The Chicago Syndicate: Sopranos
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Showing posts with label Sopranos. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sopranos. Show all posts

Friday, December 21, 2007

Sopranos Reunion This Weekend

The cast of THE SOPRANOS will reunite on Saturday, December 22nd, to raise money for two former crew members' cancer battles.

Six months after the final episode aired, the Soprano family - James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Jamie-Lynn Sigler; Robert Iler and Michael Imperioli will join up to 20 other cast members at a benefit in New York. The team is reuniting at the Mirage in Westbury, Long Island, to help raise money for two former employees, one of whom is fighting terminal cancer; the other who has beaten the disease but faces crippling medical bills.

Organizer and backstage assistant Jeff Marchanti says of the two anonymous crew members, "(One is) one of our most beloved prop guys, who's been on the show from the beginning. His name is Anthony B., but he wanted to remain nameless. "He's battling lymphoma and nobody knew about it, until a month and a half after we wrapped. Everybody loves the guy because we are absolutely a true family and we're gonna support him in every possible way we can." The other crew member, who is in cancer remission, also asked to remain anonymous.

Saturday, December 15, 2007

Federal Case for Sopranos Sequel

Tony Soprano never had to sing in court. But the brains behind the mobster is ready to take the stand.

David Chase turned up Wednesday in a federal courtroom Trenton, New Jersey, for a trial that will determine whether the Sopranos mastermind got help dreaming up the series from a former gavel-banger.

The outcome, or any financial award, will be decided by a jury of seven women and one man, who were seated during the morning session. Two would-be jurors were given the boot after they admitted to being huge fans of the HBO hit, which, literally, went black earlier this season.

Chase sat at the defense table, flanked by his wife and his legal team.

Robert Baer, who toiled as a municipal court judge in Prospect Park, New Jersey, filed suit in 2002, claiming he's due some serious clams for coming up with key elements of The Sopranos.

A federal judge twice dismissed the complaint on the grounds that the deal between him and Chase was too vague to be binding.

Both times, however, an appeals court overturned the decisions by U.S. District Judge Joel Pisano and reinstated the complaint. The appellate panel did agree with several of Pisano's points, though, and allowed the lower court judge to limit the case's scope.

Per his breach-of-contract suit, Baer claims he and Chase met for lunch in California in 1995 and discussed the idea for The Sopranos. During their conversation, Baer says he gave a thorough debriefing about his days as an assistant DA targeting Mafia types and suggested colorful locales to set the show.

"He proposed the idea about doing the show about the north Jersey Mafia," Baer's lawyer, Harley Breite, told the Asbury Park Press. "He's looking to be compensated for the value of what he did, the services and assistance he provided to Mr. Chase."

Breite says Chase kept in touch with Baer and frequently used him as an expert consultant on questions about organized crime. Chase even sent Baer a draft of The Sopranos pilot to weigh in on, the attorney claims.

Baer also claims to have introduced Chase to detectives on the mob beat. Among his most significant suggestions, Baer alleges, were that Tony and his crew hang out a local pork store and have an older Jewish character as an adviser.

Breite says that when Baer tried to contact Chase after The Sopranos was picked up by HBO, the producer never returned his calls.

According to Chase though, Baer can fuhgeddaboud trying to claim credit for the most honored drama in cable TV history.

Calling Baer's lawsuit "grossly distorted, petulant and self-aggrandizing," Chase says the former judge provided only a "modest service." And while he admits sending the ex-judge a copy of The Sopranos episode in court papers, Chase says the former judge didn't submit "a single suggestion for improvement of [his] script."

The producer has also stated that he had come up with the concept five years prior to his lunch date with Baer and was "keenly aware" of the subject, having spent his childhood in the Garden State.

The plot-poaching trial is expected to last five days.

Thanks to Josh Grossberg

Sopranos Store

Monday, December 10, 2007

Big Pussy is Not Dead, He's in Chicago

When you play a guy on TV named Big Pussy, you have big problems. People yell that name in the most inconvenient places -- in quiet bookstores, in churches, in restaurants. Actor Vincent Pastore, one of the most popular members of Tony's crew on "The Sopranos" before being whacked at the end of the second season, puts it like this: "Big Pussy is my nickname for the rest of my life. My friends even made up a T-shirt. Big Pussy is not dead. He's in Chicago."

That means he's in the musical "Chicago" on Broadway alongside Aida Turturro, who played Tony Soprano's sister Janice in the HBO mob series. Pastore's latest role is in Guy Ritchie's new film "Revolver," where he plays a con man. He's also doing a stint on the new "Celebrity Apprentice," debuting in January on NBC, and he has his own Sirius radio show.

1. What was it like to work with Guy Ritchie in "Revolver"? My Wines Direct DECSAVE

It was unbelievably great. Now Guy, [co-star] Jason [Statham] and I are friends. We're like the Three Musketeers now. When we did the movie, I really listened to Guy. The script was a different type of script for me -- something to bite into and work on. I liked my character because he was different. Not to give too much away, but he's a con man and something beyond that.

2. Were you nervous singing and dancing on stage the first time on Broadway in "Chicago"?

The acting I love. I'll act with a grapefruit. That doesn't bother me. Thank God I got my friends here in New York helping me with the singing and dancing for the show. I get more and more confident with each show. As the shows go along, I improve. Now it's like "Sopranos" go to Broadway with Aida and me on that stage. People are loving it. We come out and there are cheers and people waiting backstage with "Sopranos" stuff for us to sign. I think my friends from the show will come soon. I know Jim Gandolfini is coming. Lorraine [Bracco] is coming.

3. Tell us about your role on "Celebrity Apprentice." How was it being hired or fired by Donald Trump?

Donald is the boss. That's all I can say. ... We signed some crazy contract. If I tell you what happened they take my thumbs off. I can say that one day we sold hot dogs on a New York street corner. Me and Gene Simmons selling dogs. We sold a lot of hot dogs.

4. What did you think of the controversial, fade-to-black "Sopranos" finale?

I talked to ["Sopranos" creator] David Chase about the ending and he said he didn't want Tony to die. People talk about that ending with me now all the time. I figure it this way: If Tony would have went into witness protection, people wouldn't be talking about it that much. David did a good job.

5. We know your Big Pussy is swimming with the fishes, but can't he come back in dream sequences in a "Sopranos" movie? By the way, any news on that front?

To tell you the truth, I think David did that ending to keep it open. David can do what he wants to do now. A lot of the characters are still alive. I don't think Silvio Dante [Steven Van Zandt, who was shot and in a coma] died, either. He can wake up. The movie could be flashbacks of Tony and the guys sitting at the meat store. You could pick it up from Tony's childhood. I'm hopeful. I love those guys.

Thanks to Cindy Pearlman

Friday, November 02, 2007

Sopranos Cigars!


Taking its name from the long-running and award winning TV show, C.A.O. produces its own award winning cigar, the C.A.O. Sopranos Edition. The manufacturing facility is none other than the ultra-modern facility owned by ToraƱo in Danli, Honduras. With facilities such as these and a work force of highly trained torcedores, there's no better manufacturing location in all of Central America. They begin with a superior blending of Cuban-seed Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Dominican Republic long fillers.

C.A.O. Sopranos Assoc Mad, Pack Of 10

Friday, October 19, 2007

David Chase Takes on Angry Sopranos Fans

Were you at all surprised by the reaction to the final episode?
DAVID CHASE: No. We knew there would be people who would be perplexed by it and shut their minds to it. This just felt like the right ending.

Did you expect people to be so pissed off?
We didn't expect them to be that pissed for that long. It's one thing to be deeply involved with a television show. It's another to be so involved that all you do is sit on a couch and watch it. It seemed that those people were just looking for an excuse to be pissed off. There was a war going on that week and attempted terror attacks in London. But these people were talking about onion rings.

If you were expecting plot twists like Furio coming back from Italy to whack Tony and marry Carmela, you were obviously barking up the wrong tree.

There was so much more to say than could have been conveyed by an image of Tony facedown in a bowl of onion rings with a bullet in his head. Or, on the other side, taking over the New York mob. The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people's alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie, and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ''justice.'' They wanted to see his brains splattered on the wall. I thought that was disgusting, frankly. But these people have always wanted blood. Maybe they would have been happy if Tony had killed twelve other people. Or twenty-five people. Or, who knows, if he had blown up Penn Station. The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted his blood, after cheering him on for eight years.

You know there were many people who thought the end was brilliant.
Sure. But I must say that even people who liked it misinterpreted it, to a certain extent. This wasn't really about ''leaving the door open.'' There was nothing definite about what happened, but there was a clean trend on view — a definite sense of what Tony and Carmela's future looks like. Whether it happened that night or some other night doesn't really matter.

Have you heard the elaborate theories about what really happened? Like the one that says you were re-creating The Last Supper?
The interesting thing is that, if you're creative, there may be things at work that you're not even aware of: things you learned in school, patterns you've internalized. I had no intention of using The Last Supper, but who knows if, subconsciously, it just came out. If people want to sit there figuring this stuff out, I think that's just great. Most of them, most of us, should have done this kind of thing in high school English class and didn't.

Are they wasting their time? Is there a puzzle to be solved?
There are no esoteric clues in there. No Da Vinci Code. Everything that pertains to that episode was in that episode. And it was in the episode before that and the one before that and seasons before this one and so on. There had been indications of what the end is like. Remember when Jerry Toricano was killed? Silvio was not aware that the gun had been fired until after Jerry was on his way down to the floor. That's the way things happen: It's already going on by the time you even notice it.

Are you saying...?
I'm not saying anything. And I'm not trying to be coy. It's just that I think that to explain it would diminish it.

Why do you think people are so intent on getting an answer?
I remember I would tell my kid and her cousins bedtime stories. Sometimes I would want to get back to the grown-ups and have a drink, so I would say something like, ''And they were driving down the road and that's it. Story over.'' They would always scream, ''Wait a minute! That's no ending!'' Apparently that need for finality exists in human beings. But we're not children anymore. Especially watching a show like The Sopranos that's got sex and violence.

You've said that you knew what the final scene would be for several years before it happened. What was the seed of the idea?
As I recall, it was just that Tony and his family would be in a diner having dinner and a guy would come in. Pretty much what you saw.

So you just had to get them to the diner?
Yeah. But it's not that difficult. Whatever else happens, people are going to have to stop and eat.

Was Journey there from the beginning?
I had thought about using ''Don't Stop Believin''' a couple times over the course of the series in a background way, but I had forgotten about it until my nephew sent me a mix tape with the song on it. I knew it would be controversial, because Journey has a reputation that most people wouldn't associate with our show.

Did you consider other songs?
When we were scouting locations, I actually took several songs in the van and played them for the crew. I'd never done that before. When the Journey song came on, everybody went, ''Oh no! Jesus, David, what are you thinking?'' But then they started to say, ''You know what? This is kind of good. This is a great f---ing song!''

What about the black screen?
Originally, I didn't want any credits at all. I just wanted the black screen to go the length of the credits — all the way to the HBO whoosh sound. But the Director's Guild wouldn't give us a waiver.

Did you think of it as a prank — people thinking their TVs had gone out?
I saw some items in the press that said, ''This was a huge 'f--- you' to the audience.'' That we were s---ting in the audience's face. Why would we want to do that? Why would we entertain people for eight years only to give them the finger? We don't have contempt for the audience. In fact, I think The Sopranos is the only show that actually gave the audience credit for having some intelligence and attention span. We always operated as though people don't need to be spoon-fed every single thing — that their instincts and feelings and humanity will tell them what's going on.

