The Sopranos

I remember where I was when it happened, in the same way people remember where they were for blackouts and reports of catastrophes and assassinations. I was at my friend Sue's house. We were watching the last episode of the greatest drama in the history of television, The Sopranos. Tony, having seemingly vanquished all his enemies, was taking his entire family out to Holsten's, an ice-cream parlor in Bloomfield, New Jersey. He put a coin in the jukebox. "Don't Stop Believin'" started to play. The man in the Member's Only jacket got up to go to the bathroom. The narrative tension rose to excruciating levels. Was this it for Tony Soprano? Was he going to live or was he going to die? And then, as Steve Perry sang the words, Don't stop!, everything stopped.

The screen went black.

We, Sue and I, joined the throngs of the outraged. We immediately thought we were victims of some kind — at first, of a power outage, oddly particularized to HBO subscribers, and then of the show's creator and maestro, David Chase. He had copped out. He had ripped us off. So unblinking during the seven-year run of The Sopranos, he had saved his blink for the worst possible moment — the last. Over the next few days, Sue and I called each other, using each new interview that Chase gave to the press as pretext for continuing our speculation over Tony's ultimate end. Sue was among those who thought him still alive, forced by his misdeeds to the sentence prefigured at Holsten's: A life devoted to a contemplation of death, in which every man in a Member's Only jacket figures as a possible executioner. I was among those who thought him conclusively dead, based on Chase's comments that "Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," and his disgust at the viewers who "wanted blood," who "wanted to see [Tony's] brains splattered against the wall."

Sue thought that we were in the hands of a master manipulator — "he wanted us to keep talking about it!" — while I thought that Chase was betrayed by the terms of his own creation. He wanted to make The Sopranos more than a show about mobsters, and he found out at the end that if he actually showed what happens to men like Tony Soprano, it would never be anything more than a show about mobsters. There would be blood, there would be brains splattered against the wall, and after seven years that's what people would remember.

So I became one of those people who argued the point of Tony's death while professing not to care about Tony's death, because David Chase let us down. It wasn't the blackout punctuating the finale of The Sopranos that haunted me; it was Chase's artistic failure, his inability to see his creation through. And so, when I watched the finale of Six Feet Under, a show I hardly watched and barely cared about, I judged it inestimably superior to what Chase had done — or hadn't done — with Tony. A show about death, Six Feet Under ended by showing the deaths of all its major characters. It hit a note, and the note resolved everything that had come before. It didn't leave us hanging on the words of Steve Perry. It didn't resort to a trick not so far removed from a declaration that what we had watched for the last seven years had all been a dream.

But that was a long time ago. I have forgotten the finales of Six Feet Under and just about every other show I've ever seen — hell, the inevitable disappointment of the finales of just about every other show I've ever seen, no matter how artfully they were done. But I've never stopped being haunted by the last moments of The Sopranos, because time itself has filled in that final consuming blank. I've been to Holsten's, in Bloomfield, New Jersey, and went there years before Tony Soprano existed. I can even remember, vaguely, that the tables were bolted to the floor. But I didn't know that by the last episode of The Sopranos, James Gandolfini, the actor who created Tony Soprano and made him indelible, had grown so large that he couldn't fit into the booth unless the table bolted to the floor was unbolted — and I only knew that, of course, because James Gandolfini was dead, and people were wondering what killed him.

Indeed, I can remember where I was when I heard that James Gandolfini died, because I can remember the message I got from my friend Sue: "Well, I guess we finally know what happened to Tony. He died." I was right, all along — but so was David Chase. It really is all there, for anybody who wants to watch. There's a man in a Member's Only jacket waiting for all of us. For James Ganodolfini, it was his appetite — not the stranger who loomed as a possible assassin, but the ice cream he ordered with his family. For Tony Soprano, well, such is art that we'll never know. What David Chase did at the end of The Sopranos was a trick, all right, and nobody will be able to use it again. But Chase really was the master manipulator, as my friend Sue insisted. He not only managed to end his show on an exclamation point; he contemplated mortality onscreen in a way that actually felt like death. He did us the favor of refusing to finish off his main character. Life would do the rest. —Tom Junod