You know where i always fail with the rewatch on Sopranos and The Wire? The last season. Not sure why. Maybe because it gets more and more recent to when i watched it.
I believe it. American Dad is elite. This competition was always gonna be a mess though and we’re all using our own criteria.
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I’m old enough to remember what irony was like before The Simpsons. It barely existed. We didn’t make fun of ourselves like that. There were no shows that had a restaurant called The Rusty Barnacle.
It was like the whole nation let out a big sigh of relief every time the show knocked down some nominally cherished institution that in actuality was kind of stupid. The Simpsons and Gen X are hardwired together.
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You may really like it. Or you may hate it. Depends on if you need any likable characters in the show.
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and that man’s name was Matt Groening.
(the show was never that important.)
I love rewatches of The Sopranos. There’s always something new I pick up that I didn’t notice.
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He loves Curb. I think he will be OK with no likeable characters.
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This guy gets it!
the last 2 minutes of the last episode of sopranos?
half the country cussed and whacked their tv
But didn’t love Seinfeld partly for that reason. So it’ll probably come down to the quality of the comedy.
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Not all credit goes to Groening. He surrounded himself with the greatest comedy writers of our generation. I mean, Conan fucking Obrien got his start there
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It’s crazy I remember my buddy in the 8th grade had to cover his shirt because it said “ I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” He had to put tape over the word “hell”. Of course we all Barbara Streisand’d it and said the covered word was “fuck.”
Oh and I’m assuming that was 1989 because we graduated HS in 1994. The day I graduated HS was the last time I associated with the guy that wore the shirt in the 8th grade.
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Lol I remember the story that Groening originally wanted to reveal Marge had rabbit ears underneath her hair. He got talked out of that quick.
Just 12 more hours to see if The Sopranos holds a slight lead. Simpsons is putting up a surprisingly neck and neck fight.
I don’t see an @LKJ vote for either of these
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Maybe he’s never seen them 
Probs waiting to be the tie breaker.
Yeah, I made the prudent choice early to not follow this whole thing after all. I knew it could only annoy me.
(I’m honestly not sure how I would vote between those two. I have more love for peak Simpsons, but how could I just let it get away with continuing to roll on for dozens of seasons after the point when it lost its magic? I would basically be looking the other way on the majority of the series, which itself literally made me look the other way.)
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a counterargument is that “crime film / mafia film” isn’t a trend, it’s one of the most established genres of film/tv for pretty much forever. Saying it’s overdone is fair but it’s a little like saying hey what’s the deal with all these westerns and sci fi and martial arts stories?
idk all the reasons why mafia films became one of the most established genres as opposed to say movies about fashion or movies about math, but mafia films aren’t going anywhere in part because they’re naturally wrapped up in lots of big ticket themes like the american dream, greed, assimilation, class struggles, corruption, charismatic characters that are both good and bad, conflict and power struggles, violence, misogyny, a visual language that everybody understands now, etc.
totally hear you about how ubiquitous they are and fair enough if you think the list of like ten that you wrote out is just decent but for me Godfather 1/2 and Goodfellas are 100% in the team photo for Greatest Film Ever, same deal with The Wire and Sopranos for tv
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hey took a swing at this and started rambling so hiding reply to not clog up thread:
thought Succession was both really smart and really fun. It was a bleak scary drama that was also the funniest show on tv. The characters were complicated and recognizable. I thought it was sharp about both why the world can suck eternally in general and why it sucks right now in particular. In fifty years when we’re looking back at why everything went to hell again I think succession will have aged great. It was thoughtful thematically but was also just super fun to watch, meaning it could be watched actively or passively and was great either way
For me a continental divide in threads like this is whether people think of tv as entertainment or as an art form, but there’s never really a right or wrong answer. Watching Succession gave me the pleasure of something difficult (so like thinking critically about it and trying to figure out why the show was making this or that choice), but it also had tons of simpler and for me equally pleasurable pleasures like hilarious sick burns and drugs and being able to feel superior to our billionaire superiors. Huh I think it didn’t have any nudity? So I guess it could have been better). Anyway my overall memory of watching Succession is just this neverending stream of big & small beats where I was thinking to myself god damn this thing is dynamite, everybody involved with this is so good at what they’re doing.
in a weird but related way I also thought Succession had great restraint, especially because the subject matter was so pulpy and ragebaity and also bc the writers were awesome and could do anything they wanted. So we’re not going to sit here and figure out TASTE but to me it had great taste, it almost never got lost in gratuitous sidequests up its own ass, it always had a reason for everything and for such a verbal show it kept the storytelling really visual. And man it was so visual, it looked incredible, the production design was every bit as impressive to me as a show like Severance, totally gorgeous
Also I never really cared that Succession didn’t really have a plot, from season to season the plot was the same shit different names (maybe part of the point), and same deal with the music: 99.5% of the constant music in the show was literally a theme & variations, it was all fundamentally the same song in almost every scene in the show, which is cool, but who cares unless the music is also awesome. So yeah what got me was just how smart and funny it was, and not just zingers but funny asides and shots that landed ten turtles down because of how well-developed the characters were. And then besides being hilarious and an elite quote machine it had all these other modes too, like I’d absolutely put Succession on Cringe Rushmore next to other cringe classics like Curb and The Office. And man we haven’t even mentioned the acting, the acting was stunning, I thought Matthew Macfadyen fully deserved to win everything, but top to bottom almost everybody was A+ outstanding
I don’t think it was the best show ever or anything like that. It was very intense! So much so that when compared to the inner circle TV pantheon for me it could feel a little narrower and less fun, like for example I could almost make this whole same post about The Sopranos, but for me Sopranos is even more loveable and meaningful in part because it was more well-rounded with way more fresh air. Succession isn’t as rewatchable as some other awesome shows, which does matter but it’s not what I care about the most.
at first Succession was always getting compared to Billions, and I absolutely can have fun watching Billions in a campy way, but I get confused and afraid when someone says Billions is a better show than Succession bc for me they are completely different weight classes. Billions is just kind of dopey good fun while Succession had a real point of view and was just a crazy good achievement. Towards the end it became cliche to call Succession shakespearean, but speaking as a shakespeare dork I do think Succession actually kinda earned that. I’d for sure rather rewatch Game of Thrones than Succession, but I think that’s more my problem than Succession’s.
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