Article published June 10, 2007
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Rest In Peace, ‘Sopranos’
The end comes tonight when HBO pulls the plug
By CHRISTOPHER BORRELLI
BLADE STAFF WRITER
In preparing for this eulogy, I found myself stumbling, fumbling, clutching at failing words. None would do. But whatayagonnado? And so, having failed, having realized no words would give sufficient tribute, I stand before you today, the representative of a family in grief, shamelessly cribbing from the eulogy Charles Spencer, the Ninth Earl of Spencer, wrote for his sister, Princess Diana — a pitiful rip-off, I understand, and certainly plagiarism, but an appropriate scam. Our deceased would have appreciated it, even financed it.
For today, we gather to pay respects to The Sopranos. Boy, this is awkward, though. It is not officially dead yet. It has one hour of life left. But for whom the bell tolls, it tolls this evening, around 10 p.m., when the final episode ever fades to black and HBO yanks the plug. Only then, it is hoped, only after having sat back and considered the depths of its achievement and expanse of its story — once we have decided what it all meant; whether it was tragedy or comedy or the definitive portrait of America so many have insisted — only then will we be a nation in mourning, a world in shock, united not only in our desire to pay respects to this pop-culture milestone, but in our need to do so. Whether it ends lamely or poignantly is hardly the issue. It’s that it ends.
Also, we owe some money.
A lot, actually.
Take this tribute as tribute.
Indeed, today, here, now, I will try to draw some meaning from those six seasons, witnessed, at the peak of its popularity, by 15 million homes each week. For this will not be a senseless death. I will explain why characters so inarticulate came to articulate better who we are than most art has even attempted in decades. Yet after careful consideration of those eight wonderful years of strangulations and shootings, beatings and torture, contract skimming, no-show jobs, asbestos dumping, truck hijacking, gun running, drug distribution, racketeering, and discrete pimping, frankly, I’m a little nervous.
Friends, colleagues, fellow viewers, “members” of La Cosa Nostra (which doesn’t actually exist... but still), informants of all ages, premium cable subscribers, FBI, relatives of the soon-to-be departed — I am at a loss. The Sopranos is the only TV series I have watched every episode of. What will I do on Sunday night? How, oh how, will life continue?
But then, what is a TV series?
Friends, it is people.
First, and arguably most importantly, there is Livia Soprano, family matriarch, who bowed out (natural causes) after season one; the only character who passed unexpectedly (even for the show’s creators), Livia was played by Nancy Marchand, who died of lung cancer in 2000. But before she died, Livia confided something to her grandson, A.J., played by Robert Iler, 14 at the time. What she said would forever hover over the series like a dyspeptic’s curse. Grandma gave grandson words of wisdom: “It’s all a big nothing,” she scowled.
What a lady.
Then she died.
At the heart of The Sopranos were many such moments of painful intimacy, not the shrieking brutality it was known for. That dichotomy was personified by Tony Soprano himself, played by James Gandolfini, a plodding water buffalo in a bowling shirt.
As of last count, he was not among the dead or missing, not yet, but then his comeuppance has been steady. What made The Sopranos fresh, as it’s been said many times, is how ordinary its world appeared, how recognizable. It was the milieu of the Newark suburbs, a constant reminder that what was once local and traditional — what your parent’s generation had built — was now nondescript strip malls, where the only Italian still spoken was “venti,” and that was at Starbucks.
Tony was a mob leader with the usual mob concerns, but pressing were the existential and mundane concerns — Could he live up to his heritage? Could he live up to family? Could he buy his entitled wife a second home? He was rich, feared, and felt like a 300-pound failure. He put them aside, those fears. But they were only replaced by feelings of guilt, questions of loyalty. Tony had the respect of many, but he knew it lacked the gravitas even he himself felt for, oh, the fictional Corleone family. It was not the reality of the past he could not live up to but the popular imagination of what that past was. Just last week, Tony and his sidekick Silvio, played by Steve Van Zandt, are eating in a restaurant, and without a word between them, they recognize they’re dining to the score from Raging Bull and improvise a funny, slow-motion pantomime of its opening fight.
It’ll be their last good time.
David Chase, the show’s creator, set his masterpiece within the universe of The Godfather and Goodfellas and Mean Streets, but the show’s long run allowed everyday pains and disappointments to replace mob hits and become a 21st century litany of what ails us — indeed, those troubles were so frequent, as they are in life (or rather, in Chase’s bleak version of life), that The Sopranos could get away with being a morality play where the writers of the show never delivered judgement. Suicide, infidelity, depression, drug abuse, racism, self-recrimination, homophobia, loving too much, loving not enough, heart attacks, heartbreaks, mental breakdowns — it was merciless.
But about the bad deaths.
