The Sopranos Whack the Competition, If Not Each Other
by Natalie Finn
(From E! News)
Mon, 11 Jun 2007 05:58:35 PM PDT
The Sopranos' finale Sunday night left some people calling their cable provider, sure their sound and picture had cut out at the worst possible moment, while some knew the abrupt cutout to black was part of the show and were instead left scratching their heads.
Still others sat there nodding appreciatively, understanding that impresario David Chase had just given convention the finger.
But although the onscreen body count was low?inexcusably low for some?the episode itself was slaying the competition.
According to early estimates from Nielsen Media Research, based on the figures coming out of metered overnight markets in more than 55 large U.S. cities, The Sopranos pulled in at least 8 million viewers yesterday, beating out everything on broadcast television, including the 61st Annual Tony Awards on CBS. (And the numbers will only go up once the final figures are reported Tuesday.)
In fact, in the battle for neighborhood bragging rights, Jersey beat Broadway by a landslide, attracting more than twice as many New York viewers?obviously, people were more anxious to see if it was curtains for Tony rather than see whether Curtains would win a Tony.
Only game two of the NBA Finals on ABC, featuring the San Antonio Spurs' merciless 103-92 beat-down of the Cleveland Cavaliers, looks to have kept as many eyes glued to the screen?barely. The overnight demo showed 7.7 million people tuning in to the game, with the final national number expected to total around 8.2 million.
Keep in mind, only about one-third of this country subscribes to HBO.
But despite the raging numerical success that was The Sopranos' swan song, Chase may have had the right idea by reportedly hightailing it to France and letting everybody else associated with the one of the weirder series finales in history take the heat.
Or the glorious accolades, depending on which camp you're talking to.
At first glance, the words "letdown," "sucked" and "what the..." are sprinkled liberally throughout the various Internet forums where Sopranos fans have flocked to commiserate, fume and otherwise rage against Chase (who directed this episode?his first since the pilot) and his minions.
"Chase just bailed, probably for the aforementioned potential profit of a movie sequel," wrxfanatic opined on one of the many Sopranos forums on televisionwithoutpity.com. "But in the process he failed to complete the story and pissed off most of his loyal viewers. It's not art, and it is insulting to tell people that they're just not smart enough to realize it's art. So add me to the 'f--k you Chase' team; send me one of the t-shirts, and I'll wear it proudly."
Actually, that comment gets at much of what both the harsher and mellower critics of The Sopranos' 86th and final episode had to say.
A large cross-section of the dissatisfied viewers sounded indignant that their favorite show had ended so anticlimactically in order to possibly make way for a feature film (purely speculation, at this point).
And others were just plain ticked off that more didn't happen during that final hour, despite the fact that Chase has never been one for showboat season finales or brown paper packages tied up neatly with string.
Then there are those who wouldn't have minded an open-ended ending, but just didn't like the seemingly random camerawork and the silent credits, the show's final tune?the apropos "Don't Stop Believin'" by Journey?having cut out when the scene did.
"?the cut to a black screen was just the sort of gimmicky ending I would have expected from a first-year film school student who thought he was doing something 'bold and daring,'" BookWoman56 wrote.
"I've never been one of the fans who thought how good the show was depended on the body count, and so I usually dismissed the comments I'd seen occasionally by Chase about how much he enjoyed pissing off the fans. But I regard the finale as a major failure by Chase to write a good ending, and I don't mean one that tied up every loose thread."
Of course, this ticked-off televisionwithoutpity.com visitor also wrote that she felt the series had dragged on way too long?so she's in an entirely different camp all together.
The conspiracy theorists were busy one-upping each other on hbo.com's Sopranos message board, which temporarily went offline Sunday night after outraged viewers flooded the system, taking the network's entire Website down with it.
Guesses ranged from "Don't Stop Believin'" being an anthem for Meadow's ascent to Heaven, because obviously she died at the end, to the (more palatable) notion that it was the audience that was getting whacked. Meaning, it's Tony's world, we were just visiting.
Then there were the people peeved enough to inform the world that they were canceling their HBO, effective Monday.
There are plenty of sympathizers left in Chase's camp, of course?albeit after a few fast-forwards and rewinds to make sure that their cable boxes, satellite dishes and/or DVRs weren't on the fritz and that the creator/executive producer with the iron fist had really intended for that cutout to happen.
The San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman, for one, more or less summed up the entire series when he called the finale "both perfect and annoying," admitting that this may have been the only way for the series to end, despite the fact that even those of us who understood what Chase was getting at wanted more.
Chase "gave a gift to critics who wished that The Sopranos would just end, without melodrama or crisply tied-up storylines, but more like a camera shutting off. And it did."
Tom Shales of the Washington Post called it "the greatest double-take?by the audience?in the history of American television."
(And who would have guessed that such a polarizing series would end up being a great unifier?8 million-plus people at once thinking that their TV had just failed them.)
"These great mythic characters, who have captivated HBO viewers for nearly a decade, are now suspended in space and the national imagination forever," Shales wrote.
But the Los Angeles Times' Mary McNamara felt that The Sopranos' long-suffering fans (six short seasons spread out over nearly a decade?let's see those Jericho fans mailing all those nuts after 22 months!) deserved a better payoff, no matter how cosmically fitting the finale was.
"No, [Chase] didn't owe us any neat endings, nor some sort of final word on the nature of good and evil," McNamara wrote.
"But after eight years, he did owe us catharsis, some sort of emotional experience that would, if not sum up the entire eight years, leave us with something more meaningful than instant panic and lingering irritation. In the end, the art of writing is the art of making choices. Ending a series with the social weight of The Sopranos is not an enviable task, but end it must, and not with the sophomoric gesture of a blank screen."
In any case, the ending that Chase said he envisioned about three years ago got people talking?and voraciously searching the Internet for answers.
According to figures compiled by the Dowd Agency, more people searched Yahoo! yesterday for "the sopranos" than they did for "paris hilton," with searches for "james gandolfini" alone increasing by 3,500 percent.
And then Monday morning came and everything was back to normal: Paris had called Barbara Walters over the weekend, generating more headlines; people were calling their cable companies to complain about actual problems; and, thanks to Chase's anti-ending, Tony Soprano is up and around, somewhere, conducting business as usual.
:gunsmilie:
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