Poetic Television Review: Everybody Hurts (The Sopranos, S4X06, 2002)

Beneath the Jersey overpass, a carousel of guilt spins,
its horses chipped and weary, their painted grins
repeating like the therapy couch’s drone—
Tell me about your mother, Tony. You’re not alone.

The script, a palimpsest of sins we’ve memorized:
Artie’s borrowed francs, the Frenchman’s lies,
a suicide rehearsed in greasy kitchen light.
This is how empires rust—not with war, but spite.

Christopher slumps, a marionette of smack and shame,
his "master plan" a punchline, the family name
a noose he ties with trembling hands. The joke’s
on Tony, blind to veins collapsed like broken oaks.

In Nuovo Vesuvio’s grease-fire gloom,
a chef plays gangster, pratfalls toward his doom.
One-point-five percent—friendship’s gentle tax—
mercy’s coin, stamped with blood, slips through the cracks.

AJ gapes at gilded doorknobs, Picassos hung askew,
learns luck’s a lottery he’ll never lose.
The Bronx’s ruins? Just a set piece, cheap and trite—
his conscience, like his father’s, fades before first light.

Gloria’s ghost drifts through dreamscapes, chiffon noose
around her neck, a plot device turned loose
to haunt the man who haunts himself. Che vuoi?
The couch absorbs another lie we’ve seen deployed.

The camera lingers where ambition starves:
on Devin’s pearls, the ketchup-stained hors d’oeuvres,
on Artie’s knife—now trembling, now absurd—
while Springsteen’s sax screams every unsung word.

This is the season of mid-course corrections,
where subplots stall like Jersey intersections,
where every epiphany’s a rerun, every threat
a debt called in before the check’s been set.

The genius of the thing? Not in the grand collapse,
but in the way a napkin, folded, maps
the creases of a life half-lived in fear—
the tragedy’s not that it’s filler, but that we’re still here,

watching the carousel grind its wheezing tune,
knowing the horse we’ll mount, the stale maroon
of blood dried brown. The series doesn’t end—
it metastasizes, a punchline we pretend

we haven’t heard. Yet in the static’s hum,
between the credits, something shifts. A crumb
of truth: that even filler, artfully spun,
reflects the nothing that we’re racing from.

(Note: The review in its original form can be read here.)

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