Benjamin Schwarz' piece on
Mad Men in
The Atlantic is well worth reading.
But I was suprised to find this completely erroneous statement:
Such claims were a tad much—as are, in a similar vein, The New York Times Virginia Heffernan’s avowals that The Sopranos premiere was “like the publication of Ulysses” and that the series “may have required more patience and effort from the lead characters than drama ever had, from Euripides to Artaud to Stoppard.” Still, the megamovies have warranted, and received, careful analysis—at least 20 books have taken on The Sopranos. . . .
Shouldn't there be an apostrophe after
New York Times? But more importantly: 20 books? 20? Here's the list:
Barreca, Regina, ed.
A Sitdown with The Sopranos:
Watching Italian American Culture on T.V.’s Most Talked-About Series. New York: Palgrave-McMillan, 2002.
Gabbard, Glen O.
The Psychology of The Sopranos. New York: Basic Books, 2002.
Greene, Richard and Peter Vernezze, eds. The Sopranos
and Philosophy: I Kill, Therefore I Am. Chicago: Open Court, 2004.
Lavery, David, ed.
Reading The Sopranos:
Hit TV from HBO. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.
___, ed.
This Thing of Ours: Investigating The Sopranos. New York: Columbia UP, 2002.
Martin, Brett. The Sopranos:
The Complete Book. New York: Melcher Media, 2007.
The New York Times
on The Sopranos. New York: Ibooks, 2000.
Polan, Dana. The Sopranos. Durham: Duke U P, 2009.
The Sopranos
Family Cookbook, as Compiled by Artie Bucco. New York: Warner, 2002.
___. The Sopranos:
A Family History. New York: New American Library, 2000.
The Sopranos:
Selected Scripts from Three Seasons. New York: Warner Books, 2002.
Weber, John and Chuck Kim, eds.
The Tao of Bada Bing: Words of Wisdom from The Sopranos. New York: HBO, 2003.
Yacowar, Maurice. The Sopranos
on the Couch: Analyzing Television’s Greatest Series. Third Edition. New York: Continuum, 2007.
That's 13, not "at least 20." And only my two collections and the books by Barreca, Gabbard, Greene and Vernezze, the
NY Times, Polan, and Yacowar "take on"
The Sopranos. The others are official/companion books. So Schwarz was close: 8. That's almost 20!
Not the only error I have detected in my television reading lately. In Mark Taylor's piece on
Mad Men in
Jump Cut the author speaks of "Joe" Hamm's performance as Don Draper.
And as I note in a forthcoming (in
Critical Studies in Television) review of the BFI TV Classics book on
Seinfeld, author Nicholas Mirzoeff commits numerous blunders:
Seinfeld is, regrettably, more than a little careless, littered as it is by minor, annoying, and easily correctable errors. The actor who played NBC chief Russell Dalrymple in Seinfeld was Bob Balaban, not ‘Bob Babanal’. Jerry’s father’s Boca Vista Retirement Village nemesis, the man who disastrously gave our eponymous hero an astronaut pen, was Jack Klompus, not ‘Kloppus’. Christopher Reeve’s Superman hit the big screen in 1978, not 1987 (64). ‘The Parking Space’ was not the 22nd episode of the show but the 38th (even Mirzoeff’s own ‘Broadcast History’ shows his numbering to be incorrect). It was Carson Daly of Last Call with Carson Daly and not Carson Kressley of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy who inspired My Name is Earl’s karmic quest (p. 125). In the sentence beginning ‘As the three main actors, other than Seinfeld, had extensive acting experience . . . ‘ (pp. 27-28), of course no italics are needed for the actor’s name.
Other misidentifications are difficult to explain: It was the character Sidra’s, not the actress Terry Hatcher’s, ‘real and . . . spectacular’ breasts that were in question in ‘The Implant’ (4.18). Woody Allen is not a ‘cinematographer’ (p. 58). Jean Baudrillard and Umberto Eco are not philosophers (p. 46) in any strict sense of the term. Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is not a short story (p. 26) but a novel of over 80,000 words. Bungling such as this subverts the book’s credibility in no small way. (Has BFI Publishing’s financial troubles resulted in the elimination of copy-editors?)
