RUSH: Mark in Orlando, welcome to the EIB Network, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Hello. Mega dittos, Mr. Rush Limbaugh. How are you?
RUSH: Thank you, sir. I couldn’t be better, sir, thank you.
CALLER: I’m looking for your expert review on The Sopranos airing last night. I really haven’t heard you talk too much about it, and if you have some advance screenings like you did with ’24’ and what’s your take on the season?
RUSH: Well, I didn’t get any advanced screenings of The Sopranos. Some TV critics did. I don’t think they send those out to too many people. I’m not on the list, never have been. I watched it last night. In fact, before the Masters started yesterday, I went back to season six, the first episodes at the end of last summer and I watched the last two just to get myself ready to go.
For what it was, the episode self-contained as it was, you just look from the beginning to the end of the episode, it was pretty good. A lot of parallels to last season. Uncle Junior shoots Tony last year. ‘Whoa, what a start,’ and then the season fizzled and died. Last night, Bobby Bacala takes a shot at Tony, and you go, ‘Whoa, what a start!’ Now the history is the show will fizzle out. We have eight more episodes. Look, just as a consumer — you know, I’m not a critic or an artiste. I’ve read — and this is true, by the way, but I don’t look at it this way. People say, ‘Art asks questions. It doesn’t answer them,’ and so you’ve got the New York elite establishment analyzing this thing in all kinds of artistic terms that escape me. To me, there’s one simple thing this show better do this year and advance toward the end of things, and last night’s didn’t. So they’ve got eight episodes to get toward the end of things. Unless you want to say the family’s breaking up and Bobby Bacala is challenging Tony, but these episodes are self-contained and sometimes they don’t ever refer to things that have happened in previous episodes. I enjoyed it. It was 45 minutes before I looked at the watch the first time. I’m not criticizing the episode. As a consumer, this is the last season. We gotta get to the end of this, and I don’t think the first episode did, and there are only eight more to go.