Morgan’s study brings to conscious critical attention the deeper affective dimensions of The Sopranos subtly crafted in the interplay between the dominant level of the visual text and the more elusive dimensions effected through various auditory elements. Many viewers will have some conscious awareness of certain more obvious aspects of the soundtrack. So, as Nochimson points out, the contrast between the tough A2 gangster cut rolling through the credit sequence and the opening scene with Tony sitting in the cloistered silence of the psychoanalyst’s waiting room is abrupt enough to be read more or less on the surface. So also is some of the narrative content of the lyrical associations playing out in apposition to overall episodes with rolling credits, or at times embedded as soundtrack accompaniment in specific scenes. Morgan’s analysis, however, goes beyond these relatively obvious juxtapositions to explore how not only the more overt narrative lyrical content reinforces narrative lines in the dramatic action, but also how more subtle aesthetic elements not only of sound, including animals, telephones, and other ambient elements, but even also of the absence of sound, as in the sessions with Melfi, play into the richly developed texture of the psychoanalytical process that sets The Sopranos apart from all that had preceded it in the genre. Morgan quite rightly detected how the layered mysteries of the psychoanalytic process playing out in Soprano’s troubled and contradictory psychology are expressed through the subtle aesthetics of sound, and how specifically the various dynamics of sound serve not only to convey the un-, or sub-conscious processes unfolding in Soprano’s psychoanalytic adventure, but also how they serve to engage unconscious mechanisms of our own sympathy with and―in their suspension—revulsion at the monster within.
— MICHAEL DEGENER
WR 100: Renaissance TV: Serial Drama and the Cable Revolution