"Made In America"

[YRIsTheBest]

<--------- This emoticon pretty much sums up my feelings about it!

[EricaKane70]

It was terrible and they copied off the godfather with the intense moving segments pulled all together at the end, then the supposed shooter going into the bathroom for the weapon(godfather I) and then tony's daughter coming into the restaurant in a dramatic fashion just before she is shot but she wasn't but it reminded me of godfather III when Anthony's daughter was killed. I actually thought something was wrong with my tv when the screen went blank, but then I read a review on yahootv and it was just a black screen. That ending would have worked had the episode been very high pace and fast moving but it was a dull and boring episode.

[King]

Like I said last week, this show is one of the most overrated and disappointing shows on television and has been that way since the beginning of season three with the exception of an episode here or there and last year's mini season with Tony's shooting aftermath.

Last night had some minor highlights, but in the end, it failed to deliver, as usual. The ending was lazy and uninspired. David Chase is not a good television writer. Plain and simple. Whenever someone calls this show the best show on t.v., I laugh in their face.

[Sylph]

June 12, 2007

TV Writers Were Also Watching 'Sopranos'

By BILL CARTER

After he completed the final episode of "The Sopranos," David Chase told publicity executives at HBO that he was leaving for France and would not take any calls asking him to comment about the ending of his classic television series.

He also said that he had instructed all of his writers and producers to turn down any requests for information about the decisions that had gone into shaping the show's last chapter.

The reason for his resistance became clear on Sunday night when "The Sopranos" ended, not with a moment of final summation, but with a literal blank. The reaction to the stunning last shot of an empty screen has been a mix of outrage among some fans at being left sitting on the edges of their seats, where they had been perched for much of the show's last batch of episodes, and awe among others who have always regarded the show as the most ambitious and unconventional of television series.

Included in the latter group were many people in the same line of work as Mr. Chase, storytellers in the entertainment business.

Damon Lindelof, one of the creators of the ABC hit show "Lost," another series whose viewers have high expectations about quality, said: "I've seen every episode of the series. I thought the ending was letter-perfect."

Like millions of other viewers, Mr. Lindelof said he was initially taken aback by the quick cut to a blank screen and thought his cable had gone out at that crucial moment. He even checked his TiVo machine and saw that it was still running several minutes beyond the end. When he checked the scene again, he said, he noted "the scene cut off right as Meadow is coming through the door and right at the word 'stop' in the Journey song."

He said: "My heart started beating. It had been racing throughout the last scene. Afterward I went to bed and lay next to my wife, awake, thinking about it for the next two hours. And I just thought it was great. It did everything well that 'Godfather III' did not do well."

In an e-mail message sent right after the final scene, Doug Ellin, the creator of another HBO hit series, "Entourage," said: "The show just ended, and I'm speechless. I'm sure there is going to be a lot of heated discussion, but that's David Chase's genius. It's what made 'The Sopranos' different from anything that's ever been on TV. It invented a whole new approach to storytelling that isn't afraid to leave things open-ended, and now the biggest open story line in the history of television."

For David Shore, creator of the Fox hit "House," one of the best touches was Mr. Chase's own refusal to discuss the ending. Mr. Shore said: "Obviously he wants us to speculate on what it all means. Obviously that's what we're all doing."

David Milch, who has created highly regarded dramas like "NYPD Blue" and "Deadwood," said: "It was a question of loyalty to viewer expectations, as against loyalty to the internal coherence of the materials. Mr. Chase's position was loyalty to the internal dynamics of the materials and the characters."

Comedy writers also said they were impressed with Mr. Chase's choices. Chuck Lorre, who created and leads the CBS hit comedy "Two and a Half Men," emerged from screening the final episode and said with a laugh, "This is what you get when you let a writer do whatever he wants."

But he added that he was saying that with admiration. "People just finished watching that show and immediately talked about it for a half-hour," Mr. Lorre said. "That's just wonderful. What more could you want as a writer?"

If any shows feel special pressure from the attention "The Sopranos" finale is receiving, it is current series looking down the road at their expected finales, even if long in the future.

Tim Kring, the creator of this year's NBC hit "Heroes," said, "I have to admit that as soon as it ended, I immediately went there. I don't have an ending for the series yet. I put myself years in the future thinking about what you do when you have viewers with these sorts of expectations. And I think you just have to be true to what you were originally trying to say."

Mr. Kring said he had only come back to "The Sopranos" this season, anticipating the buildup to the ending, and he said he found "the storytelling in the finale a bit disjointed, so that you lost the cause and effect of some scenes." But he said he admired the choices Mr. Chase had made to be true to the nature of his series. "This was a show that always did everything its own way," Mr. Kring said.

For the producers of "Lost," who have declared an official finale in three more seasons, the conclusion of "The Sopranos" carried special weight. "There was immediate blowback for me," said Carlton Cuse, Mr. Lindelof's creative partner on the show. "A sense of fear ran through my veins, thinking that we are going to be in this position," he said, adding, "we know the end is coming in 48 short episodes."

