Paulo Seabra

I was just watching some random clips of The Sopranos, as I every so often do, and I came across one of my all-time favorite scenes. It's season one, Tony gets picked up by Christopher who arrives late and after a string of recent screw-ups. Tony chastises him in his typical Tony way, but then Christopher opens up and they have something of a rare moment. And this moment is very relevant, maybe one of the most important moments in the entire show, especially as it pertains to the more psychological aspects of it, because it's the first moment where Tony and Christopher talk about depression. And the way it's phrased by Christopher, the way a relatively uneducated man verbalizes his innermost feelings, it's just so poignant and full of depth that I've come to steal the phrase and use it myself when describing what it truly is like to feel depressed – It is to constantly struggle when facing the regularness of life. “Can I try and explain here?... I don't know, T...

Recently I was asked about the greatest TV show of all time and, as it is often the case, I tend to overthink things when having to recommending it to a real person. I start to wonder if they will like it, if they are going into it with a wrong idea of what it is, if the show, or book or movie for that matter, contains scenes they will find distasteful, and so on. I reckon it's just one of those many idiosyncrasies related to having studied philosophy, even if only a little bit. It just comes with the job, you end up overthinking every word, always wondering if you are misleading this person, even if you are absolutely convinced the TV show they asked your opinion about is one of the absolute greatest masterpieces in all of human history... So while I'm a staunch defender of The Sopranos, even going so far as to evangelize it, I still hesitate about doing just that when presented with an actual chance, and whenever I'm asked to give my opinion I always wonder, I always thr...

In episode [616] of The Sopranos, Tony describes his gambling vices in the following way – Well, you start chasin' it... And every time you get your hands around it, you fall further backwards... And at some point in my multiple viewings of that brilliant show, I happened to interiorize that description, that feeling, this idea that an addiction, almost more than the sensory pleasure itself, is actually all about the chase. In a way, it's not about what we gain from it, not really, it's about chasing that feeling. And in doing so, we realize the addiction becomes a reward in and of itself. Indeed, addictions seem to get us to a point where we don't particularly enjoy the coveted thing itself, we instead enjoy pretty much everything else about it, that is to say, the addiction isn't or isn't merely the object of our desire, the addiction becomes the whole ritual we built around that golden calf. I suppose the pleasure can be nice, but it's at times ironical...

Ask anyone about the best TV shows of all time and you're very likely to hear either one or the other. Full disclosure, among us fangirls, I'm Team Tony all the way. I think The Sopranos has a pretty huge advantage over The Wire simply because, at its core, it's exceptionally funny, and in my view, all great art ought to be comic art. And though both shows have their brilliant comedic moments, I find The Sopranos wholly superior in that aspect, especially because I actually needed a couple of tries to get into The Wire, perhaps because it's more plot-heavy, which can be good or bad depending on how well you can keep up with all the deep procedural talk. But regardless of my preference, the more I watched either show, the more I realized they were oddly similar. Indeed I've come to think of them as cousins, and though different in significant ways, they probably have more similarities than differences. And as I wrote about the similarities between Berserk and A ...