Entertainment, TV, Television - Army Times

‘Sopranos’ left fans in the dark

Debate is raging among fans and critics about Sunday’s “Sopranos” finale, a fitting end to one of TV’s most analyzed series.

Some are angry that Tony’s fate was never revealed. Others are content that, as in many of the show’s 86 episodes and in life, its ending was untidy and inconclusive, leaving Tony and his family munching onion rings in a New Jersey diner.

Viewers did tune in: Preliminary ratings from Nielsen’s top 56 cities jumped 42 percent from last week, which projected nationally would translate to about 11 million viewers, its biggest audience since March 2004. Final figures are due today.

As the cast finished a read-through of the final script, “we all kind of sat there,” star James Gandolfini recalled in a March interview. “I think for five minutes nobody said anything. It just kind of felt satisfying. Nobody was like, ‘Whaaaa?’ ”

But that’s exactly the reaction fans felt Sunday. Just as Meadow rushed into the diner, the screen abruptly cut to black for a seemingly endless 10 seconds, leaving some to fear that their cable or DVR had gone on the fritz. And that was that as producer David Chase closed the book on one of TV’s most fascinating families.

“I can understand people feeling like Chase stuck a middle finger in the face of a lot of dedicated viewers,” wrote entertainment website Zap2It.com’s Rick Porter. On the other hand, he added, “who else but Chase would think to end his masterwork on such an uncertain note?”

No alternate endings were shot, so none will appear on the final-season DVD due in October. But a final page of the original script, in which Meadow takes her seat at the table before the episode fades to black, was scrapped.

And though the finale might seem to beg for a sequel, don’t expect one. With the TV series definitively ended, there are no plans for a “Sopranos” movie, HBO says.

Chase declined interview requests and told other “Sopranos” writers not to talk, preferring to let viewers imagine in their own way the off-screen aftermath to the ending he’d conceived three years ago.

“David didn’t want us weighing in on what the ending meant or what it is,” says writer Matthew Weiner.

But theories abounded on the Net and e-mail volleys: The silent ending signaled 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 Tony was indicted. Or maybe his mobster life just went on, now that nemesis Phil Leotardo had been whacked, his skull crushed under the wheels of an SUV.

Viewers had expected a variation on one of these long-rumored ends but got no end at all. So they flooded message boards and HBO’s Web site, which crashed for at least 30 minutes Sunday night with 10 times the usual volume.