Last night, the known universe choked, as the clock wound down for the HBO series THE SOPRANOS. The crew I was with shouted "bloody murder!" at the blackout scene where to everyone's dismay, no one died, and life went on as usual for the Soprano clan.
My brother and I discussed this anticlimax on the way home, and while he obsessed about the sexual aspects of the Sopranos (He was left particularly breathless by the FBI agent's hairy chest)I realized i rather enjoyed the end. Who needs things to end bloodily and with manic carnage? My friend Will described the Drama and the family aspects of the Sopranos as the "Meat and Potatoes". I sort of revelled in the game they played as the clock ran down, and when the end came I took a huge amount of satisfactions at the grunts and hollers from everyone around me, and then of course the inevitable backlash. People flooded the HBO website untill it crashed, people cancelled their subscriptions to HBO, angry message boards, etc. etc.
It seems this country is so obsessed with the immediate gratification of a tidy and violent ending, that they convulse at having to think about things. The "Outrage" over Paris Hilton is another example of how people would rather yell, than be forced to think. As the Simpsons movie looms in the horizon i wonder if the obviously weary creators aren't doomed to a similar backlash but with the beloved yellow family. Unfortunately for the Simpsons, the end will not come soon enough. The Sopranos should have ended before Chris and AJ became Film people. Would anyone have complained if the season where Adrianna gets offed were the last one? Instead the same public that demanded more and more of the same, becomes wildly enraged when the creators of the show, decided that the end should be the same as a regular episode.
1 comment:
Ah, and yet - the Finale of Sopranos WAS a neat and tidy package. We saw and said goodbye to all the characters, AJ's a porn-agent, Meadow can't park, Tony left his AK-47 somewhere out of memory and the entire Soprano family said goodbye in a tidy little package with onion rings on the table and Journey's "Don't Stop Believing..." playing incredulously on in the background. Will nailed the 'meat and potatoes' part of the story. However, what we all saw on Sunday was less meat and potatoes and more 'onion rings'. To voice a common and valid opinion from those who did not enjoy the ending: UnFairly, the finale was a cop-out to the SEVEN-YEAR fans of the show who made a sloppy Gandolfini into Tony Soprano and a used out Michael Imperioli into Christopher by tuning in every Sunday night for a little less than a decade. It was the stupid shirts and posters and Bada Bing references that made this show what it was. The fans of the show made the show, and after all this time the fans expected - nay, deserved, better. David Chase kept a potentially awesome ending for himself, and frankly, it wasn't his to keep. What was a creation of characters came to be a part of everyone's family and fairly, we would have liked to have seen some conclusion of their story. We get it. It's not over our heads. It's not too much of a good thing. It was a let down. Just because the show lacked its luster for the last 4 seasons (My girlfriend and I joke that the real Sopranos finale was about 5 years ago) does not give it an excuse to cop out on the finale. This who-shot-Bobby type of argument can go on for years, but ultimately the Sopranos will have gone out with a whimper, a plate of onions rings and Journey's "Don't Stop Believing..." to boot. Some finale.
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