11/25/08: "Watching Too Much Television" (2002)
This is one we’ve been waiting for somebody else to address. If nothing else, this episode of
The Sopranos is a lovely primer on the subprime mortgage crisis. It’s one of the few great scripts from a bad season, with lots of corruption and rationalization crammed into a busy hour. Just substitute Barney Frank and Chris Dodd for main mobsters Tony Soprano and Ralphie Cifaretto. The local politicians in the story probably have their own equivalent in your district.
Tony’s wife has a fairly straight cousin who’s a stockbroker named Brian. He’s an incidental character who occasionally socializes with Tony. “Watching Too Much Television" finds Brian in a diner with Tony and Ralphie. [Language alert here, by the way.] Brian’s talking about real estate. “Sometimes,” he mentions, “there’s money in shit.”
This gets Tony’s interest. He asks Brian to tell him more.
“Some guy I went to school with,” says Brian, “this black guy, we worked one summer for this not-for-profit housing group. ToId me about some scam his minister was invoIved with up in HarIem…You ever hear of HUD? HUD was set up to heIp minorities and Iow-income famiIies to be homeowners. If the feds guarantee the home mortgage, the banks figure, why not? They’II Ioan the money. You get a front man to buy houses in some crummy neighborhood. TaIking about some reaI shitboxes. Maybe they’re worth $100,000 apiece. Next, you tie up with some non-profit organization who goes to HUD, and says they intend to buy these houses from your stooge. They’re gonna convert them to homes for working-cIass bIacks, bIah-bIah-bIah. Thing is, though…”
The action cuts to Tony talking to assemblyman Ron Zellman. The politician has brought along his old pal (and community activist) Maurice Tiffen. They met in college back in 1967, when Zellman and Tiffen organized black voting drives in the wake of the Newark Riots. Tiffen now runs something called the Urban Housing League. The group is having a hard time. Tiffen blames the Republican administration and too many post-9/11 charities.
Tiffen agrees to be Tony’s frontman in a scam where the non-profit will buy up homes in downtown Newark. Tony’s got an evaluator who’ll inflate the value of the properties before Tiffen’s organization defaults on the loans. Tiffen will get 10% of the profit range.
What’s next is one of Tony’s typically twisted attempts to work a scam for personal benefit. He takes his son A.J. out to see the houses he’s buying—partly to impress the kid, and also to try and teach A.J. about things like his proud Italian heritage, investing, and working to save a community. In the process, Tony learns one of the properties is now a crackhouse. That interferes with Tony’s plan to clear out the homes for all the fixtures before Tiffen’s group walks away from the loans.
Tony goes to Zellman, who goes to Tiffen, who’ll use his position with a youth outreach program to recruit some black gang members to chase out the crackheads. Naturally, Zellman and Tiffen have to enjoy some liberal guilt about working with Tony Soprano. Tiffen mentions that he renounced violence back in the old days.
“Then EIdridge went into the codpiece business,” says Zellman—who later adds, “ When you think about it from a poIicing standpoint, it's one group of recidivists beating on another.”
The crackhouse gets shot up, the HUD deal goes through, Tony gives Brian an expensive wristwatch. “Me and Ralph got lucky on a new real estate investment,” Tony explains.
“You did it?” says a nervous Brian. Tony puts him at ease, assuring Brian that he’s got no connection to the deal.
“It’s not that,” says Brian. “The American taxpayers—“
“They pay for airport security,” says Tony. “Look how weII that's going.”
Zellman stops by the homes while the properties are being gutted. A little black kid walks up to him: “Is it going to be a nice house here now?”
Zellman looks all guilty—and there’s more of that (again) as he gets back together with Tiffen to split their profit. They’re each getting $60,000, and maybe there’s more in the future. As one notes, “A Iot of poor famiIies need affordabIe housing in Newark.” That’s what starts the guilt fest. They talk about the tragedy of their ’60s revolution being bought and sold. (“You heard the BeatIes for H&R BIock?”) Then they toast to the federal government.
Also, Zellman says, “Sometimes I feeI Iike I shouId be punished.” He will be at the end of the episode, but it’s just a beating from Tony over girl trouble. Tony wouldn’t seriously injure somebody who’s from the government and here to help him.
Make it your own: “Watching Too Much Television” is from
The Sopranos’ fourth season,
available individually or as part of
a new box set of the complete series. You don’t need the complete set. Maybe it’s way too late to be bitching about this, but some folks weren’t complaining about the final episode because of that big mysterious blackout at the end. We were complaining after creator David Chase had told us for years that it would be worth sitting through the useless padded seasons that HBO kept demanding, because all the cryptic foreshadowing from his original story arc would be addressed at the end of the series. They weren’t—and, no, we don’t mean the Russian from out in the Pines Barren. We knew we’d never see that Russian again.
