I am going to agree with you. Finally went through S3 of Ozark and enjoyed it. I read the comments here, and was forewarned about the brother but his storyline didn’t bother me and at points was pretty useful to the tension of the story.
I am definitely in for s4. I have been in on Jason Bateman as a nefarious character since his appearance as a protagonist in Silver Spoons.
@RiskyFlush suggestion for movie streaming. Saw a blurb about Team America recently and I have not seen it in forever.
It’s currently on HBO I believe.
I still remember driving in my car listening to WBAP radio interview David Koresh while this was all going down. Plus my parents owned a store in Waco at the time that sold lots of canned goods to the Branch Davidians.
I fast forwarded through a lot of Sopranos scenes with Dr. Melfi. Show was still amazeballs.
Haven’t seen it either. GOAT actor, amazing director and I am less than lukewarm in seeing it just because of the premise. But I am sure I would enjoy it if I watched it.
I honestly did not even remember PTA directed it.
As previously noted, I am all in on skipping melfi, but skipping those other things would cause almost nothing to be lost.
It was such a good show yet it still had a tremendous amount of fat on it.
Risky is D2M with his goodfellas take.
The scenes with Doctor Melfi are really good and very important to the show overall.
Let me spell it out for those who don’t get it: Doctor Melfi is a stand in for the audience. One of the major themes of the show is that Tony is charming, but he’s a fundamentally evil person who probably has a pretty significant personality disorder that enables him to do the things he does.
At the beginning of the show Tony is charming and generally likable and the audience is sucked in by the really quite excellent antihero. As the show wears on though the showrunners slowly peel back layer after layer of glamor until we’re left with who Tony really is. Doctor Melfi goes through this whole process herself and finally fires him as a client when she realizes she’s being used to sharpen a sociopaths game. Her experience with Tony allows us to see a complete relationship between a relatively normal person and an organized crime figure with a personality disorder. It begins with the charm offensive and concludes the way it concludes. There’s even the moment where Melfi has a choice to get deeper into Tony’s world (her rape and the opportunity to have the perpetrator punished) and she passes on it.
It might not be the most enjoyable part of the show, but you can only ignore it if you aren’t trying to appreciate the message the show is trying to send.
The reason the Melfi scenes are so uncomfortable for some people is that they actually like Tony and it’s very obvious that Melfi is fooling herself. What does that say about us that we’re actively liking this dude who is pretty obviously a monster?
Interestingly my dad, who almost certainly had undiagnosed narcissistic personality disorder really liked the Sopranos for the first 2 seasons, and that switched to actively hating it in the 3rd season when they started to really turn the corner into realism.
Related: Not only do people still do cannonball runs, somebody has used the low traffic from Covid to set a new record.
It’s still worth watching if you haven’t seen it, yeah. I don’t think it’s the GOAT but it’s a good show, although outside of a handful of episodes I don’t often feel like rewatching it, and Chase’s contempt for his audience really starts to leak through in the last couple of seasons.
(Here’s a thought: The Sopranos is less of a drama than a satire.)
Ha. That is amazing.
Yeah if you are watching this in 2020 and don’t realize Tony is the bad guy after the first episode (or, I guess, “college”) I don’t know what to say. Melfi realizes 6 seasons later Tony is jerking her around, so why would we as viewers put up with that? IDK maybe as now I’m an old its easier for me to lose patience with that sort of thing.
I also did not realize it was a PTA flick or I would have made an effort to see it before now
Finished S1 and S2 of Narcos Mexico. Am a little torn bc I genuinely enjoyed it and would definitely recommend, especially to anyone who likes cops and robbers. My issue is that it begs a comparison to the original and against that, it’s just not as good.
I acknowledge that this may not be entirely fair. The performances were just as good, if not better and some of the action sequences were spectacular (the scene with Don Neto by the beach was completely bonkers) and miles better than anything in the original.
Think the issue was how this series seemed to be taking more liberties with the narrative than the original. The original made it feel like we were much closer to the true story with the way the actual footage was used. This series was less effective that way, and for me was the worse off for it.
Was still a really good watch and I’ll be there for S3 if it ever drops.
The scenes with Melfi are A+ if you have a background in psychology.
Basically Tony is using her the entire time to justify his actions.
The Melfi scenes are good. There’s something to rich assholes being coddled by expensive therapists, claiming they are trying to improve by going to therapy while not being meaningfully challenged.
The dream stuff sucks.
AJ sucks but their terrible parenting is good.
If it took you more than 10 minutes into the pilot to hate Tony you probably have a personality disorder.
More broadly, rich assholes who terrorize their families and employees are absolutely everywhere in this country and the show nails that dynamic. Meadow = Ivanka and AJ = Don Jr., 15 years early.
It’s not exactly that The Sopranos gets that much better with rewatches, but if you flashy-thing’d me MiB style, I’d lose so much appreaction of the details of it on a first watch. When it was new and coming out week to week, I mostly paid attention to who got killed, some anti social humor, and dreaded AJ scenes and tolerated Melfi scenes. This is like 5% of the show.
You melfi lovers are sick, sick I tell you.
Time to hit the trail for Metuchen