102: 46 Long, With Julia Prescott

About this episode

This week on Pod Yourself A Gun, our guest is Julia Prescott, television writer and co-host of Everything's Coming Up Simpsons, on MaxFun. We're all discussing Sopranos episode two, "46 Long." In episode two, we see some of the growing pains of the show. It's the first episode that's truly a TV episode, David Chase having originally envisioned The Sopranos as a movie, and we see the show finding its voice. This episode is a bit broad. They telegraph the jokes and ham it up more than they would in future episodes. Television was still a broad, hammy medium in 1999, and episode two has some writing that feels much more sitcommy than it The Sopranos would eventually come to -- creating the sort of "prestige TV" format that's now so ingrained. Despite its slight shtickiness, it's also an important episode in establishing that these mobsters are operating in a world where their conception of what it is to be a mafia guy (and just a man in general) has been influenced by depictions of mafia guys in pop culture. Mafia figures became movie characters, movie characters influenced later mafia figures (like John Gotty, referenced in the opening scene of this episode), and then Tony and his cr