It seems part of what upsets people is your ruthlessness. The idea that nothing ever changes or gets better.
I disagree. People have said that the Soprano family's whole life goes in the toilet in the last episode. That the parents' whole twisted lifestyle is visited on the children. And that's true — to a certain extent. But look at it: A.J.'s not going to become a citizen-soldier or join the Peace Corps to try to help the world; he'll probably be a low-level movie producer. But he's not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not become a pediatrician or even a lawyer, but she's not going to be a housewife-whore like her mother. She'll learn to operate in the world in a way that Carmela never did. It's not ideal. It's not what the parents dreamed of. But it's better than it was. Tiny, little bits of progress — that's how it works.

Do you believe life has an arc? Or is it just a bunch of stuff that happens?
Is there a pupose, you mean? Everything I have to say about that is in the show. Go look at Albert Camus' Myth of Sisyphu. It's all there: Life seems to have no purpose but we have to go on behaving as thought it does. We have to go on behaving toward each other like people who would love.

So, it's still worth trying?
Of course. What else are you going to do? Watch TV?

(Interview by Brett Martin. Excerpted from The Sopranos: The Complete Book)

Monday, October 15, 2007

The Sopranos Bobby Bacala is Heading to Las Vegas

Steve Schirripa, Bobby ‘Bacala’ Baccalieri from The Sopranos’, will be hosting Vegas Va-Voom Variety Spectacular at The Comedy Festival on November 14th at 9:00 PM. It’s a variety show full of music, comedy, and surprise guests. Musical performances include Las Vegas headliners the glitzy-glam duo Zowie Bowie, Vegas perennial favorite “The Lon Bronson Band,” and Schirripa’s own sexy Vegas Va-Voom showgirls.

The Comedy Festival will run from November 14-17 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and is produced by HBO and AEG Live. For ticket information please log onto: www.thecomedyfestival.com.

He'll also be on The Tonight Show onTuesday, October 16 promoting his appearance at The Comedy Festival.

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

"The Sopranos" are Moving in on "Chicago"

Aida Turturro and Vincent Pastore, two of the more prominent supporting players on "The Sopranos," will join the cast of the long-running Broadway musical revival on Nov. 19, producer Barry Weissler announced Tuesday. Wolfgang's Vault - Jazz Memorabilia

Turturro, who portrayed Janice Soprano (Tony Soprano's tough-minded sister), on the HBO TV series, will play Matron "Mama" Morton in the Kander and Ebb musical. Pastore will play Amos Hart, the hen-pecked husband of chorine Roxie Hart in the show. The actor appeared as Sal "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero on "The Sopranos," which end its cable television run in June.

"It's going to be a lot of work, but I'm sure we're going to have a lot of fun," Pastore said in a telephone interview.

The actor said the "Chicago" producers reached out to him several years ago, but he was doing more work in Hollywood at the time. "Since then, I have come back to New York and bought a house in the Bronx," Pastore said. "I think it will be a nice job for me to stay in New York and do some theater."

Pastore hasn't sung or danced on stage since the beginning of his career when he did community theater. "It looks like a tough schedule, but I will get used to it," he said. "This is my first Broadway experience."

Asked what kind of preparation he was undergoing, Pastore said, "I'm sleeping a lot. I'm trying to get my body adjusted to performing at night. I'm sleeping later and staying up later.

"I'm in love with the play. I've seen it again a few times and I'm anxious to do this. And I'm working with some great people," said Pastore, who will begin rehearsals in early November.

Both Pastore and Turturro will appear in "Chicago" through Jan. 13. The musical, which is approaching its 11th year on Broadway, is playing at the Ambassador Theatre. The show currently features Adriane Lenox as Matron "Mama" Morton and Rob Bartlett as Amos Hart.

Thanks to Michael Kuchwara

Saturday, August 25, 2007

The Sopranos Season 6 to be Released 10-23-07.

Last year, Tony Soprano cheated death when he was shot by his now institutionalized Uncle Junior. While Tony continues to muse about his second chance at life, he faces a myriad of immediate, stress-inducing crises at home, at work and from the law. Tony's wife Carmela plans for a future she's not sure will arrive, and son AJ and daughter Meadow find that adulthood holds its own surprises. Meanwhile, at work, Tony comes to doubt the allegiances of many of those closest to him - no one, not Paulie, Bobby, Silvio or even Christopher is above suspicion. The clock is ticking. Time is running out. But on who?

Features:

* Making "Cleaver": Behind the scenes of Christopher's horror film
* The Music of The Sopranos: Creator David Chase, cast and crew discuss the songs from the show
* Four audio commentaries with cast members Dominic Chainese, Robert Iler, Arthur Nascarella, Steven R. Schirripa and Stevie Van Zandt

Thursday, August 02, 2007

The Sopranos - Season 6, Part 2

The Sopranos - Season 6, Part 2 is the highly anticipated conclusion of the long-running HBO series surrounding mob boss Tony Soprano, and his life with both "families". The highly publicized conclusion of the program's final season made the news recently, and HBO Home Video and Warner Home Video are bringing this home on October 23rd. There will be a 4-DVD set and HBO will release hi-def versions on both the HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats, too.

The 9 episodes, which are nominated for 15 Emmy awards, will be joined by several extras, including 2 Featurettes and a number of Commentary Tracks: Making "Cleaver": Behind the scenes of Christopher' s horror film The Music of The Sopranos: Creator David Chase, cast and crew discuss the songs from the show Four audio commentaries with cast members Dominic Chainese, Robert Iler, Arthur Nascarella, Steven R. Schirripa and Stevie Van Zandt.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Mob Candy

Friends of ours: John Gotti, Carlo Gambino
Friends of mine: Soprano Crime Family

Tony Avella, a City Council member and founder of the Council’s Italian-American caucus, was home in Whitestone, Queens, watching the local news when a segment about a new magazine caught his attention. Inaugural Issue of Mob CandyThe magazine was called Mob Candy, its publisher, Frank DiMatteo, told the camera in what he calls broken Brooklynese, and its focus was the gangster lifestyle.

“Everyone likes to read about Mafia stuff; that’s why ‘The Sopranos’ did so well,” said Mr. DiMatteo, a balding man with forearms that display Popeye-like tattoos of a Marine Corps bulldog and the names of his three children.

