Sopranos season 4 & Rome 1.1

With HBO finally finished with the 4th season repeats, I can comment that the show never really lost it. I think the extended periods between production, my love for The Wire (the new season needs to come out soon, and I need to see the 3rd season so much), and the fact that I hadn't seen the show since college, I think I just sort of put it back behind a few other shows. We can all thank the Soprano clan for being responsible for the resurgence of HBO as a place for great original programming. Not that the Larry Sanders Show or Mr. Show weren't great, but they also put out a bunch of crap (Dream On?). Since the Sopranos, they've been putting out brilliant stuff almost without fail. I think I had this season spoiled for me, a little, as I knew what the end of season 4 was going to be, but I liked how it got there, and I didn't know about what most of the middle was going to be. Looking forward to the 5th season. Oh, wait, they're moving the 5th season repeats to the same time period as Gilmore Girls. Damnit all to hell. I get two weeks of season 5 goodness before I have to switch to Gilmore Girls. Really, damnit all.

I think part of the reason for the move was so that they could repeat the first episode of Rome before the second episode next week. As someone who will give almost anything HBO produces at least one try, I watched the first one. And the thing that bothers me about the show was that I am not sure about the whole women shaving their pubic hair thing. Now, I had a whole big rant about why pubes are not only unneccessary, but also annoying, on my last blog, but just accept that I'm anti-pubes. So, I have to say that I am surprised that apparently Roman women also don't like a lot of hair down there. There are a lot of other good things about the show, so I won't hold that against them. It's like watching a period piece and seeing obviously fake breasts. I'm anti-fake breasts as well. I'm pretty sure this whole silicone breasts thing started a little after, say, Rome stopped being the center of the universe. No matter how insane the Pope is, Rome hasn't been the center of the universe since around 476. And really, as a history buff, I'd even say that it wasn't the center of the universe after 330, when Constantine made Constantinople the capital of the Roman Empire. And that's ignoring the entire non-European world. I'll be Eurocentric for the purposes of this argument. I will continue to watch the show, as I like it.