Actually. Love to brag here, but I imagined it. The show wouldn't end, it would just dangle. That is what the show always did.
But here is why. The show always was pretty meta about narrative. This whole last season was about not wanting to do this damn job, just wanting to get out of it.
There is a sense in which the Philistines are right only they, should have been right all along... They never guessed that this was always the show. They are right to complain about the show but that is only because they only caught up with how much the show hated, despised its audience. That was the genius of the show. What they didn't realize is that this is a show that specialized in poking a finger in the eye of the audience. From beginning to end Chase hated his audience, despised it, and the pleasure of the show was how much he hated people like us who intellectualized the show, and people like "them" who thought the show was just about gangsters.
Audience, he hated you. Always! He hated our expectations of suspense and narrative arc. He hated our glamorization of the gangster life. That was the brilliance of it. It was meant to be lousy television! Or perhaps anti-television. Very, very funny. The joke was always on us. A very Baudelairian joke.
Personally I do prefer "the Wire", hell I prefer Buffy the Vampire Slayer, my nomination for the best television ever. But part of that is because the Sopranos reminded me a little too much of my own family, the gestures, the violence, the hatred of education and the demand for it, the bigotry, the gambling, the nightclubs, the narcissism. That was certainly my family before they escaped from Saratoga and Schenectady. So I don't completely trust my judgment of preference for BtVS over the Sopranos. The Sopranos made me wince too often with recognition. And I am talking about the everyday conversations and not the deliberate "gross-out" scenes.
Sopranos was certainly the best anti-television to appear on television.
Jerry
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