Mr. Avella, whose father’s family came from the Naples area, was incensed by what he saw as pejorative stereotyping of Italian-Americans. In the past, he has spoken out against “Shark Tale,” the animated film in which criminal sea creatures speak with Italian-American accents, and attacked PBS for naming a series “The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance.”

On July 20, Mr. Avella took to the steps of City Hall to protest Mob Candy, accompanied by representatives of several Italian-American groups. He held a copy of the cover of the magazine’s premiere issue, which depicts a scantily clad, Glock-toting moll. “The magazine glorifies criminality,” he said. “It’s offensive to Italian-Americans and it degrades women.”

The other day, sitting at the bar of a Court Street pizzeria in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, just blocks from where he was born, Mr. DiMatteo pondered Mr. Avella’s position.

“Am I glorifying crime?” asked Mr. DiMatteo, 51, whose grandparents, like Mr. Avella’s, come from southern Italy. “Maybe I am, but I’ve had a lot of great teachers: The Post, The News, The Times, the History Channel, Hollywood.”

Mr. DiMatteo, who previously distributed the pornographic magazine Screw, said his new magazine offers “an entertaining history lesson.” And he added, “I ain’t making nothing up here.”

The 92-page first issue, which costs $4.99 and should be on newsstands by Thursday, offers an article about the legacy of Carlo Gambino and a history of a half-century of what the magazine describes as Mafia rats. There is also a pull-out poster. On one side is a collage of photographs of John Gotti; on the other, an image of the cover model, wearing a lace-up bustier and garter belt, toying suggestively with a grape Blow Pop. “That’s the candy side,” explained Tyrone Christopher, 39, the magazine’s co-founder.

Despite the publication’s glossy appearance, all the articles in the first issue were written by its two creators, and there are no advertisements. In the opinion of Mr. DiMatteo, the attention Mr. Avella called to his magazine may change that situation. “Ultimately,” he said, “it helps.”

Thanks to Emily Brady

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Mobster Presidential Campaign Contributions

Rudy Giuliani's campaign revealed that the actor in The Sopranos who played Paulie Walnuts donated to them, even though Rudy is a Mafia-buster. It's pure self-interest. The more real mobsters who are off the street, the more jobs there are for the actors who play them. Thanks to Argus.

Sunday, July 22, 2007

15 Emmy Nominations for The Sopranos

A month after fading abruptly to black, “The Sopranos” received Emmy nominations today for best dramatic series and for the performances of five of its principal actors, including James Gandolfini and Edie Falco.

When the 59th Annual Emmy Awards are presented on Sept. 16, “The Sopranos” and “Heroes” will be competing against three other nominees for best dramatic series: “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC, “House” (Fox) and “Boston Legal” (ABC).

In the category of best actor in a drama, Mr. Gandolfini, whose Tony Soprano may or may not have survived the series’ final act, will square off against Hugh Laurie of “House”; Denis Leary of “Rescue Me” (FX); James Spader of “Boston Legal” and Kiefer Sutherland of “24” on Fox.

In addition to Ms. Falco, the nominees for best actress in a dramatic series are Sally Field for “Brothers and Sisters” (ABC); Kyra Sedgwick, “The Closer” (TNT); Minnie Driver, “The Riches” (FX); Mariska Hargitay, “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” (NBC) and Patricia Arquette, “Medium” (NBC).

Among all series, “The Sopranos” was the most nominated, with 15, including nominations for best supporting actress for Lorraine Bracco, who played Tony’s psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, and for Aida Turturro, who played his sister. Michael Imperioli, who played Tony’s nephew Christopher, whose death in a car accident was hastened by Tony, was nominated in the category of best supporting actor.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

Replacement for "The Sopranos" Found

The Hollywood Reporter said Wednesday a four-part movie about Saddam Hussein's life will air on HBO. It makes perfect sense that the cable network would buy a mini-series about Iraq. There's nothing HBO likes better than a shoot-'em-up with no ending.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Tony Soprano's Blackout

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

What rough beast is David Chase riding?

He seems to have understood the mood of his nation better than anyone since Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola forecast the fate of the American empire in The Godfather. And he has world leaders mouthing his dialogue, day and night. Here is Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, in The New York Times yesterday: “There are two mentalities in this region,” he said. “Conspiracy and mistrust.”

Baghdada-bing.

The rest of the world was muttering about Tony Soprano’s final blackout, but Mr. Maliki proved once more that David Chase has been battling for something worth fighting for. What do I mean, battled?

Try David Chase himself, as interviewed cathartically and perceptively by the hardest-working man in Sopranos land, Alan Sepinwall, the TV critic for Tony Soprano’s end-of-the-driveway hometown paper, The Star-Ledger: “No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” Mr. Chase said. “We did what we thought we had to do.”

He had completed his story, but he was giving us a gift in the last scene: He was telling us more. What happened in the four last minutes was plenty of information, and not of the conspiracy-theory type: We got to see the world as Tony does, suffused with anxiety and some amusement and apprehension. It took David Chase eight years to get Tony in and out of therapy, and he was improved about as much as a patient can be improved, maybe 2 to 5 percent.

“It felt like ginger ale in my skull,” he told Dr. Melfi in the first episode. The Sopranos ended up as it began—not with a bang, but an anxiety attack.

Only this time it was ours. This time we blacked out.

“I was shocked by the ending,” said Peter Bogdanovich, the movie director and film historian who played Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, Tony’s therapist’s therapist. Mr. Bogdanovich said he had shot another scene that didn’t make the final episode, in which he was comforting an exhausted, bereaved Dr. Melfi.

“It ends at that moment because that’s his life,” said Mr. Bogdanovich. “He’s anxious about getting blown away, the F.B.I. is going to indict him, Syl is going to die, everything is insecure and tense. It kept going, and the insert shots kept making you feel it was the last thing he was going to do. Endings, endings, endings. The little things in life are the last thing you are going to do. In fact, that’s his life.