He had admitted to some initial frustration with the ending of "The Sopranos." "But it settled well with me," Mr. Cuse said. "In that blank screen, there was a certain kind of purity in the choice Chase made to make it the fulcrum of the ending."

Mr. Lindelof said that as daunting as it is to think of the expectations of ending a popular piece of entertainment, there was also a bit of benefit. "If you feel that everybody is going to hate it anyway, no matter what you do," he said, "there's a certain liberation in writing it."

[Sylph]

June 16, 2007

Fans Online Sift for Clues in the ‘Sopranos’ Finale

By BILL CARTER

Nearly a week after the HBO series “The Sopranos” itself went to black forever, the debate about what its final scene — in which the screen goes black for 10 seconds as Tony Soprano and members of his family eat in a diner — might really mean has raged on, especially on blogs. Online, fans have either been railing about the “cop-out” of the ending or trying to fill in the blanks of the final episode themselves (or, often, both).

David Chase, the creator of the series, has done little to clear things up, offering only one potentially relevant comment in an interview he granted to the Newark newspaper The Star-Ledger this week. While declining to say whether the abrupt cut to black meant that Tony Soprano had been killed, Mr. Chase said the meaning of the ending was “all there” in the episode.

Quentin Schaffer, HBO’s chief corporate spokesman, said yesterday that Mr. Chase had wanted an even longer duration of blackness at the show’s conclusion. Mr. Chase had wanted as much as 30 seconds of blackness but was talked out of that by HBO executives, Mr. Schaffer said.

Mr. Chase’s silence has led theorists to sift though the episode for clues to Tony’s fate the way some people watch the Zapruder tape of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Among the wilder speculation on the Web: that the man in the jacket who enters the restaurant and sits at the counter in the last seconds is the cousin of the recently killed mob boss Phil Leotardo, and that the two young African-Americans who walk in are the same two who tried to kill Tony in Season 1.

According to Mr. Schaffer, Mr. Chase dismissed both those points in conversations after the finale was broadcast. Mr. Schaffer added that while Mr. Chase was not talking publicly, he has been monitoring the debate about the final episode closely, calling several times a day this week from his vacation hideaway in France. And Mr. Chase has not dismissed some of the Web chatter about other points in the show.

Most significant for “Sopranos” theorists is the identity of a mystery man at the counter. He is identified in the closing credits as “Man in Members Only,” even though, as Mr. Schaffer pointed out, the scene never reveals the brand name of the jacket he is wearing. A previous episode of the series was titled “Members Only.” Theorists have speculated that the brand name was meant to suggest that he is a member of the mob, and therefore a hit man.

The revelation that Mr. Chase had wanted the blackness to extend far longer would seem to further the theory that one of the apparently menacing forces gathering in the restaurant stepped up and turned Tony’s lights out.

Undoubtedly, a longer stretch of darkness would also have fed the now-growing speculation that the final scene was intended to suggest that Tony was about to experience something his late brother-in-law, Bobby Bacala, had prophesized in the very first episode this season: in a scene at Bobby’s lake house, he had speculated about what happens when you die — or get whacked, in “Sopranos” terms.

The scene was reprised in the show’s second-to-last episode, though many of the blog speculators have been getting it wrong when claiming Bobby said that at the moment of death “everything just goes to black.”

Mr. Schaffer said that HBO’s own viewing of the scene revealed Bobby’s exact quote to be “You probably don’t ever hear it when it happens, right?”

That does not undercut the overall conclusion that Mr. Chase was hinting at Tony’s fate with that final scene, which comes just as a bell rings as the restaurant’s door opens for his daughter and the background song “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” hits the words “don’t stop.”

Mr. Schaffer said: “David Chase wanted that black screen moment to be really long. It’s certainly plausible to see that as a reference to death.”

[Sylph]

Gandolfini has "no idea" about Tony's fate

Viewers weren't the only ones who didn't know what to make of the boldly ambiguous ending of "The Sopranos." Some of the stars didn't, either.

James Gandolfini told the Daily News in Friday's edition that he had "no idea" what to think was to happen to his character, the emotionally tortured mob boss and suburban dad Tony Soprano, after the hit series' finale closed Sunday with an abrupt cut to a blank screen.

"You have to ask ("Sopranos" creator) David Chase that. Smarter minds than mine know the answer to that," Gandolfini said. "I thought it was a great ending. You decide."

The screen went black and silent as Gandolfini's character and his family sat down to dinner, leaving fans guessing -- and some complaining -- about the ending's meaning or lack thereof.

Some have suggested that the movements of a man in the background portended a "Godfather"-style shooting. Others surmised that the show, which delved deeply into the domestic life of its mobster protagonist, was simply ending on an everyday note. Chase has declined to explain.

Several of Gandolfini's castmates echoed his praise for the show's open-ended conclusion.

"A conventional ending would have been a fraud," Steven Van Zandt, who played Silvio, told the Daily News.

"Life doesn't have tidy little endings," said Van Zandt, a member of rocker Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band. "Even some great songs just fade out like the last episode of 'The Sopranos.' "