Going to hell

Ross Douthat on the new [and final] season of The Sopranos:

.... I recommend Matt Zoller Seitz's short and sweet explanation of what it's all about. An excerpt:

The Sopranos isn't just one of the most stylistically influential dramas in TV history. It's also the most cynical - a worst-case scenario look at human nature in which the inhabitants of an insular, paranoid, highly materialistic subculture are confronted with the choice between doing the right thing and the convenient thing, and nearly always go with option B. It's a butt-backwards cautionary tale that asks, "What should one do in order to be a moral person?" and then replies, "Not this."

I would actually go a little further than this (and I do, in a forthcoming piece), and argue that The Sopranos is implicitly - and sometimes explicitly - a show about damnation, and how ordinary, often-sympathetic people can willingly choose to go to hell.

Source: The American Scene: Bada-Back