“He didn’t give you what you expected—instead of a Hollywood ending,” Mr. Bogdanovich said, and so the viewer was left with “any number of imaginings, so you ask, ‘What the fuck happened?’”

“David has been consistent by doing everything with a vengeance he was not allowed to do on network television, so he gave you a very ambiguous ending,” he continued. “Which is not what the American audience is used to.”

The entire business history of American television has been a conspiracy toward two ends:

a) the resolved ending, generally happy;

b) destroying ambiguity.

Life and art weren’t supposed to jibe when it came to commercial entertainment. It’s not that David Chase was the first guy to come up with ambiguity and moral relativism on TV, but he may have done it with the most vengeance of any television writer since Rod Serling.

You may have noticed that the guys in the safe house where Tony was hiding were watching an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s a 1963 episode called “The Bard,” and it was written by Rod Serling, the patron saint of television auteurs. In it, a failed playwright summons William Shakespeare from the dead to write his TV pilot for him. Shakespeare, needless to say, sells it, then is compromised and crushed. On Mr. Chase’s soundtrack, you could hear the agent lecture the writer: “The television industry today … is preoccupied with talent, looking for quality … the television writer is a major commodity.” Television writer … commodity. It is the voice of the network slaughterer.

Now the tabloid writers are mad at him. They wanted the show to splatter. As John Candy and Joe Flaherty used to say on SCTV, they wanted it to blow up real good. Mr. Chase inspired the ire of yahoo nation by bagging and dumping what he wanted to avoid: The dark bedtime-story end of The Sopranos was in great demand, and he provided it—splattt!—under the wheels of the Phil Leotardo’s Ford Expedition.

But he also provided the first really grown-up summation in the history of American television: The subjective shot of Tony experiencing the American influx of diners at Holsten’s restaurant was news, as was his inglorious humanity. The final shot of Tony before the black, if freeze-framed, is a human image more photojournalistic than dramatic. If you have that particular device, take a look at Tony, the woolly mammoth in freeze-frame before the ice age, another human in anxious abatement in the Age of Ambiguity.

“It is the most subversive television series ever because it makes you like the monster,” said Mr. Bogdanovich, who was still mulling the last scene. “You don’t know what you’re waiting for. It’s the perfect use of suspense. You are trapped, not wanting anything to happen, but wanting something to happen. It’s very vicious. You’re left with any number of imaginings. What the fuck happened? Which shows you’re bloodthirsty also.”

We saw the two things that were preoccupying Tony: the one unambivalent relationship of his life, the adoring Meadow, his only true believer—she decided to become a lawyer when she saw her daddy taken away in cuffs!—and the assassins around him.

The Chase Gang gave us all the information we needed in the hour: indictments, threats, business, A.J., Carmela, Janice, it was all wrapped up. I was always certain that someone was going to clue Carmela in on the murder of Ade, but it didn’t happen. When Carmela entered Holsten’s, she entered in long shot, and her friendly, reassuring smile to Tony was casual and loving, but quick. A.J. entered with what looked like a potential assassin, his effective twin. But it was Meadow who received the Hitchcockian treatment of threat: Would she be able to park? Was she about to be locked in by assassins? Would she make it across Broad Street, on which she seemed to be in as much jeopardy as was Janet Leigh in Psycho?

“Anybody who wants to watch it,” Mr. Chase told Mr. Sepinwall in The Star-Ledger, “it’s all there.”

The Sopranos could have made it in the Clinton years, but it could only have become the deeply troubling comedy it was in the Bush era. Not because of the White House so much, but because of the viewer’s complicity in the dirty brew of power that flowed from this White House. Not because of the war, but because of the public sense of responsibility for this war.

“Oh,” says Carmela when she’s trying to talk A.J. out of joining the army, “you want to get your legs blown off?”

“Always with the dramatics,” he says. But not really.

Earlier, at Bobby Bacala’s funeral, A.J., who truly did seem to relax and inhabit his own body once more after his yellow S.U.V. exploded, had a peroration for the commercial landscape the show inhabited: “America,” he said, “is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling and come-ons for shit they don’t need and can’t afford?” Paulie mocked him and descended into a Norm Crosby routine.

But David Chase fought for and won a strange moment of pure insight into the American process. It was romantic, bleary, filthy, piercing. It was as much a comedy of American sobering up after 9/11 as Dallas was a comedy of America getting drunk on the Reagan years. But Mr. Chase fought a battle and won: He created a last shot on television that was one of the best close-ups in movie history, the snapshot of Tony taking in American ambiguity: the Boy Scouts, the killers, the gangstas and the one person toward whom he had little ambiguity. Like the final image of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, he captured all the intimate uncertainty of his age, in a room that could have been heaven or hell, but with good onion rings.

It was, so far, the best last episode in TV history—better than The Mary Tyler Moore Show or All in the Family or Seinfeld, despite all the screaming about it from plotmongers who wouldn’t have been happy with anything short of the conflagration from the end of Scarface or Tony whacking Dr. Elliot Kupferberg before he entered witness protection. Paradox, moral relativism, internality. All the stuff that network television has battled and ejected in the past 60 years—except in a very few instances—is the essence that David Chase brought to his 86 hours. David Chase’s enduring triumph in American television is that he embraced ambiguity and looked for poetry in the Bush administration.

Paulie Walnuts thought he had seen the Virgin Mary, and Tony mocked him; but in fact, Tony had seen the other side of mortality as well, and almost was cajoled by Cousin Tony—a spectral Steve Buscemi—into entering that big, well-lit house in his coma dream, after Junior shot him. But he didn’t, he re-entered the living and went on. That was, he knew somewhere, his task, and it’s why the cozy, dark ordinariness of Holsten’s restaurant in Bloomfield, N.J., was a terrifying but immensely moving way station.

Orson Welles once said that “Every story essentially has an unhappy ending. If you want a happy ending it all depends on where you stop telling it.” David Chase’s triumph was that he had the balls to stop telling it right h

Thanks to Peter W. Kaplan

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

We Get No Such Thing as An Soprano Ending

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

We get a basket of onion rings, hailed by Tony Soprano as Jersey's best.

