Michael Bierut’s “Everything I Know About Design I Learned from The Sopranos” is an especially fun read on The Morning After the end of the Sopranos.
Even more entertaining are the reviews encouraging you to cancel your HBO subscription. More reviews here. And here.
It’s funny to hear people bitch about the end. There are lots of people saying it was lazy and lacked creativity, but in the same breath they fire off all the possible endings they envisioned.
Isn’t a large part of creativity about the unexpected? If it was predicable it wasn’t creative. If it was formulaic it wasn’t creative. if it was obvious is wasn’t creative.
I think last night’s show was one of the most creative finales I’ve ever seen. The show may be over, but it didn’t end. Or did it? That’s creative.
BradM
on 11 Jun 07I agree. The ending was great that it wasn’t expected. My wife was so angry. At first we thought our Satelite kicked out! We both jumped up and yelled, “No!!!” but we all know it was the show.
(Spoiler coming up for the movie Seven)
Another great ending was the movie ‘Seven’. The wife died! It wasn’t expected at all! It was great! I did a quick definition search on Creativity and you find “the ability to transcend traditional ideas into new ideas”. Sounds good to me. Looks like they did their jobs.
Plus, we can now look forward to a movie! Well, we can all hope.
Dennis
on 11 Jun 07A lot of people cite back to that flasback conversation in the previous episode between Bobby and Tony. Where they say something about “once you die, its just goes black”.
Sounds like a pretty plausible theory to the ending considering all the momentum being built. The only thing that throws it off is the song selection that kept pushing this different concept.
JF
on 11 Jun 07Yup, the “once you die it goes black” scenario is a likely possibility.
It could have gone this way: The guy at the counter was waiting for the whole family to arrive so they could witness the horror of Tony’s point blank execution.
Since Meadow was late, the guy had to inconspicuously kill some time so he went into the bathroom (which was beautifully lined up with Tony’s seat). Then Meadow enters. The whole family is there.
Then the guy exits the bathroom, uses the short bathroom hallway for a bit of cover, walks right up to Tony, POP, black.
But who knows! It forces us to be creative. And that’s what’s so creative about it.
DC
on 11 Jun 07You also wouldn’t expect to see purple monkeys fly out of Tony’s ass, but that doesn’t make it a good ending. I thought my TV broke. A piss-poor effort riddled with not-so-sublte car commercials and political blathering.
Anonymous Coward
on 11 Jun 07DC: Stop interjecting. Who said it was “good”? Jason just said it was “creative.”
brad
on 11 Jun 07I never saw The Sopranos but this all reminds me of Peter Hoeg’s novel “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” which was an amazing piece of writing and storytelling. Nobody liked the ending though, because it was so inconclusive. But life is like that more often than not; you don’t get everything tied in a neat bow at the end.
DC
on 11 Jun 07AC, What is the point of creating crap? Creativity for its own sake is a worthless endeavor.
--Josh
on 11 Jun 07Creative or not, it wasn’t entertaining – and that is why we watch the show. This whole last season they needed to read your design articles/chapters about epicenter design and start from the core that the show needed to first and foremost be entertaining.
Adam
on 11 Jun 07I truly enjoyed the ending and thought it was a fantastic way to end the show. Instead of following the same old boring Hollywood formula, David Chase delivered a creative, and in my opinion realistic conclusion to a great series. I can’t stand these cheesy and predictable shows/movies that Hollywood seems to continuously produce. Why does an ending need to be happy or sad? I found the unpredictability of it all to be refreshing and exciting. Like life, the show goes on and its up to us to figure out whats next.
Marcus
on 11 Jun 07I have to agree that the ending wasn’t entertaining at all… it felt like a cop out to me. It was written as a cliffhanger ending to a season, not the series. Sure, you can look at it as the writers attempting to leave the rest of the story up to the audience, but the last show is certainly a bad time to switch formats. The last scene was shot so awkwardly too… focusing the viewer’s attention to each of the likely would-be hit men.
If this was supposed to have been Tony “going all black”, a single sound effect could have sold it.
I ultimately found it to be lazy… or you could look at it as honest. “We didn’t know how to end the show, so we just stopped.”
