David Chase Goes Back to the Mattresses

'To explain it would diminish it'. Gag.

I've never seen a show have more contempt for its audience than 'The Sopranos' in its final season. From a complete lack of any arc whatsoever ('But that's how life IS!') to the deeply cynical laziness of ending your story with no regard to the characters or their history, Chase has proved time and again that he's completely given up trying to impress or entertain anybody patient or forgiving enough to consume what he creates.

With this interview, David Chase is saying one of two things.
Option A: Tony did indeed get whacked. Randomly in a restaurant, unrelated to any particular thing that he's done. Gee, what a denoument, Dave. An ending worthy of a million mid-90s Tarantino clones and horror movies. The hero finally triumphs ... only to be hit by a bus in the last frame.
Option B: Tony wasn't whacked. That was just a nice onion-ringy family meal at the end of 6 seasons of mafialicious banter. Again, how utterly impressive. End your show the David Chase way: Just unplug your computer while you're writing the screenplay, and turn in whatever Microsoft Word AutoRecover can come up with when you turn it back on.

The more I think about it, the more i'm convinced that the first few seasons of 'The Sopranos' might have been brilliant simply because they *tried*. Those seasons wanted to expand what people thought television, and human beings, were capable of. Five seasons later, Chase lost interest in that and just devoted himself to fucking with us.

P.S. I think I resent that Da Vinci Code reference, too, but I'm not sure why.

Since when is it considered clever in fiction writing to let your audience down?

"Realism" is a poor excuse for a fiction project to be unsatisfying.
Firstly, "realism" and "audience satisfaction" aren't necessarily contradictory concepts. It's all in how you handle the plot and the sequence of events.
Secondly, a fiction audience is in the first place usually looking for a good and entertaining story rather than "realism". Because, you know what? We have non-fiction for realism. Claiming "realism" determines your plot logic in a fiction series seems like an incredibly subjective thing to say to me anyway...

So there's two possibilities for me:

Either the writer was indeed trying to be clever by "subverting TV expectations", and I really hate it when an author shoots a perfectly decent plot in the foot just to make some smartypants point that will be missed / debated by most anyway,

Or I'm reading far too much in a standard, unresolved open-ended ending. In this case, though, the fan backlash really couldn't have been unexpected. The defense is lame, too. "Everything that pertains to that episode is in that episode"? What does that sentence even mean? What about everything that pertains to, y'know, the actual series plotline?

Seriously, IIRC it's not the first time the series leaves plot threads dangling. The "Oh, you just don't get it, that's realistic" defense just bothers me, though. Most conflicts in life do get resolved, for better or for worse.

The bottom line is that Chase chose to end the show that way because he didn't have a real ending -- he had said and done everything that he wanted to do with the Tony Soprano character, and that was it.

But killing off Tony was simply not an option, because it would have changed the nature of the entire show -- bumping off Tony in the finale would made everything else in the series merely part of the progression to Tony's demise. The show was about Tony's life, not about the his death, and the ending was Chase's way of saying that there was nothing more worth saying about "Tony Soprano."

IMDB lists 9 directors and 12 writers for the series , but none of them could come up with an ending that holds some kind of climax or resolution, and none of them felt there was anything "worth saying" about the series or its characters anymore?

The series was about more than Tony Soprano alone to me, anyway. These writers and directors made some of the most interesting and nuanced characters I've ever seen in a TV show, and so it's strange to me that they ended up doing less with them than crappier TV shows did with crappier characters.

I'm not crying about the fact that it ended, it's better to end a series before the quality drops. But claiming your fans just don't "get" your ending when there really isn't anything to get irritates me.

Also, as I said, acting surprised and annoyed about the backlash is bull. Whether you dig the ending or you don't, it must have been blindingly obvious in advance that tons of people were going to whine about the lack of some kind of closure.