The best TV show of all time

"The Sopranos" vs."The Wire": Two Salon critics duke it out over which series is the greatest ever.

Editor's note: Read more of our TV Week 2007 coverage.

By Rebecca Traister and Laura Miller

Read more: The Sopranos, Laura Miller, Arts & Entertainment, Arts & Entertainment TV Features, Rebecca Traister, TV Week, TV Week 2007

Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams)

Sept. 15, 2007 | An opera on the turnpike: Rebecca Traister argues for "The Sopranos"

You know how one perfect moment can make a movie? A crafty shot, a wonderful line or an inspired soundtrack choice can cement a great film's place in the pantheon or sear a mediocre flick into our collective gray matter. Sometimes these moments are universal, sometimes personal. For some, it's not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but La Marseillaise; it's not Alvy sneezing on the cocaine but Annie singing "Seems Like Old Times." Then there are the just plain indisputable moments, where music marries dialogue marries beauty and a baseball hits the light, Lauren Bacall asks if you know how to whistle, John Travolta does the twist or Gloria Swanson says, "We didn't need dialogue. We had faces."

Television has arguably had fewer of these moments: Mary Tyler Moore and her colleagues at Chuckles' funeral, Bob Newhart waking up next to Suzanne Pleshette, Carol Burnett in drapes.

But what about a TV show that had all this?

"What, no fuckin' ziti now?" "It's good to be in on something from the ground floor. But lately I feel like I'm coming in at the end." "What's different between you and me is you're going to hell when you die." "What ever happened to Gary Cooper?" A shot of a soaring New Jersey church as a portly father tells his whining teen daughter, "Your great-grandfather and his brother, they built this place ... They didn't design it, but they knew how to build it," moments after having gleefully busted the kneecaps of a gambler while Frankie Vallee trilled, "Don't know why I love you, don't know why I care." Or the pause that contained a million truths, as a shrink told her new patient that if he reveals that anyone is about to get hurt, she's supposed to alert authorities ... technically."

All those moments unspooled in the first hour of "The Sopranos." Of course, the following 85 episodes were imperfect; they contained meandering plotlines, interminable hiatuses and strings that would never be tied into bows.

But looking back at the beginning of "The Sopranos" now is startling. Because as untamed and untrimmed as the show often felt, watching the first hour, you realize that the themes into which it would delve, both deeply and at its own maddeningly erratic pace, were all in place. There are even things embedded in that first show that we think arrived later, but were actually there from the start, like Tony's malapropisms (he tells Carmela that she's making him feel like "Hannibal Lecture or something") and Drea de Matteo (who appears as a restaurant hostess who seats Dr. Melfi and her boyfriend). It's eerie, actually. But also a sign that David Chase both designed and knew how to build his masterpiece right at the outset.

Stratospheric plaudits now jangle cacophonously in the media echo chamber that has been lauding this show for 10 years. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby compared "The Sopranos" to "Berlin Alexanderplatz," the New Yorker's David Remnick called Tony's mother "the Medea of Bloomfield Avenue" and the show "the richest achievement in the history of television," and New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan saw in it "The 400 Blows."

But the fact that praise is often repeated does not make it untrue. "The Sopranos" was quite simply a fine piece of narrative, an opera on the turnpike that was simultaneously lush and spare in its depiction of American life. Tony and his buddies were many things that marked them as "other": Italian, murderers, fat. But in all their extraordinariness they were just ordinary Americans.

From the moment it hit the cable airwaves, "The Sopranos" was in the pantheon, but as it aged it deepened and grew, not only matching great filmed epics line for line and shot for shot but blooming into a work of literature. It examined the evolution of the American dream with as much precision, if less economy, than Fitzgerald, and took apart the experience of American masculinity with the sometimes heavy-handed symbolism of Melville. (In fact, several years ago, Soprano family members tipped their hand by mentioning "Billy Budd" and literary critic Leslie Fiedler, who was a great fan of the show before his death.)

As a uniquely American story, "The Sopranos" had all the big themes: class, ethnicity, sexuality, mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. It ruminated both on the thickness of blood and on the unsettling ways it can thin with time; it examined the intricate steel on which marriages are built, the high costs of loyalty and even steeper price of betrayal. And then there were the deaths -- both natural (Livia Soprano) and wrenchingly manufactured (Big Pussy, Adriana).

To call it the best show ever would be hubris, and a hubris that reeked of exactly the same kind of self-absorbed futility in which Tony and company wallowed. No. "The Sopranos" was a great, transformative show. And to transcend the gloomy here and now in which the boys ate their gabagool, I will optimistically predict that because of it, there will someday be even better shows. Perhaps they already exist.

But before it drifts out of our national consciousness, consider the other moments inked on our brains, the ones that both elucidated and made beautiful our quotidian anxieties and put them in modest perspective by casting them in the shadows of crime and cruelty. From Johnny Sac's devotion to his overweight wife to the scorn heaped on Corrado Soprano Jr. for going down on his girlfriend (not to mention the violence with which she pays for unwittingly unmanning him), from Meadow's college tour to Carmela's visit to Paris, from Phil Leotardo's skull popping under the wheel of an SUV to Adriana's pooch, Cosette, getting smushed under the weight of a drugged-out Christopher, there was always the heartbreaking etched in the mundane.

The poetry of "The Sopranos" was large and small, visual as well as verbal: Just take a look at the Hopper-esque tableau of the orange cat and orange Paulie Walnuts on the sidewalk in front of Satriale's in the final episode.

But no matter how many highfalutin comparisons there are to be made, there is no better evidence that "The Sopranos" remained to the end its own peculiar animal than the end itself. As soon as the pounding piano notes ushered Carmela through the door of onion-ring Mecca Holsten's, the final scene was electric, sparking with suspense and heart-swelling beauty. Here was the extraordinary ordinary tribe, living its extraordinary ordinary life, but about to do so out of our sight for the first time in nearly a decade.

The degree to which the show's final narrative interruptus frustrated and beguiled us was the final reminder of how much we were going to miss these people who had become our family, in so many senses of the word.

It's like Tony says, back in Episode 1, about his beloved ducks. "It was a trip having those wild creatures come into my pool and have their babies. I was sad to see 'em go."

Us too, T.

Next page: "The Wire," all about the game