4 TV Characters Who Would’ve Gotten Weird During All This

Politics has gotten strange over the past few years. It wasn’t that long ago that the worst thing about Facebook was someone asking you to play Farmville. But ever since the conspiracy theorists figured out how to monetize their lithium withdrawals, we’ve all become one scroll away from discovering that someone we once respected has gone completely off the ideological deep end. In a way, that’s what’s great about TV shows. We can welcome these characters into our lives for a time, and if we don’t like what they’re doing, we can stop watching them. We can just block them from our lives without the worry that they’ll stalk us using a burner account. 

But we also live in the age of reboots, remakes, revivals and reimaginings. These TV characters we thought we knew so well still have the chance to come back with some pretty out-there ideas. So, here are a few of them we suspect might crash the crazy train. We admit we could be way off base here with this fan fiction, but at least we’re not “pregnant Sonic the Hedgehog” level off base. Perspective, people!

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Janice Soprano, The Sopranos

The political climate that has taken hold since Donald Trump won in 2016 has ushered in a new golden age of family arguments. It’s gotten so bad we can’t even agree on how to pronounce the word “divisiveness,” much less overcome it. For someone as manipulative as Tony Soprano’s older sister Janice, politics definitely would’ve become yet another pressure point she could use to aggravate her little brother. 

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“I swear, Janice, again with you and the Hillary’s emails!”

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Janice Soprano is a self-serving opportunist whose personality can instantly flip from new-age hippie sage to callous, backstabbing shrew depending on what she stands to gain out of the situation. She never had to think of the long-term ramifications of her actions because she’s A) always manipulated someone else to do the work for her and B) never had to clean up her own mess. 

Just look at her relationship with Richie Aprile. One of the main reasons Janice got together with Richie in the first place was because Tony hated him. Tony wasn’t really conflicted by any loyalty towards his sister. When he found out about the two of them, his response to Richie was, “She’s your f–king problem now.” Janice kept making the feud worse by convincing Richie to make a move against Tony, which led to Tony ordering Richie killed. Only Janice took care of that herself, shooting Richie to death after he punched her in the face during an argument. The first person she called after that was Tony to ask him to dispose of the body, which he did. 

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Janice’s boyfriends all die, to their relief. 

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In 2019, series creator David Chase was asked what he thought Tony Soprano’s opinion on Trump would’ve been. “He would think the guy was full of [expletive],” he said, “Whether he thought he was a good president or not — I don’t know that Tony thought much about that question at all, with anybody who was in office. But I know Tony would have thought Trump was penny-ante, in terms of his lying and presentation.” (A.J. though? He might’ve thought otherwise.) Also, there’s a 0% chance the real-world murder of Frank Cali by a QAnon adherent would not be incorporated into this plot somehow.

If that was how Tony felt about Trump, Janice would’ve made MAGA her entire personality just to annoy the crap out of him. She might have thought that Trump’s “alleged” ties to organized crime would be a good thing for the family business. Someone has to have some dirt on this guy in a safe somewhere in case they needed a DOJ investigation to magically go away, right?

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And we know how Sopranos respond when their politicians get into bed with the Soviets.