The Obligatory Sopranos Post

You know what the world needs right now? Another opinion on The Sopranos finale. Now that every newspaper, blog, and the PTI guys (as well as SportsCenter, ATH, and every sports talk radio show I listened to today) has chimed in and I've had 20+ hours to digest it, I think I'm ready too.

Mediabistro probably said it best: The Sopranos didn't end--it stopped. The more I think about that, the better I feel about it. That wasn't the case last night, however. I wasn't outraged, just a bit "miffled."

Now, I've never been a serial TV watcher. The Sopranos was my first experience with can't miss television, the first time I scheduled my life around being in front of the tube for a non-sporting event. I didn't even start watching until the show was four seasons old, but I caught up quickly thanks to On Demand and last night's episode was my first true "event programming" moment. I'd been thinking about it for weeks, talking about it with anyone who would listen. Let's just say I've never been more excited for one hour of television.

Was it worth it? Not immediately, but in the long run, in the conversations that we're having right now and will continue to have, I think it will be.

I'd like to think that we're comfortable at this point with the relationship between profundity and ambiguity. Namely, one doesn't always equal the other. Performance art, foreign films, Captain Beefheart--all often ambiguous and frequently ridiculous.

The final episode wasn't like that. In fact, it was like 50 or so other episodes of the series we'd seen before. Methodical, plodding, a fuse that fizzles just before the big bang. The only difference is that now there's no next week. That big bang is never coming, so perhaps the bigger surprise is that we ever expected it in the first place.

The Sopranos "altered the playing field for dramatic television" because it wasn't like anything else out there. It never was going to go out like a "very special" 2-hour finale of Friends. But what if we knew Tony's fate when we woke up this morning? What if everything truly was over? We'd have our reviews and our memories and we would move on.

But now we have a moment that will live on in our cultural history forever. The Sopranos went from one of the most popular television shows ever to the most controversial ending ever.

Writer/Director David Chase is hardly the first person to play the ambiguity card, but I don't think anyone has flipped it over in such a high-stakes game. If his last name wasn't already a verb, I'm fairly certain that it would become one just to describe this sort of ending. (Q: "How did you like the new Wes Anderson film?" A: "First half was good, but he totally Chased it at the end.")

Was this laziness on the part of Chase? Absolutely not. That final scene was as good a lesson in tension as you'll ever get. Was it selfishness on the part of Chase? Absolutely. He took his series and ended it on his terms and this points to the larger question at hand here: what responsibility does the artist have to his audience?

My inclination is none. Pick any famous artist you want, they all started for some variation of the same reason: the hope that someone out there would find their vision, their work, their words, worthy. Michaelangelo didn't paint for the greater good of mankind, he painted because it gave him some sort of personal satisfaction. Hendrix didn't pick up a guitar to make people happy, he did it to make himself happy. In the art, literary and music worlds that's seemingly okay. In fact, to abandon that strategy is to commit the worst of artistic sins: selling out.

But with television the expectation is different for some reason. Why? I'm not sure, but it probably has something to do with the amount of time involved. A painting or a photograph can be consumed in one sitting. An album is about an hour, a movie two. A book lasts as long as you want it to, but television last as long as they want it to. It's finite, but not on your terms.

For example, we know that we've spent exactly 86 hours watching The Sopranos. That's 3 1/2 days of our lives spent with Tony, Carmella and, unfortunately, A.J. You can keep track of exactly how much time you've invested and when you know how much you're spending you know how much you expect in return.

Maybe in that sense The Sopranos failed as a television ending, but that's also why it succeeded as an artistic one. In the relatively brief history of television, many point to this show as one of the first to elevate the medium to an "art."

Last night's ending may not have been the one you wanted, but it was the one that confirmed that very notion.