"One" is the loneliest number.
"I'm afraid I'm going to lose my family. Like I lost the ducks."
-- Tony Soprano, Episode 1, January 10, 1999
" _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _"
-- Tony Sproano, Episode 86, June 10, 2007 (TBA)
"The Sopranos" didn't look terribly promising to me back in 1999 when I saw the first promos. Another Italian-American mob show? What could be more of a cliché? Of course, I was hooked after the first episode (the ducks, the shrink's office), and it continued to astound me week after week with how smart and savvy and rich it was. It took the pop gangster mythology of "The Godfather" and "GoodFellas" (and "Miller's Crossing," though I don't recall any characters specifically referencing it) and turned them inside out.
"The Sopranos" is about a small-time mob family in Jersey for whom "this thing of ours" is "trending downward," and who long for the legendary status of movie gangsters. They're shmucks, losers, the very definition of a dysfunctional family, and subconsciously they may even know it. But petty and corrupt as they are, they're still clinging to the American Dream, right down to the characterless and strangely empty McMansion in the suburbs. In "The Sopranos," the mob is a metaphor for contemporary capitalism and consumerism and those treasured illusions of "family" that seem like vestigal instincts. That's why I think the final tableau of the first part of Season Six was one of the series' most brilliant and haunting moments. All the trappings were there -- the festive decorations, the lovely home, the extended clan gathered 'round the hearth -- but we knew then that the greeting-card Christmas image was a sham. The tension was stomach-clenching because we (and perhaps they) could feel that this hollow moment was merely the calm before the storm of the final eight episodes. And now it's all coming down.
Since the third season or so, "The Sopranos" may have lost much of its ability to astound, but that's mainly because we now know anything is possible. Other shows kill off significant characters or rupture the storylines' major arteries, too. By the time Adrianna was wacked, it didn't seem so shocking. As with the best drama and comedy (and "The Sopranos" is an operatic tragicomedy), it seemed inevitable in retrospect. I hated losing her, but whaddaya gonna do?
"The Sopranos" made acclaimed shows like "The Wire" and "Deadwood" possible. I have friends who think "The Wire" is "better than" "The Sopranos," but that seems like a silly and fruitless comparison to me because they exist in entirely different dimensions. "The Wire" is consistently brilliant and thrilling to watch, with its teeming cast of characters and long, tangled narrative threads. I love it. But "The Sopranos" is much bigger, more deceptively complex, because it can work a meta-metaphor, make a satirical observation about contemporary politics or history or popular culture, and keep you absolutely in the moment with these characters in this particular set of circumstances. It makes your heart race, your eyes water and your head explode. It lives up to the word "masterpiece." And this single series has probably been more consistently excellent than all the rest of the American cinema over the last eight years. It hasn't just made a subscription to HBO indispensible (and an unbelievable entertainment bargain for the money), it's helped make watching television as essential as going to the movies.
I'm embarrassed to admit it, but there have been times when I didn't want to watch the next episode, because I was too fearful for the characters. I feel incredibly apprehensive about Sunday night, because I'm afraid of what I'm going to see, and how I'll feel about it. And I don't want it to be over. Maybe I should just TiVo it and then, when I'm feeling a little less vulnerable... Well, that's not going to happen. That's part of what the show is about: Having to face things you'd rather were kept out of sight (like the stashes of cash and guns around the Soprano household), and having to know that everything comes at a price.
I wonder if to say I care deeply about these characters is to say I love them, when I feel I shouldn't. I know how horrible they are. But I guess they're like family. And as we know from Season One, that doesn't guarantee love, either. (I'll admit it: for all her avarice and denial, I'm probably in love with Edie Falco's conflicted Carmella. Hey, one of the show's consistent themes is that you can't help who you fall in love with. And if I ever met James Gandolfini I would want to hug him -- the actor, for creating such a tremendous character, not Tony.) I'm sure they deserve whatever's coming to them. But series creator David Chase doesn't necessarily think that way. As he says on page 163 of "The Sopranos: The Book" (which I haven't even begun to read) in the article called "What We'll Never Know": "If you're raised on a steady diet of Hollywood movies and network television, you start to think, Obviously there's going to be some moral accounting here. That's not the way the world works. It all comes down to why you're watching...."
And so, we come to Episode 86 (heh-heh), the end of the long commute. I don't want to get into all the guessing games about the fates of the Soprano family and crew, but let me just say I feel in my gut that Uncle Junior will intervene somehow. Just a feeling.
In the penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," our last glimpse of Dr. Melfi wryly reversed the final image of "The Godfather": She closed the door on Tony. (And the opening credits sequence always ends with Tony shutting the car door on us.) Bobby's whacking, to the mock-suspenseful (but still suspenseful) choo-choo-chooing of model trains, was a clever commentary and takedown of the series of murders intercut with the baptism at the climax of "One" (as Paulie and Sil call it). And many of the theories about how the series will end are drawn from its reference points. Consider some possibilities:
Meadow is killed instead of Tony. ("Godfather III")
Tony (or Paulie) cooperates with the FBI and enters the Witness Protection Program ("GoodFellas")
AJ, the son, steps up and whacks Phil Leotardo. ("The Godfather")
Tony loses his family (one way or another) and sits alone in his back yard -- by the pool, of course. ("Godfather II")
I hope it's none of these things, because I want Chase to come up with something I didn't anticipate, but which feels right for "The Sopranos." He's done it before. But now I'm afraid in a different way: I really, really want the ending to live up to the show. But no matter what happens, we'll always have Jersey.
The finale is finally here. Check out this interview with Gandolfini:
http://www.thenewsroom.com/details/383816/Entertainment
The Wire is a very good show, but The Sopranos is without a doubt, the finest drama in television history. As Dick Cavett recently said ' in the fullness of time, The Sopranos will be considered the Mt. Everest of television drama' It's the first television show that I've consistently watched in 20 years. God, I hate to see it end.
So that was the ending.... was initially disappointed... but I didn't want to see my all time favorite characters sprawled in pools of blood. Job well done! It's been a hugely entertaining journey.
This was the worst episode I have ever seen! The end was shit! David Chase is probably laughing at all of us right now! Got us good! And everyone thinking it was a deep ending?? Come on guys its mobster,murder, robbery nothing metaphorical in that.. Whatever nothing happened and honestly it didnt leave me with a feeling of OMG did Tony die? It left me with holy shit this is a joke and David Chase just screwed all loyal fans!
Rambling Jenn
I stopped watching "The Sopranos" after season three, so I am grossly unqualified to talk about the ending (or, for that matter, HALF of the show's entire "arc").
The reason I stopped watching is simple: I frankly felt that "The Sopranos", while decent and entertaining, was ludicrously overpraised by both critics and audiences. To hear the oft-repeated refrain (which you just repeated) that "The Sopranos" was more consistently excellent than American cinema in the past eight years always left me perplexed...was I missing something in this show, something that could rival the moments of wit, beauty and human poignancy that I had seen in the best films of the past six or seven years?
As I said, perhaps the show really achieved something in the final three seasons, but I remember heaps of praise being ladeled on the show even in its original years, and I just didn't understand it. Part of the problem was the structural nature of a television drama which, by its very nature (no matter how well-executed), can begin to come across as a glorified soap opera when it is so plot driven. Unlike a film, or even a miniseries, a television show with an infinite running time (and it was infinite until they finally settled on a closing season) must by its nature string the viewer along without providing a clear-cut narrative arc. (I can already here the objections: "But REAL LIFE doesn't have narrative arcs! That's the brilliance of the show." Well, no, it wants to have it both ways...pretend to be "above" traditional concepts of drama while still manipulating the viewer into tuning in just to see the latest plot developments).
That's one of the other problems I had with the show: the disconnect between the lofty ambitions attributed to it by the critical community, and the reality of the show's appeal to the public at large. Now, by no means should the mass audience's base instinct for entertainment negate a work of pop art's higher value (for example, just because Spielberg's "Jaws" or Coppola's "The Godfather" provided vicarious thrills should not overshadow the fact that they are both brilliant for more than simply their manipulation of the audience). But with "The Sopranos", it often seemed as if fans of the show were trying to justify the (relatively simple) pleasures of finding out whether Christopher would survive another week, or whether Carmela would finally leave Tony, by claiming that "The Sopranos" was really a complex metaphor for American capitalism and, as you said, a sort of meta-narrative about not only previous gangster films, but storytelling as a whole.
First of all, almost all of Scorsese's mob work, from "Mean Streets" on out, has examined (in a more revealing way, I believe) the way that gangsters can mold themselves after their equivalent Hollywood image. And as for the conceit of having Tony be a "new age", self-aware gangster who sees a psychiatrist, didn't "Analyze This" come out a few months before "The Sopranos" hit TV stations? (Not that I'm saying "Analyze This" is some sort of underrated gem, merely that the idea was hardly novel).
