The sopranos

Thursday

Drea de Matteo

Drea de Matteo’s Italian-American Christmas

Los Angeles, California The Italians take their holidays very seriously. We live in California, so winter isn’t really tangible; we pretend we’re freezing when it’s 60 degrees out. For food, the Italians always would prepare the Feast of the Seven Fishes. But since my grandma and dad are gone, we’ve shied away from a lot of the tradition; it’s a really heavy load to make that meal. We do some of it; I’ll do a pasta with a lobster sauce. Some Christmases we’ve made a Genovese sauce, with meat that’s cooked for about eight hours with like thirty onions and butter. We would cook for forty-five people on Christmas Eve and then thirty people on Christmas Day. On Christmas Day it was always lasagna.

drea de matteo italian-american christmas

Monday

Alexander Larman

The Penguin, Agatha All Along and the perils of spin-offs of spin-offs

Two of the highest-profile show launches of the past month are also two of the least original. If your taste runs to hard-bitten, Sopranos­-accented crime, then you might enjoy the new HBO series The Penguin, with Colin Farrell reprising his role from 2022’s The Batman as Oswald Cobb, the so-called “Penguin,” a Mafioso who is attempting to gain control of Gotham City’s crime underworld following the death of Carmine Falcone. And if you’re more interested in female-driven whimsy, then Marvel’s Agatha All Along, the latest genre-hopping comedy-drama-fantasy-horror on Disney+, will allow Kathryn Hahn ample opportunity to chew the scenery as the witch Agatha Harkness, who forms a new coven after the misadventures of WandaVision.

penguin spin-off

Tuesday

Cockburn

Bob Menendez, the Tony Soprano of the Senate?

Leaving the Democratic Party is becoming something of a trend in the Senate. Just days after Joe Manchin filed as an Independent, New Jersey senator Bob Menendez followed his lead last week. Cockburn, as well as Democratic sources, suspects the latter’s decision has less to do with ideological disillusionment and more to do with a shakedown worthy of Tony Soprano. Menendez, along with his wife Nadine Arslanian and three New Jersey businessmen, was indicted last September on bribery charges. The years-long scheme allegedly benefited the Egyptian government in addition to lining the senator’s pockets. Cockburn uses the idiom literally here — almost half a million dollars was found stuffed in jackets at Menendez’s home.

bob menendez

Tuesday

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

An Enemy of the People is hit-or-miss

As I entered the lobby of Circle in the Square Theatre, now showing Broadway’s hottest ticket, An Enemy of the People, staff were upselling booze. “Do you want to buy a shot?” offered one enthusiastic barman, waving a bottle of bracing Linie aquavit. He added, grinning: “It’s what the actors drink on stage.” Sam Gold’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s didactic and stuffy morality play aims to draw direct comparisons between past and present, including what alcohol we consume (more on that later). In late nineteenth-century Norway, a town finds itself prosperous by selling access to the local spa baths, which supposedly have curative properties. When Dr.

jeremy strong enemy people

Friday

Ben Domenech

The quiet end of the Golden Age of television

This week's finale of AMC's Better Call Saul represented a quiet end to the Golden Age of Television. It's a fitting end for Prestige TV — marked by lavish sets, sex, violence and episodes as expensive as feature films — to end with a small black-and-white ode to a spin-off. Bob Odenkirk's performance as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman, a pivotal bit character in Breaking Bad a decade ago, was marked by over-the-top colorful courtroom flair, but it ends with somber black-and-white drama and a quiet prison cell, serving almost as a muted on-screen act of penance for all that came before.

prestige tv golden age television better call saul

Monday

Ben Sixsmith

Steve Austin and the age of the antihero

Having been fired from World Championship Wrestling, Steve Austin entered the World Wrestling Federation with the godawful gimmick of 'the Ringmaster’. He looked no more memorable than a Big Mac. Austin knew that something had to change. He wanted to adopt an edgier, more cold-blooded character. The WWF’s creative team, displaying the genius that had inspired 'Mantaur’, a wrestler who dressed up as a Minotaur, and 'the Gobbledy Gooker’, proposed such names as 'Otto Von Ruthless’ and 'Chilly McFreeze’. According to wrestling legend, Austin was at home when his wife told him to drink his tea before it turned 'stone cold’. Stone Cold Steve Austin was born. He quickly flourished.

stone cold steve austin
nineties
Ben Sixsmith

I hate the Nineties

I’m a Nineties kid. You know what that means: Tamagotchis, Super Mario, Sega, primitive cell phones, slap bracelets, skateboarding, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, David Koresh, scooters, Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys, the Spice Girls, the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the Nato bombing of Sarajevo, Pokémon!, Blink-182, Bill Clinton, Friends and the friends of Bill Clinton. What a decade! Only Nineties kids will understand it. And as even Nineties kids grow up, Nineties nostalgia is now big business. Everyone from the Spice Girls to Smashing Pumpkins has launched comeback tours on a rising tide of misty-eyed affection. McDonald’s brought back Tamagotchis and Furbys and other veteran Happy Meal toys. Friends is set to make a highly profitable return.

Friday

Michael Tracey

Twenty years on from The Sopranos

This week marks 20 years in the can for The Sopranos, the TV series which almost instantly transformed into a ‘cultural phenomenon,’ although the term ‘cultural phenomenon’ is exactly the kind of cliche that most characters on the show probably would have hated. Indeed, it’s not a moniker particularly embraced by the show’s creator, David Chase, who always seemed to project a bit of depressive resignation about his role front-running the series. Asked at a panel event Wednesday night what his reaction was to the anniversary hooplah, Chase simply responded: ‘Well, confused.’ The Sopranos today has a somewhat confused legacy, because two decades later it’s firmly entered into the realm of nostalgic reminiscence.

sopranos pine barrens