Let us give a rollcall of the dead and missing that The Sopranos have deposited at our doorstep. Let us remember Big Pussy, played by Vincent Pastore. He was a rat. He ate a bullet at sea. Let us remember Adriana, played by Drea de Matteo, who was a rat. She ate a bullet, execution style. (Though officially, she’s missing.) Let us remember Christopher, Adriana’s boyfriend and Tony’s nephew, played by Michael Imperioli; he flipped his SUV while listening to The Departed soundtrack but died only after Tony held his nose until he stopped breathing. There was Richie Aprile, played by David Proval, who slapped Tony’s sister and didn’t get to slap her twice. There was Tony’s cousin, played by Steve Buscemi, killed with a shotgun by Tony himself. There was the informant who, by chance, Tony ran into in Maine, while looking at colleges with his daughter; Tony snuck away from the tour and strangled the guy. There was Gloria, played by Annabella Sciorra: she was Tony’s mistress but he would not leave his wife; she hung herself.
Those are the highlights.
As for Tony?
Who knows? I don’t. HBO did not send out screeners of the final episode, wisely. In fact, in the interest of those who have yet to rustle through their TiVos, I will not even tell you who died last week. So the ending is a mystery, but allow me to suggest — does it really matter how The Sopranos ends? Isn’t the best time to consider the ending after the ending has occurred? Would a moral exclamation point, served by Tony’s death or his jailing or the loss of his family, be in the show’s poetic style? More to the point, why bother predicting how it will end? Far more important, what should be honored, is this: here was the rare TV series that chose its demise. HBO pleaded with Chase to keep it going, until the end of time if necessary, but he refused — which was smart.
Normally, a long-running TV show dies only after what could be said had been said many seasons ago. The big stars have moved on, the ratings are down, and the shark was jumped many DVD box sets ago. But, with a few missteps here and there, The Sopranos never became a drag, because unlike the average TV series, it was never open ended.
Not really.
Of course, unlike a novelist or screenwriter, Chase never had a way of knowing how the beginning would look at the end, how the first episode would evolve into the 86th, tonight’s episode; the show, like any series, relied on network executives to renew it with every season, not the steady flow of ideas. But to a remarkable extent, the themes and characters and the tone of the first season have remained consistent through this sixth season. Tonight’s episode, in fact, was written and directed by Chase himself, who wrote and directed the first episode, and only a few others, but it’s largely symbolic.
The coherence was there.
Which is why, bleeped profanities aside, the show’s profitable trip to syndication never felt right. Here was a show you could disappear into — particularly if you gorged on a box set of the DVDs. You needed to watch it in order, to await each installment. And if you did, with no commercial interruptions, you’d begin to think in the show’s cadences, and having stood up when it was over, you felt a bit like you lived in it. That intimacy is closest to an epic novel — which is exactly what Norman Mailer once compared the show with. But even novels, he said, are insufficient to encompass how we live today.
“Americans want large canvases because America is getting confusing,” he said. “It takes something like The Sopranos, which can loop into a good many aspects of American culture.” And so it is that The Sopranos came to resemble, if nothing else, those sprawling serialized novels of Charles Dickens, populated with every contemporary character it could squeeze in, loaded with plot lines that sometimes converged, sometimes dead-ended, and sometimes were left dangling. And as with a great book, I imagine when the series is watched again, in full, from beginning to end, arcs that stayed buried within individual chapters will reveal themselves.
Or will it be remembered, as the former New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote back in 1999, as a kind of “mega movie”? Then, he compared it with Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (16 hours), and The Singing Detective (six hours) and even the original nearly 10-hour cut of Erich von Stroheim’s Greed — but there were only 13 one-hour episodes of The Sopranos in 1999. If his point holds, and to some extent it does, it’s now an 86-hour film.
I suppose.
The sad truth, the part I’m wrestling with here, the thing that’s more depressing than its passing, is that there will never be another Sopranos. I mean, HBO, television, the culture itself, will never have a series like it, a television show that pointed a path to a vast, rich, morally complicated, serial approach. Miss an episode and it’s like reading a novel with chapters ripped out.
The show forced the networks to notice what they hadn’t been doing, and now, from Lost to Heroes, everyone does it all the time. There are fringe benefits to this: the Sci-Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica, that first season of Lost. The Wire, in particular, also on HBO, began in The Sopranos’ wake and has proved just as smartly written and thickly plotted. But ground can never be re-broken.
Tony, sad to say, I’m left agreeing with your Medea of a mom:
It is all a big nothing.
Ahead, Sunday nights — ech.
And so, Tony, Carmela, A.J., Meadow, Paulie Walnuts, Phil the Silver Fox, Big Pussy, the Pine Barrens, the Jersey Turnpike, the nice working women down at the Bada Bing gentleman’s establishment in Lodi (conveniently located) — anyone who survived last week’s New York gangland hit — continue your trajectory, your spiral of death.
Rest in peace. Or pieces.
Whichever comes first.
Contact Christopher Borrelli at: cborrelli@theblade.com or 419-724-6117.
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