Jim: the book

A 'Sopranos' biography, plus Tina Fey remakes 'The Four Seasons,' 'Andor,' 'The Last of Us,' and more

This week’s What’s Alan Watching? newsletter coming up just as soon as I calibrate my enthusiasm…

Buy his book! Buy his book!

Ordinarily, the book plugging around here goes to the stuff I’ve written — which are all still available to order wherever books are sold — but I’m kicking things off this week with a book where my only contribution is a blurb on the jacket: Gandolfini: Jim, Tony, and the Life of a Legend, by Jason Bailey, now on sale from Abrams books.

I will never pretend to have known Jim well, because he was too press-averse to do anything more than make small talk whenever our paths crossed on The Sopranos set. Still, I came away from Jason’s book feeling like I understood him far better than I did in all my years writing about the series. Because Jim hated talking about himself so much, and because there are some delicate issues to cover here — notably struggles with addiction — this was a really challenging subject for any biographer to cover. But the book handles it all with aplomb, and with genuine empathy whenever it’s dealing with some of the tougher moments in Jim’s too-short life.

Or, like it says in the blurb Matt Zoller Seitz and I wrote:

If you’re a Sopranos fan, you will really enjoy it.

Spring, summer, fall, winter

Among the many things Gen X’ers whine about being the last to experience something, I’ve always been fond of us being the last to grow up at a time before there were movies and TV shows geared towards us around the calendar and around the clock. When I was a kid, there wasn’t an animated or otherwise family-friendly movie in theaters every weekend. So my parents were constantly taking me to see films that were in no way geared towards me, but that were PG-rated (in the days before PG-13), and thus considered acceptable. One of those was Alan Alda’s movie directorial debut, The Four Seasons, about a trio of couples who go on four vacations together in the same year:

It was a big hit at the time — the fifth highest-grossing movie in 1981! — but has mostly been forgotten. Except, that is, by Tina Fey and friends, who have adapted it into a comedy series — starring Fey, Will Forte, Steve Carell, Coleman Domingo, and more — that dropped yesterday on Netflix, which I reviewed. It’s… fine? The most interesting thing about it is that Fey chose this relative obscurity to bring back as her next project. She’s a few years older than me, so perhaps it landed more with her at 11 than it did for me at 7?

I see Saw

I liked this week’s trio of Andor episodes substantially more than last week’s, particularly in the ways it illustrated the costs of being a spy or a rebel, even for the people who don’t get themselves killed doing it. (If anything, the major death was the biggest stumble of this arc.) At the time I’m writing this, though, this week’s Andor chat is pretty light on discussion. I’m curious if the three episodes per week scheduling is making it difficult for people to keep up. It’s not a true binge, but because these aren’t short episodes, it takes nearly as long to watch these three as it would be to watch all of The Four Seasons. Structurally and thematically, I understand why Disney+ is releasing them this way. But it’s a lot to ask of people.

Odds and/or ends

• It would be all but impossible for Dark Winds to top this year’s incredible sixth episode, but the close to Season Three felt underwhelming even allowing for that. It’s a combination of weaker source material (the Leaphorn plot comes from one of the lesser Tony Hillerman books I’ve read), the awkward splitting of the action between the reservation and the border, and the fact that Joe’s emotional struggle in the aftermath of killing Vines overshadowed any of the plot stuff. (And that includes Jenna Elfman showing up to investigate said killing.) That said, Zahn McClarnon always makes the show worth the price of admission, and I’ll never complain about Jim Chee fighting crime while wearing a space-age polyester suit.

• This week’s The Last of Us had the tough task of not only dealing with the aftermath of Joel’s death, but setting up the next phase of the story, with Ellie and Dina making it all the way to Seattle without incident. I thought it was a mixed bag, and am, as always curious for the reaction, especially in the aftermath of such a huge change in focus for the series.

Mystery solved!

Finally, we close things out with last week’s pop culture itch being scratched. Many thanks to the BlueSky follower who figured out which show I was thinking of where two characters debated whether Butch and Sundance died at the end of the movie. It was from Season One of Peacemaker:

That’s it for this week! What did everybody else think?