Sopranos watered down by painfully obvious car promotion

This past season on the Sopranos was rife with car talk: Johnny Sack boasts about his Maserati in one episode, even going so far as to mention its top speed and quarter-mile times. Then there’s the wince-o-rama which occurs when Tony gives his son A.J. an Xterra, to which A.J. robotically responds that the truck has “sensors in the seat belts. Part of Nissan’s triple-safety philosophy.” Finally there’s Tony’s ubiquitous Escalade, which just happens to save Tony and his passenger’s lives after a near-fatal crash. An executive close to GM divulged that the company had “a lot of dialogue about the crash” so that the episode would not make the Escalade seem unsafe, when in fact the emphasis of the episode was to make the Escalade seem “totally pimp, but with mob flava.”