'Sopranos' class a hit at Canadian school

Along with studying "The Sopranos," students in the University of Calgary class will also examine "The Godfather" and James Cagney.

CALGARY, Alberta (Reuters) -- The trials and tribulations of television's favorite dysfunctional crime family, "The Sopranos," are set to be yanked from New Jersey's mean streets and dissected alongside Shakespeare at a Canadian university.

The University of Calgary is offering a course this fall that will examine how the gritty, award-winning HBO series that features mob boss Tony Soprano, his wife Carmela, his gang and his troubled psychiatrist fit into the gangster film genre.

Inappropriate subject matter for an institute of higher learning?

Fuhgedaboudit, said English professor Maurice Yacowar, who will be teaching the credit course as part of the university's film studies program.

"The Sopranos" episodes represent the evolution of the gangster film style by showing that even denizens of organized crime suffer the same basic human problems as the rest of us, said Yacowar, author of the recent book "The Sopranos on the Couch: Analyzing Television's Greatest Series."

"They really do stand up to the kind of analysis I'm used to giving for a (Harold) Pinter play, or a Tennessee Williams play, or a Hitchcock film, or a Shakespeare play," he said. "The text is that rich, the context is that lively. They really are remarkable works as individual films."

The mob mentality

The course has been booked solid for months.

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Students will first view the 1931 gangster classic "The Public Enemy", starring James Cagney, then Francis Ford Coppola's "Godfather" series before studying six episodes of "The Sopranos" from the first two seasons.

The hit series, which pulls no punches with its raunchy dialogue, features James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, the unlikely mob capo whose struggles to keep his gang of thugs in line and maintain some semblance of suburban life leaves him prone to anxiety attacks.

Wife Carmela, played by Edie Falco, is "First Lady of the New Jersey Mob" whose religious faith and desire to be a good homemaker is constantly at odds with Tony's brutal line of work, and his propensity to stray from the marital bed.

Yacowar said the course fits well into the mushrooming field of popular culture as an academic study.

"For me, while 'The Sopranos' are a very rich and very serious-minded text, the real purpose is about the student learning to analyze the text. 'The Sopranos' is the excuse for that," he said.

There will be no excuses for not making good on the assignments, however. They will include three short essays and one major research project.

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