We get shifty-eyed diner customers, one of whom (whoa, look out!) just shuffled off into the bathroom.

We get a 25-year-old Journey song on the jukebox.

We get Meadow's abysmal parallel parking effort, reminiscent of a teen's first driver's test, outside the diner.

We hear the diner's front door open, and now our hearts are pounding and we're gripping our chairs waiting for what happens next.

And we got a spooky blank screen.

Did the cable just go out? Come on, who's sitting on the remote?

Nobody's sitting on the remote. The cable didn't go out. The greatest show in television history just stopped.

As it turned out, creator David Chase was just toying with us. He'd sooner subject himself to the kind of fate received by Phil Leotardo earlier in the episode (crunnnnch!) than provide a neat and tidy conclusion to the Sopranos.

Sure, we knew Sunday's much-anticipated finale wasn't going to tie up all loose ends.

Nobody should have expected the crazy Russian who Christopher and Paulie Walnuts chased in the snow a few years ago to turn up again.

We shouldn't have expected to see Tony pay a price for ordering the hit on Ade.

We shouldn't have expected to learn what happened to, say, the nutty Goth son of the late Vito Spatafore.

Fine. But let's cut to the (David) Chase: Does Tony live or die?

Does Meadow find her family dead once she finally manages to park her car? Is she killed herself? Or does she simply walk in, take a seat and enjoy Jersey's finest onion rings with her family?

And what about that psycho cat who kept staring at Christopher's picture earlier in the show? That has to come into play somewhere, doesn't it?

Of course not.

The best we can figure is, Tony will be indicted. (If he lives, that is). But what about Silvio? He's toes-up in a hospital bed. Is he a goner? Or does he make the same sort of miraculous recovery from bullet wounds that Tony did?

I liked the last Sopranos episode, but it left me empty, and because of an interruption, it took an extra long time to discover the resolution, or rather that there was no resolution.

My 5-year-old daughter emerged from her bedroom halfway through the episode, still wired from a long day at Holiday World, unable to sleep. This was just before Phil's head got smashed. Needless to say, the television had to go off and the DVR had to go on. My little girl fell in the arms of my wife, who looked at my distraught facial expression and tried hard to keep from laughing. The end of the Sopranos would have to wait until Caroline was back in bed.

But even then, we were still left waiting for an ending that never came.

Thanks to John Martin

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

The Sopranos Don't Stop Believin'

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

The songwriters of Journey's power ballad "Don't Stop Believin"' were "jumping up and down" when they learned a few weeks ago it had been licensed for use in the final episode of "The Sopranos." But even they couldn't believe how it would prove so integral to one of the most memorable final scenes in television history.

"It was better than anything I would have ever hoped for," said Jonathan Cain, Journey keyboard player, who watched at home with his wife and family.

Tony Soprano chose the song after flipping through a jukebox at a New Jersey restaurant where he dined with his family. The song played in the background as ominous characters flitted about and, right as Steve Perry was singing "don't stop," the HBO series did exactly that, for good. The ending infuriated some fans, amused others and intrigued all.

Cain, who wrote the song with Perry and Neal Schon, didn't know how it would be used when they agreed to the licensing. Cain kept the fact that it was going to be in at all a secret, then watched the episode with his family.

"I didn't want to blow it," he told The Associated Press on Monday. "Even my wife didn't know. She looked at me and said, 'You knew that and you didn't tell me?"'

Journey released the song in 1981, and it reached No. 9 on the singles chart. It has taken a life of its own since then, often reflecting the attitude people had toward Journey itself. "Don't Stop Believin"' brings back fond memories for many, is unbearably cheesy for others.

It's easy to imagine Tony Soprano, back in the day, taking a young Carmela to a Journey concert.

The Sopranos Don't Stop Believin'David Chase, creator of "The Sopranos," has an eclectic musical taste. He's curated two songtrack albums for his series, and made music a key part of the stories, particularly as the ending credits rolled. It's possible "Don't Stop Believin' " was part of the elaborate inside joke he made of the final episode.

It's also possible he found the end of the last verse too hard to resist: "Some will win, some will lose," Perry sings. "Some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on ... "

"Don't Stop Believin' " has been featured in a several television and movie scenes. It crept onto an iTunes top-10 list when, during the same week, it was on Fox's "Family Guy" and in a romantic scene on MTV's "Laguna Beach."

Chicago White Sox 2005 World Series ChampsSports teams have adopted it, too. After the Chicago White Sox used it in 2005, Perry sang it at the parade to celebrate the team's World Series victory.

Cain, who has a 13-year-old and twins aged 11, said the songwriters are careful about how they license the song, and have resisted several advertising campaigns. They debated its use in the film "Monster" with Charlize Theron but, in the end, "she's too cute to say no to," he said.

He was a little nervous Sunday when, as he watched with his children, the mob boss Phil was shot and viewers heard his head crunched as it was run over by an SUV. But he loved the final scene.

"It was very smart writing," he said. "I always love movies where you don't see the guy whacked. You wonder whether he's going to get whacked."

It could help Journey's visibility, too, as it did for singer Nick Lowe when his song "The Beast in Me" was used over the closing credits for "The Sopranos" very first episode. There had been some speculation that Chase would return to it for the finale.

"A lot more people knew Johnny Cash's version (of 'The Beast in Me') and this put Nick's version on the map," said Jake Guralnick, Lowe's American manager. "Nick's version is a lot more vulnerable."

Cain said it indicated that a wish he and Perry had -- that their songs would have a long life -- was coming true.

"It puts our feet in the cement," he said. "We're a staple in the American music culture. Like us or not, we're here to stay."

David Chase Speaks on The Sopranos Finale

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

In that scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid song) with no resolution.

"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.

Some fans have already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. "I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.

"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."

Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."

(Earlier in the interview, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the '60s.)

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.

Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9. "If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "To me, that's Tony."

Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?

"I'm the Number One fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"

One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox. "It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."

Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies. "It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."

Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:

-After all the speculation that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.

"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," says Chase of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.

-Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.

"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "The majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."

Also, the apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn't true.

"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."

-I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."

-Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony? "I think Butch was an intelligent guy, he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."

-Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, Tony killed at least, one if not both of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.

Thanks to Alan Sepinwall

Cast of The Sopranos Cheer Final Episode

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

Hey, you got a problem with how "The Sopranos" wound up? Take it up with Christopher, if you dare.

"I think it's a great ending. It's a good way to go out," said Michael Imperioli, who played Tony's nephew, until he got whacked this season.

Imperioli and fellow cast members told reporters they were pleased with the finale as they walked the red carpet at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Sunday. "We're all heartbroken. We could go on forever. Me and Edie Falco wanna die on the set," Tony Sirico said, sporting his character Paulie's trademark silver wings.

The characteristically shy James Gandolfini, who played New Jersey mob boss Tony, was mum on his thoughts on the ending. He sported a beard and sunglasses and was sweating in the muggy South Florida weather as he smiled and waved to the large crowd of fans that gathered for his send-off.

Lorraine Bracco's character, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, didn't appear in the series finale. Melfi abruptly terminated Tony's therapy in last week's episode. "She ended a strong confident woman and I loved that," Bracco said at the cast party.

Steven Van Zandt, who played Tony's consigliere Sil, said cryptically of the finale, "We're not sure it's ending."

Series creator David Chase's dangling ending seems primed for the big screen. Although there's been no serious talk of making a film, "a couple of years from now, who knows?" Van Zandt said.

Arthur Nascarella, who played Carlo on the show, also didn't rule out the possibility of a future for the show. "Wait three years and get back to me," Nascarella said.

Thanks to Kelli Kennedy

Top Ten Surprises in 'The Sopranos' Series Finale

Top Ten Surprises in 'The Sopranos' Series Finale10. Paula Abdul shows up as celebrity judge, thinks the Sopranos are singers

9. Bada Bing strip club changes into bingo parlor named "Bada Bingo!"

8. Pauly Walnuts reveals hair coloring routine after signing exclusive contract with Just For Men

7. Tony comes out of the shower to find it was all a dream and he's actually just a fat guy from New Jersey

6. Dr. Melfi reveals she's actually a podiatrist

5. Bob Barker neuters Tony

4. Tony seated next to Tuberculosis Guy on flight to witness protection program

3. Ugly turf war with The Altos and The Baritones

2. Rosie O'Donnell makes guest appearance as Tony's long lost twin brother

1. Tony's psychiatrist says he can't go to prison because of "medical condition"

Monday, June 11, 2007

Tony Soprano: Our Favorite Murderer

I'm bummed for a lot of reasons about the end of "The Sopranos." I'll miss Tony's invincible life force, and the shambling way he pulls late-night snacks out of the refrigerator. I'll miss Carm's shrewd emotional casuistry, and Meadow's fight to make a clean life, and Artie's weird unkillable marriage, and Paulie's utter lack of self-insight, and Dr. Melfi's half-sexy, half-unnerving voice. I'll miss the Bada Bing and Satriale's and that great opening sequence, the drive through stratified class layers until we arrive at Tony's vulgar McMansion. I'll even miss poor little lost A.J., who, God help him, not only tried to commit suicide, but discovered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But mostly, I'll miss the show's absolute and perverse amorality. In the age of Bush, how am I going to survive without my weekly double shot of ethical ambiguity?

The genius of "The Sopranos" has always been that it presents two apparently contradictory realities simultaneously, like one of those illustrations that looks alternatively like a vase or a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Its shtick is that it is a show about an American family just like ours -- who are also a bunch of coldblooded murderers whom according to even the laxest moral standards we should loathe. And the king of these monsters is, of course, our dear old Tony.

And he is our dear old Tony. We try to loathe him, but we can't make it stick. Not for very long, and not really at all. We identify with him too much. We feel for him. In a weird but undeniable way, we actually love him. Because even after he murders his relatives, or whacks some terrified kid who's pissing in his pants, a few minutes later he bobs back up, the original and literal whack-a-mole, the same old crinkly-eyed Tony. Tony is just Tony, as real as you or me -- and a hell of a lot more real than just about any other character on TV. We know him too well not to love him, this careworn family man damaged by his cruel mom, this dad trying to raise his kids and keep his marriage going, this hardworking guy who just happens to have this unusual job that involves killing people. He's our favorite murderer.

This puts us in a deliciously uncomfortable position. Loving Tony, like loving Hitler or Osama bin Laden, is not something we're supposed to do. In one episode, Tony callously murders his nephew Christopher -- then in the next reveals his most wounded, deeply sympathetic side, wrapping his arms around his suicidal son while groaning, "My baby, my baby." Neither of these is the "real" Tony, for there is no "real" Tony -- there are a multiplicity of Tonys, and at every moment he is free to choose. "The Sopranos" is existentialist TV: To paraphrase the legendary French capo Jean-Paul Sartre, Tony's existence precedes his essence.

"The Sopranos" is built not just on moral ambiguity, but moral obscenity. It achieves this by graphically depicting the most brutal events, while suspending all judgment about them. This holds true for the good guys and bad guys alike. Actually, there are no good guys. FBI agents are icy zombies. Priests are corrupt and confused. Psychiatrists are backstabbing pedants, trotting out neat phrases like "sociopath" that illuminate nothing. Married men are only as faithful as their options. Married women are manipulative and self-serving. Human behavior of any kind, from adultery to blackmail to murder, has no transcendental meaning. If Tony Soprano can strangle somebody and then return to checking out a college campus, it doesn't mean he's a madman. It's what he does.

"The Sopranos" wasn't the first mass entertainment to challenge the unwritten (and sometimes written) moral codes laid down by our national entertainment nannies. Film noir flirted with reversals of moral and narrative expectation. The '70s saw a wave of revisionist westerns and war movies. And many TV shows have pushed the envelope. But David Chase's creation represents the most decisive break ever with pop culture's punish-evil, reward-good rules.