JF
on 11 Jun 07I like Kev’s theory in the subtraction comments:
Go back and watch. Every time the door opens, we go to “Tony-vision” – that is, we see who comes in the door from his point of view. Right as Meadow is running through the door, we see her from Tony’s POV. It’s at this moment that the screen goes black, which felt so abrupt that I can’t help but feel that we witnessed Tony’s end exactly how he did.
ke
on 11 Jun 07I kept thinking about it afterward… if we saw Tony get popped in any other way, it would have been a let-down. Nothing would live up to 6 seasons worth of build-up short of getting that black screen.
As far as the comments about it being lazy.. do you seriously think Chase et al didn’t spend months writing through every possible scene that the series could end on?
If you want to talk about mixed-emotion, “let-down” endings, read 1,000+ pages worth of Infinite Jest.
Dennis
on 11 Jun 07Six Feet Under’s ending was probably one the better endings to an HBO show in recent memory. It had a ton of closure and still felt creative and stayed within context of the show.
David
on 11 Jun 07I loved the ending. I think it would be a really interesting psychologically study to compare the reactions of people who tend to be positive versus negative and hyper critical. My bet would be the first group loved it and the latter group hated it. My girlfriend and I also both jumped up and swore when the screen went black. Then when the credits came and we realized we’d been had we both started laughing. We thought it was a wonderful ending. I find it amusing how so many people were upset at the ending, and cannot enjoy that we are allowed to imagine the ending we want. What could have been more perfect?
David
on 11 Jun 07p.s. It’s also really interesting how some people are convinced that there was an ending and that Tony was whacked. Chase clearly played it so we could see it either way. There was NO ending other than what we want to make it. And for me that’s a great ending.
Mark Gallagher
on 11 Jun 07I don’t think it is “creative” or “original” to end a long running tv series with no defining ending.
And cutting to a black screen after building a lot of tension, that was clever ? I don’t think so.
I agree it’s an ending that lets you use your imagination, but that’s a pretty easy ending to write.
I love the show and thought the entire last season was great, but the ending was not creative.
Dennis Eusebio
on 11 Jun 07http://weareonlyhuman.com/Arts_and_Entertainment/story/346/not_giving_the_sopranos_finale_a_chance
Luigi Montanez
on 11 Jun 07Here’s my take on it:
Tony and family didn’t get whacked, we did. The audience. After watching this family for 8 years, we were whacked, and it ended abruptly and silently, just like it does for any wiseguys who got killed. We weren’t allowed a tidy resolution because, well, those who get killed don’t get tidy resolutions either. It just ends for them in an instant, and that’s that.
Queen of Suburbia
on 11 Jun 07At least it wasn’t as bad as the Gilmore Girls ending….on that show they didn’t decide to end it until after they’d shot the last episode of the series!
LS
on 12 Jun 07I don’t pay for a six pack to get sober, and I don’t pay for HBO every month to “use my imagination”.
I have to take the negative side on this as well. The “see black” theory makes me feel a little better but to tell you the truth, I didn’t see that. The screen looked like the directors middle finger in the form of a 50”, blank, Plasma screen.
This “let’s leave it to their imagination” stuff is BS. When you get right down to it, for better or worse, we don’t watch TV to exactly exercise our imaginations. How would you feel if you popped open a cold one at the end of the day & took a big swig only to find that the contents this particular bottle/can had been replaced with black coffie in an effort to sober you up?
Seriously, I haven’t felt that let down since Inspector Gadget ended without ever showing the rest of Dr. Claw.
Christopher Fahey
on 12 Jun 07Luigi, above, is correct. Kev’s theory at Subtraction is wrong and based on a mistake: The last shot is not, as Kev claims, from Tony’s point of view, but from our POV.
The audience got wacked.
JF
on 12 Jun 07Christopher: You’re right. I watched the end again last night and it wasn’t from Tony’s POV. They went right back to him before the black. We were wacked!
DW
on 13 Jun 07The ending was disappointing. I have no problem using my imagination, and if that was the point, I could have decided to not watch the finale before it aired. I could have decided that I would just make up my own ending before seeing what David Chase could come up with. But that’s not what we do with character-driven stories. We want some form of closure. Every mystery doesn’t have to be solved, but this was clearly a cop-out. It is possible to have been a creative ending with more of a conclusion. Other TV writers have been doing it for years.
DW
on 13 Jun 07Sorry, I meant I could have made up my own ending and never watched the series finale.
This discussion is closed.