In the antepenultimate episode of The Sopranos, “The Second Coming,” Anthony Jr., depressed, unemployed, and newly single, confines himself to his bedroom reading news about the Middle East. Looking for a way to cheer him up, his sister Meadow enters and tries to start conversation about a movie. “I was just watching Borat on cable. You can watch that thing 50 times, and it’s still hilarious.” In reply, a tortured, expressionless A.J. mumbles one of the best lines in the series: “It wasn’t fair to the people involved.”
Through A.J.’s depressive, black-pilled outlook, the final season of staked itself most clearly as a fable of contemporary American decline told through the fortunes of its unhappy Families. Like that series, (2006) sent up the malaise of the Bush era: the sense that, as the “War tracked Sacha Baron Cohen’s Kazakh-ish reporter on a journey of (self-)discovery to the Great Satan, seeking to sweep Pamela Anderson off her feet and into his “wife sack” and discovering that the real America, perhaps, was the friends he made along the way.
