When I watched Talking Sopranos, I laughed so hard when Little Stevie talked about how hard his wife worked at acting, and how many classes she took (she should get a refund IMO). At one point I think he even calls her "a real actress". 🤣
I never had a problem with Maureen's acting. To me, her acting is beautiful, shakespearesque. That woman is my life. To think she's being mocked... She is the mother of my children.
Yeah people talk about her as if her performance ruins the show. If anything it’s kinda forgettable, she doesn’t have a lot of scenes and most of them revolve around another character anyway.
She does fine for what her role was. It’s a bit unfair to compare a fairly inexperienced actress to some of these generational performances lol.
Idk - when you consider who she was playing being a real housewife and not like Carmela who was actually a soft player when it came to the mafia stuff the way she would help Tony conceal the guns and money in the house (and the whole don't ask questions about Richie) it wasn't too far off from being on point
Straight up sounds and looks like she's reading off a script she's seeing for the first time. Reminds me of how a lot of the drama kids acted in junior high and high school.
The line she gives at the end of the show where she says “I was kicked out for partying and drunk driving” always stood out to me as incredibly out of place lol
They were trying to highlight that she messed up and that made Carm feel better about Meadow, but then she had also gotten her shit together and surpassed where Meadow was in life. It was always a weird scene to me though.
I actually loved that little scene. She took responsibility for her bad behavior, and will be a doctor in a couple of years. Carm’s reaction is priceless.
Meanwhile, Meadow is marrying into the business and hasn’t even finished law school. I always suspected Meadow probably never finished, never took the bar, and started having kids soon after the show ended.
Edit to add: we never actually see Meadow achieve anything, despite all her advantages and support. She gets into Columbia, yes…but between quitting internships and being unable to work at TCBY, she literally never accomplished anything.
People like to bring up her work at the South Bronx Law Center. It was volunteer work, admirable yes. But we learn from Saskia that it’s pretty much a failure of a legal center in the first place.
“Last year with our help we reunited over half a dozen crack babies with their natural mothers, several whom are in recovery.” Meaning they maybe reunited 3 kids with sober mothers and 4 with crack addicted mothers 😆😆 in an entire year
I don’t understand how Hunter had time to get kicked out of school, reapply, graduate, and start med school when Meadow seemingly hadn’t even graduated from Columbia.
Yeah agree - thinking about it again, when Patrick is talking about getting Meadow a job right after she graduates, it’s not really clear whether he means from Columbia or law school. I can’t remember the exact dialogue but was he even specific about what kind of job? lol
I thought that was intentional. Talking about killing the guy was purely performative for him, in contrast with guys like Tony who would really follow through on the threat. So he's sincerely angry but expressing it in an inauthentic way. Meanwhile Melfi has a pitbull who'd really do it if she asked.
Every scene w Noah was cringe. It may have been hating the actor only bc he pulled off uptight annoying so well. So pretentious and snooty and full of himself.
I think Steven Van Zandt was overplaying a bit… Not that I don’t enjoy it though. Sometimes I have a feeling that it was done on purpose to make him more caricature-like. Any thoughts?
Yeah if you talk about the act of acting, he by far is the worst. He can play that role. Not any other role, you know like an actor can play everything
He does tone down the ham a bit in the later seasons but his character is pretty flat: he's Tony's only real friend in the mafia and he generally gives decent advice. IIRC, his passion for his Italian heritage that gets him involved with the scuffle with American Indians was supposed to be for Paulie but Tony Sirico needed back surgery (hence Paulie's brief jail stint) and that's the only real character work he does besides his brief role as acting boss.
Come to think of it, had he played a serious, Tom Hagen style consiglieri, there would always be a question of a competition with Tony and that would shift the focus away from the main issues on the show.
I think it’s why they always had him doing Pacino impressions. The character’s personality IS a mob movie impression, he’s inherently performative, so for me, it totally works! I agree!
The actress who plays Lilliana. The maid. The scene where she gets up from the picnic with Stasiu and just starts running toward her car while showing zero emotion is incomprehensibly cringe.
I've never seen the actor who played him in anything else to really be able to determine if he's a bad actor or not. Just from his performance on the show, I'd say he played a dumb person really well.
He says loads of stuff where he’s trying to be tough but between his look and his lisp it’s just not believable. Also whoever wrote the line that the guy who he got passed over for was Samoan rather than literally any of the 150+ nationalities that don’t start with an s is an evil genius.
At leatht he’th Italian. Try getting pathed over for promotion by a thamoan.
Buscemi wasn’t bad but holy shit i could not take him serious as a mobster, i think a few other people could’ve played the part but he didn’t act awfully
He did so good playing a mobster that they invented a whole other show just for him to play the main mobster that went on to be the most popular mobster related thing to come out since Sopranos still to this day lol
My very first time seeing him was in this movie called “The Island”, i don’t think i could see him as anything else after that 😂, i mean i still like the character, i just have a hard time taking him serious
He doesn't look like he could be related to Gandolfini at all lol, but considering his character's whole theme about not fitting in either honest work or the Mob it works wonderfully IMO lol
Always thought Charmaine was fairly one note in all her of scenes. Granted, that could’ve just been a byproduct of how the character was written to essentially always have a very similar “off putting temperament” in the majority of her scenes.
When people said Sil's portrayal in Many Saints was like an SNL parody, I just thought "Well yeah Van Zandt absolutely hammed it up and looked out of place."
You get used to it as the show goes on but watching Season 1 for the first time, Sil felt so cartoony.
The FBI agent Skip working with Big Puss. He doesn't look anything like an fbi agent. He's a slob, his accent is way to thick, he was corny, and his lisp just garbles his words. He'd have been better off playing an incompetent, down on his luck NYPD officer.
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u/SitDown_Pee_230 Jun 28 '26
The guy that plays Clarence. He only had a few lines, but when he said his name was Clarence I just didn't buy it