive sound caught his attention. And that’s no life. As the credits rolled, I realized that I was rigid with tension. The exemplary editing of that last sequence had created a palpable sense of dread which, concentrated onto Tony’s face in the last shot, ought to have conveyed to all viewers what it conveyed to me.

The last season contained some magnificent episodes, none more than the agonizing scene in which Tony’s son AJ tried to take his own life and Tony, belatedly understanding what was going down, struggled to save him. The intertwining threads on the home stretch plotted Tony’s angry and reluctant withdrawal from analysis – where we started back in 1999 – against the long-awaited showdown with Phil Leotardo’s New York mob (caused by disagreements over asbestos waste: “waste management” was the job description Tony gave to his analyst at the outset) and the aforementioned crisis in AJ’s young life.

Season Six was shown in the States in two bunches with a gap of some months in between. Given how long British viewers had to wait for the beginning of the season, it seemed unnecessary to replicate the mid-season gap on either E4 or Channel 4. I would have watched on E4 where the first episode was screened twice but the second episode’s same-week repeat never materialized (it was listed in Radio Times) and, as I had not seen what would have been the first transmission, I decided to be extremely patient and await the C4 re-run, knowing that friends who were fellow fans would be months ahead of me.

This disruption of series runs is becoming epidemic in British television. ITV launched its new American-made mini-series Pushing Daisies last Saturday but today we learn that the second episode has been summarily dropped. ITV only has eight weeks of slots available before beginning its vitally important coverage of a football tournament that features no British teams. Pushing Daisies has the temerity to run to nine episodes, which ITV would of course have known when it made its Saturday night dispensations.

Naturally you would assume that if any episode had to be delayed it would be the last one. But you would be wrong to make the assumption that contemporary schedulers give a tuppenny damn about the audience. The second episode has been dropped from the schedules altogether. Given that the first episode did not perform as strongly as ITV would have required, the chances are not only that the second episode will never be shown (despite ITV’s vague undertaking to fit it in “in the autumn”) but that the show will anyway be moved out of its prime time slot in short order. In that case, it would have been possible for the nine-part run to be shown in sequence (after all, ITV has four channels to play with) but by then the hiatus will have already occurred. Broadcasters seem not to care whether they alienate their suppliers, never mind the pesky audience. I suspect that there will soon come a time when we will be looking back on the fact that British television showed the likes of The Sopranos and Shameless in any form as the last vestige of a last golden age of broadcasting.