The have-it-both-ways element of "The Sopranos" was finally its most off-putting trait to me. Episode after episode portrayed sadistic, gruesome violence of the kind we would expect mobsters to perpetrate, but with very little in the way of insight into character or human behaviour to back it up...and worse, often with a smug, misanthropic tone that David Chase let seep into the series as a whole. A perfect example of "The Sopranos"' pandering could be found in the episode where Ralphie ends up murdering his stripper girlfriend Tracee. In one scene, Ralphie and Tracee are relaxing at Ralph's place (Ralph is angrily berating "Spartacus" and comparing it unfavourably to "Gladiator", another of the show's countless self-congratulatory, unfunny pop-culture allusions). Silvio Dante knocks on the door angrily and says that Tracee hasn't showed up to work for the past few days. He proceeds to drag her outside and violently push her onto his car trunk. And here is the sickening part...Chase cuts to a shot of Ralphie looking outside the window, laughing. Obviously this scene is meant to drive home the point that Ralphie is indifferent to her feelings (as if we didn't know that already), but it has the (perhaps intentional) effect of placing the audience's identification with Ralphie! A less misanthropic show might have cut back to Tracee's pained reaction in a way that really forced us to contemplate what prostitutes have to deal with...instead, it turns her into the disposable plaything that Ralphie sees her as.
The world envisioned by Chase is finally too cynical and violent to be even remotely believable, and thus "The Sopranos" really can't tell us much about society or offer an indictment of America because it doesn't offer enough moments of recognizable human interaction to cut to the bone. The drama is either too heightened or too leaden, and the characters (as many have pointed out) not only don't really change (which is, admittedly, true-to-life) but also do not demonstrate enough differing shades to seem fully-rounded. A.J. is always pouty, Meadow always judgmental and rebellious, etc., etc. And the world around them reflects Chase's cynical view, a world where everyone is out for themselves, where community is almost non-existent, where selfishness is the natural state of humanity.
In the final analysis, "The Sopranos" simply never appealed to me because I found it drab: dramatically, visually, thematically. It took a long time, and many bizarre and often contrived plot developments, to reveal absolutely nothing to me about human nature or the world around me (and worse, I don't even think there's an episode I would like to watch again for its aesthetic pleasures...except perhaps the "Fargo"-esque Russian in the snow episode).
I do admit to being intrigued by the audacity of the show's ending (and ironically, even though I haven't watched the show's new episodes in-depth, I correctly predicted the ending in an office pool...my exact words will be "They'll end it with us not knowing how Tony's story ends"). But even the praise being heaped on the ending by people like you and Matt Zoller Seitz (both of whom I admire very much, by the way) is indicative of a sort of self-abusive, "Isn't David Chase so much cleverer than us?" form of hero worship. Seitz says that the abrupt cut to black is a rebuke to the audience, pointing out the futility of investing one's time and energy into what is, after all, a mob show, when so much of importance is going on in the real world. Many are calling this the greatest rebuke toward television, and if the people saying this really believe it (I don't...I think Chase just ended it this way because he feels that life goes on whether we're there or not), then don't they realize that Chase is having his cake and eating it too? For it's all well and good to point out the meaningless of television, but isn't it a bit hypocritical to do so at the VERY END of the show you have created, a show you have profited from and made your name on for eight years? Somehow this hypocrisy seems indicative to me of "The Sopranos" as a whole...a TV show that wanted to convince us it was MORE than a TV show, a mob drama about assassinations, betrayal, and the worst of humanity that wanted to convince us it was holding a mirror up to our society.
Perhaps one day I will see seasons four, five and six of "The Sopranos", and who knows, it may change my opinion of the show. But among recent, highly-acclaimed dramas, I'll take "Six Feet Under" any day, a show that has had me simultaneously laughing and crying with recognition at how poignantly human the characters are...which, I gather, is the way you feel about "The Sopranos". It is, alas, something I have never felt while watching what one critic laughably called "the best work of American pop culture of the past twenty-five years". "The Sopranos" is over, and overrated, I'm afraid.
"It is, alas, something I have never felt while watching what one critic laughably called "the best work of American pop culture of the past twenty-five years". "The Sopranos" is over, and overrated, I'm afraid."
TROLL TROLL TROLL! Get the reaction that you wanted?