"Insofar as American foreign policy impinges directly on these worlds, it provides ironic context to events on the home front. On The Wire, the beleaguered cops of Baltimore find that their city’s bloody drug wars are near the bottom of a terrorism-obsessed FBI’s list of priorities. The commentary in The Sopranos is more pointed still: midway through the final season, Tony’s hapless son, A.J., abruptly decides to join the Army and ship off to Afghanistan, in search of the moral purpose that’s eluded him as a mobster’s son in suburban New Jersey. His horrified parents quickly buy him off with a fancy new car and a movie-business job—not because that’s what a Mob family does, the show suggests, but because that’s what almost any upper-middle-class American parents would do. For the Sopranos and their law-abiding neighbors alike, the wars that followed 9/11 are for other families to fight."
