Constant Viewer: Woke Up This Morning, With A Cannoli In My Hand

As its final series begins, eulogies for The Sopranos are already pouring in. (See, also, Joe Gandleman's roundup of commentary at The Moderate Voice.) How the series will end is a matter of much speculation. From the viewer’s point of view, however, the answer is self-evident: it will end badly. Badly because however well resolved or unresolved the final episode may leave all the still dangling plot threads, the viewer will nonetheless be as unsatisfied as the reader of a long, absorbing novel is at the final page. These fictional characters, having become real or real enough to him as he followed their stories over the past six seasons, still have lives ahead of them about which he will remain forever ignorant. How unfair.

By way of perspective, The Sopranos isn’t, let's face it, Shakespearian either in its scope or its writing, it isn’t even clearly the greatest television series of all time, and it worked, when it did work (less and less in later seasons), because of the same largely fortuitous convergence of events that blesses any collaborative art that works and especially any film or television program aspiring to art. It had a great theme, great writers and directors, a great cast and crew and, perhaps most important, it had HBO, which had the freedom to let it be what it was without fear of censorship. Remove any one of these elements, some of them entirely beyond the control of David Chase, et al., and the result would probably have been at best only so-so. (The exact same can be said, indeed has been said by William Goldman, about movies. So much for the auteur theory.)

Finally, of course, it stood out in large measure because most of its competition was so bad. But then there has never been a time or an art form in which most of the competition wasn't bad. Even in Hollywood’s "Golden Year" of 1939, most of the movies the studios churned out were crap.

Television remains just another part of show business, emphasis on the word “business.” It’s “vast wasteland” began as a technology that created a new medium for which there was, from the start, insufficient content, let alone insufficient content worth watching. Producers sold shows first and foremost to commercial sponsors, speculating in an age before sophisticated market research and focus groups that sufficient audiences would, in turn, tune in and watch.

The business model of television, in other words, was to sell anticipated audiences to sponsors, not programs to audiences. Cable television and especially premium channels have changed that model, selling product directly to audiences in a manner akin to the movie industry.

That shift and the equally important freedom from FCC guardians of public mores, made shows like The Sopranos possible. Still, with hundreds of cable channels now available, television has again become or, perhaps more accurately, remained a medium in desperate need of more content of any sort, let alone high quality content, than it can realistically hope to produce.

Even in the days of the broadcast monopoly and censors keeping a watchful eye out against airing anything too shocking or controversial, art managed occasionally to rise from the video muck. Writers like Rod Serling and Sterling Silliphant managed to bring wonderfully literate and engaging shows like The Twilight Zone, Naked City and Route 66 to viewers. Imagine what they could have produced with today’s greater creative freedom, vastly larger production budgets and shorter series requirements. (By the end of this final season, The Sopranos will have run 86 episodes in eight years. The Twilight Zone ran 156 episodes in five seasons; Route 66 ran 116 episodes in four.)

So, yes, I shall miss Tony and his two families, even as I have wondered from time to time whatever happened to Tod and Buz and that Corvette that magically traded itself in for a new model every season. (And will whoever owns Route 66 please ferchristsakes bring them out on DVD, even if only in the half-hearted way Naked City episodes have finally been dribbled out?) And, for what it’s worth, here’s my suggestion for the final episode, supposedly still being tweaked: Tony awakens from a dream about being a mobster, only to find himself lying on a psychiatric couch next to his therapist, a one-armed Bob Newhart. Okay, so maybe not.