The Sopranos
Roseanne and I have started watching The Sopranos. I caught a couple of episodes early on, but never really got into it. But all our friends watched it and the series just ended, so we figured this would be a good addition to our growing TV series collection.
I never quite understood this series before. I mean, I've seen pretty much every mob movie there is, from "Godfather" to "Prizzi's Honor". My feeling was, what can they really show me that I haven't seen before? But I think what makes this show a little different is that it's driven by such interesting characters. They're not cardboard mafia stereotypes.
One thing that's great is watching the show in 16x9 format on the big screen. It's not HD -- the show was shot in HD but most of the series is only available on DVD so far. But the PQ is excellent and the DVD does show off the widescreen HD format. It's used to great effect too, at least in the early episodes that we've been watching. The directors seem obsessed with wide-angle close-up shots of those oh-so-interesting Northeastern Italian-American faces -- Uncle Junior's eyeglasses never looked so big. But they also push a lot of dollys around, and did a lot of outdoors shooting (I never knew northern New Jersey was so scenic...), and all those shots really look terrific in widescreen.
The last season has been released in HD DVD, and we'll be checking that out from Netflix later, when we get to that point in the series. But I think a lot of people may grab this whole series on HD DVD, just because it was shot in HD and watching it on DVD really takes it down a notch, especially on a large projection screen.