Once again, Virginia Heffernan, writing in the Times, gets it wrong. In "Character Issues," she takes on the TV drama as long-running movie phenomenon: "The Sopranos," Mad Men," "In Treatment." She writes: "In the Chase paradigm, a show’s main character must be fundamentally evil, and this evil must undermine the tenacious American fantasy that there are morally responsible roads to power and moreover that the achievement of power is itself a moral responsibility." This is so wrong as to be asinine. The compelling potential of a show like "The Sopranos"--or "Mad Men," for that matter--especially when it ventures into the male interior, is that it explores a place where bad men do what good men dream. More importantly, and consequently, these men are not, in fact, "bad" at all; they are good. They may plunder, kill, cheat, lie, backstab, and hustle, but if we did not love Tony, we would not love "The Sopranos." We enjoy the transgressive pleasures of watching him move through the world with bat-swinging impunity because this is the stuff of which we dream in secret, and we know in our hearts that he's good--in spite of himself, in spite of these deeds--or so we hope. Because if he isn't, we're lost. Of course, there's no real parallel between Don Draper and Tony Soprano--other than Matthew Weiner. Don is a shadow that seeks to be what Tony was. All self-suppression and perfectly polished angst, Draper remains artfully composed, even when he slips. Tony, on the other hand, wasn't afraid to get his hands dirty--even when it came to body matter--yet he remained a hero because he did it with heart.
