CHRISTOPHER: I’m workin’ my ass off on this movie script. You know how many pages I got? Nineteen.
PAULIE: Is that a lot or a little?
CHRISTOPHER: Books say a movie’s supposed to be about 120 pages.
PAULIE: [whistles softly].
CHRISTOPHER: With this f***in’ computer, I thought it would do a lot of it.
PAULIE[menacingly]: If you’re bein’ frank about the business, kid—
CHRISTOPHER: I would never do that. It’s only “Suggested by.”
PAULIE: That writer—with the bullfights? He blew his own f***in’ head off.
CHRISTOPHER: I bought a script-writin’ program and everything.
PAULIE: My advice? Put that thing down a while. We go get our joints copped and tomorrow the words will come blowin’ out your ass.
—The Sopranos, episode VIII
Television is the great postmodern medium. In “The Sopranos,” television has at last got a great postmodern drama worthy of it. Or at least those statements may be regarded as true except insofar as they are self-contradictions, “greatness” being what postmodernism consciously and inevitably seeks to undermine. Optimistic by nature, however, I have always held that not even the archness, the derivativeness, the fundamental unseriousness of postmodern art can prevent that art from having, like any other, its master practitioners. And like other craftsmen—these are something more than glass-blowers and something less than furniture designers—they are worthy of our (perhaps qualified) admiration.
At any rate, if there are any masters of the craft, there can be no doubt that the creative
