Read on Twitter
Rewatching THE SOPRANOS for the first time in ages and a thing I really appreciate is characters frequently getting quotes and idioms wrong. Sometimes it's played for laughs but mostly it's just recognizing how people actually talk.
It's also, I think, a gesture to the show's overall stance of never being unduly impressed with anyone. Everyone is constantly lying to themselves in big and small ways, consciously or not.
Really highlights where so many successors went awry, clearly worshipping protagonists who were just conflicted enough for Sexy Angst and nothing more. None really want to dive into all the self-editing a compromised person does to make themselves tolerable.
We want to believe we're a lot more coherent - spiritually, intellectually, verbally - than we really are.
We just watched the one where Tony and the Gang go to Naples and Paulie spent the entire time trying and failing to bend his ancestral home into something that cared about him and he comes back and says.... it was the greatest experience of his life.
Again, played for laughs (if small ones), but it's still a guy cooking up a story of the world and his place in it, meeting stone cold indifferent reality, and subconsciously deciding the story was true anyway.
