Barry's Blog

Widely hailed as the greatest drama ever created for television, The Sopranos came to an abrupt end last Sunday evening after 8 years, 86 episodes, and 18 Emmy Awards. Praise for the highly acclaimed HBO series has come from unexpected places, like Peggy Noonan, a regular contributor forThe Wall Street Journal. In her piece on The Sopranos last weekend in the Journal, Noonan offered: "The Sopranos wasn't only a great show or even a classic. It was a masterpiece, and its end Sunday night is an epochal event....It was real, Old Jersey real (Satriale's butcher shop,  not the mall) and primal. It was about big things, as all great drama is - the human hunger for dominance, for safety, for love; the desire to rise in the world; the need to belong to something,..Because it was primal, its dialogue was pared to the bone and entered the language. 'You disrespecting the Bing?' 'You wanna get whacked?' And other famous phrases, many of them obscene..."

But the abrupt finale, despite the high expectations, has been mercilessly bashed by fans and critics. Writing in The New York Times on the show's ending, Alessandra Stanley wrote: "There was no good ending, so 'The Sopranos' left off without one. The abrupt finale last night was almost like a prank, a mischievous dig at viewers who had agonized over how television's most addictive series would come to a close. The suspense of the final scene in the diner was almost cruel. And certainly that last bit of song, -'Don't Stop Believing,' by Journey - had to be a joke."

After so much frenzied anticipation of the finale, when the screen literally went black, with the music playing in the background as Tony and his family munched onion rings in a New Jersey diner, many of the 11 million plus fans were not amused. What to make of such an ambiguous ending? Theories abounded on the Net: Did the silent ending signal that Tony was killed, harking back to a conversation with now-dead brother-in-law Bobby Bacala, who said that when you die, "everything goes black"? Or maybe Tony was indicted, or his mobster life just went on, since his nemesis Phil Leotardo had been whacked.

For his part, Sopranos creator David Chase had nothing to say. He had fled the country, taking his wife out to dinner in France on the Sunday of the finale, to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's abrupt ending. In an exclusive interview (with The Star-Ledger of New Jersey) agreed to well before the season began, he suggested he had little to add to the controversial final scene he had conceived three years ago: "I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there."

Like it or not, The Sopranos was a lot like real life. T.S. Eliot once observed that "Humans cannot bear much reality." I think Eliot was suggesting that we don't like ambiguity and untidy endings, in real life or our television dramas. We want to know what happened to Tony. Did this New Jersey mobster with a family, a business, and a therapist finally get his "just rewards"? Perhaps part of our discomfort with the ending is our deeply rooted sense of justice and righteousness. Does justice win out in the end?

The great Southern writer Flannery O'Connor once remarked that she had an aunt who thought that nothing happened in a story unless somebody got married or shot in the end. Yet life seldom provides such definitive endings. Life itself, like The Sopranos, is chocked full of ambiguity, and it takes maturity and faith to handle the absurdity, the chaos, the untidiness of life. And if we refuse to live with ambiguity, we may be excluding something very essential and dear, like the hazards of faith, even the mysteries of God.

What was the Oscar Wilde statement, "Life imitates art far more than art imitates life." He may have been on to something...

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow