Tony Wasn’t Whacked, but What About HBO?

 

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December 23, 2007

Television

By BILL CARTER

 

THE scene of the year in television was 10 seconds of black screen.

With a good portion of the nation riveted, David Chase, the creator of “The Sopranos,” perhaps the most talked about drama ever presented on television, conjured up an ending that perfectly matched the show’s cumulative viewing experience: a jaw-dropping, inimitable and uncompromising climax that inspired everything from outrage to wonder, along with endless analysis.

Did the ending in a homey Bloomfield, N.J., diner called Holsten’s really mean to imply that Tony Soprano was about to meet the kind of brutish end he had dished out so many times himself? Was the man who entered the diner and slipped into the men’s room an obvious homage to the famous pre-whacking restaurant scene in “The Godfather”? Then there was parallel parking, along with Journey lyrics and onion rings to parse.

Mr. Chase’s obsessive control over every aspect of “The Sopranos” elevated it to what many saw as art, even as he grumbled throughout the show’s run about being confined to what he considered a demeaningly commercial medium. (Although he did once openly wish that he had saved a classic first-season episode, “College,” for use as a film.) So to Chase watchers it was unthinkable that anything in those final scenes was pure happenstance. Mr. Chase provided only a few hints of illumination in an interview for an authorized book about the series.

He confirmed that he had settled on an ending years before the series wrapped up, one in which Tony and family would be having dinner “and a guy would come in.” He did not spell out what that guy would signify (his interest in spelling out anything is obviously minimal) but he did say, “There was nothing definite about what happened, but there was a clean trend on view, a definite sense of what Tony and Carmela’s future looked like. Whether it happened that night or some other night doesn’t really matter.”

The fact that the ending was so widely and heatedly debated only affirmed the intense attachment that viewers felt for the series. The finale was watched, in its various showings, by an estimated 18 million people: gigantic by cable television standards, and especially so for HBO, which reaches only about 29 million homes. Many more watched the finale of “Friends” on NBC; many fewer were still talking about it weeks and months later.

“The Sopranos” ending is still being talked about, referenced and parodied. And the fallout is still being felt. That black screen perfectly symbolized the black hole that the departure of “The Sopranos” left in the television landscape. What show is going to fill the gap it leaves behind?

That gap is inevitably most noticeable in the lineup of programs at HBO. No network could ever hope to match the extended influence of “The Sopranos,” but only HBO will be judged on how well its subsequent programs measure up.

HBO’s first try at a replacement, a zen drama called “John From Cincinnati,” proved inscrutable (and unwatchable) to most viewers. And that “Mad Men,” an evocative new drama about advertising agencies in the 1960s that ended up on American Movie Classics after HBO passed on it, was identified by Entertainment Weekly as the new show with the most buzz surely galled a few HBO executives.

HBO has always been about generating buzz more than ratings; and for eight years it owned the most buzzworthy show in the business. One of the busiest writers on “The Sopranos,” Matt Weiner, created “Mad Men,” tailoring it specifically for HBO. Mr. Chase spoke up on the show’s behalf. But HBO still passed — a mistake, one of the network’s top executives later admitted.

HBO may never quite be the same without “The Sopranos” and, many critics would say, neither will the rest of television.

 

 

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company