Tony may die Sunday night, but if he does, his death will not represent "payment" for his sins. Whether he lived or died was just a matter of fate. Even Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," which brilliantly subverted traditional moral judgments -- and was attacked for glorifying criminal violence -- was not as nihilistic as "The Sopranos." The film's famous final shot, in which Michael Corleone, now completely and irrevocably alone, broods bitterly as his command to kill his older brother is carried out, implied some kind of cosmic justice: As ye sow, so shall we reap. In the universe of "The Sopranos," Michael would have brooded for a few minutes, then called up his goomah, done a few lines and partied. And then gotten depressed again a few weeks later. And then gone out to eat.

The sheer duration of "The Sopranos" helps to explain its oceanic approach to narrative and morality. Since the writers are not confined to a two-hour story, they aren't under pressure to make their stories mean anything. And the fact that most of the main characters have had a fictional life -- the entire show is 80 hours long! -- pushes the form toward the picaresque. There are dozens of little climaxes but no big plot hinge. This deepens the show's contingent, arbitrary, lost-at-sea feeling. Like the beautifully realized characters in John Dos Passos' great, insufficiently appreciated "USA" trilogy -- an achievement that led Sartre to call Dos Passos "the greatest writer of our time" -- the characters in "The Sopranos" wander aimlessly about, bump into obstacles, and eventually fall down.

For me, and obviously for many viewers, the amorality of "The Sopranos" is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. Growing up, I hated the bogus quasi-official morality promulgated by popular entertainment -- in movies, but especially in TV shows. I couldn't stand the fact that the Good Guys always won and the Bad Guys always lost. I groaned at the two-bit narrative semiotics employed by Hollywood hacks on shows like "Dragnet" -- the "maniacal" laughter of a villain, a hero's "noble" profile, all accompanied by message music piped in by some dreadful cosmic DJ.

In "The Story of the Bad Little Boy," Mark Twain viciously sends up the Sunday school tales he was forced to read as a child. "Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim -- though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books," Twain begins. "It was strange, but still it was true that this one was called Jim." Jim, Twain tells us, didn't have a sick mother, "who was pious and had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at rest but for the strong love she bore her boy." No, his mother was "rather stout than otherwise, and she was not pious; moreover, she was not anxious on Jim's account. She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss." Twain then goes on to relate how Jim did all kinds of horrible things, but instead of being caught and punished, he blamed them on other people and laughed coarsely. Finally, "he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature. "

Give or take a detail or two, this is the Tony Soprano story. But of course there's more going on with "The Sopranos" than just a satisfying reversal of bogus moral strictures. Its goal is not just to tear down pious, mom 'n' apple pie subjects like the family, but to use that destruction to wake us up to the quiet violence and repressed mayhem that haunt our own oh-so-respectable lives. The existence of Tony Soprano, whose combination of lovableness and explosive violence makes him an utterly familiar enigma, makes our own lives stranger and scarier and bigger.

And this is one reason why the corrosive moral ambiguity of "The Sopranos" speaks to us. Like Tony Soprano at the start of the series, America is a little stressed these days, a little anxious. On the surface, everything is fine. Under our devoutly Christian leader, we are all highly moral. We have right and God on our side as we fight the evildoers. Except that, well, we've been feeling kind of weird. And, to tell the truth, we have a few skeletons in our closet.

Somebody whacked some of our crew, and we were scared, so we whacked Iraq. Just like Tony ordered the hit on Adriana. Steps were taken, as Sil would say. Except it turned out there were some unexpected consequences. We basically killed an entire country, and a whole lot of Americans, and people are dying all the time. And what are we doing? Nothing. We're going to the Bada Bing. We're having dinner at Artie's. Same old same old. Everything's fine. It's just fine.

Except that it's wearing us down, having this strange war that no one thinks about, and this president who keeps preaching about good and evil and how we're the greatest country in the world and why we have to keep fighting this "war on terror" that no one understands. And it's hard to say anything back to him because he's really prickly and self-righteous. It's kind of like having a really mean, manipulative mom -- the kind who says, "Take the knife out of the ham and stab me here!"

We're trying to act like nothing's wrong but all this stuff is working on our minds. Nothing they tell us about right and wrong seems to make sense anymore. It's all self-contradictory. They told us all terrorism is evil, but it seems like some terrorist acts are more evil than others. Like this Turkey deal. Some Kurdish separatists just set off a bomb outside a shopping center in Turkey's capitol, Ankara, killing six innocent people. The Turks want to cross the border into Iraq and wipe out the terrorists. But we don't want them to, even though we cited a terror attack against us as justification for invading a country that didn't even have anything to do with the attack. What's up with that? They tell us lying is wrong. But after Lewis Libby was convicted of lying to federal investigators, the same people who were screaming the loudest about America's moral decline and the need to embrace transcendent values are now raging that it didn't matter because no crime was ever discovered. What's that about? It's all confusing, and the pressure is building up, and we're starting to get these anxiety attacks. And there's no Dr. Melfi in sight.

Art serves a cathartic function by exposing the unspoken, the repressed, the taboo. In this case, the taboo is our moral code -- a rigid, black-and-white, self-righteous insistence that what we are doing must be right and no one must question it. In Bush's America, this code has become singularly oppressive. But it predates Bush. It's the way we simplify the world, the story we tell ourselves to make sense out of life's senselessness.

Among its many other achievements, "The Sopranos" has allowed us to mock that frozen certainty. For seven years, it has been a saturnalia of ethical meaninglessness. It has given us a precious breather from sanctimony, a holiday from the tyranny of right and wrong. It has thrown us into the big, blue, endless sea and let us swim. It's scary being out in the middle of the ocean, no horizon in sight. But it's liberating.

And now that "The Sopranos" is over, we'll have to find other seas to swim in, other stories to reflect our lives. Stories that are bigger and darker and truer than the ones they've been telling us, and the ones that we tell ourselves.

Thanks to Gary Kamiya

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