The Sopranos: Season 6, Part 2

I knew how The Sopranos ended before I had ever watched a single episode. I knew all about the abrupt cut-to-black that took place at a diner during Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and the ambiguous lack of closure the show ended with. I knew all of this because I was not living under a rock five years ago when the series finale made national news for being so unconventionally abrupt and vague. For the past fifteen months, as I've watched The Sopranos from beginning to end, I've never known what was going to happen next to Tony, his family, his crew, or his rivals, but I always knew the series would end with Tony, Carmella, Meadow, and A.J. gathering for dinner at a small town diner. And while I'd love to have been genuinely shocked and surprised by the now infamous cut to black, there was an undeniable excitement building inside me as the final episode grew closer and closer to that instantly buzz-worthy scene. In a way, knowing what was coming gave me a strange adrenaline rush that I'm sure most people didn't get organically from a Journey song and a diner scene.

Let's back up though. I'm here to recap nine episodes' worth of this show, and that iconic final scene was merely one of hundreds that composed the final stretch of The Sopranos, arguably the most game-changing drama in the history of television. Yet I don't really know what to say about this half season in general. I loved it? It was excellent? All that seems trivial and obvious. It's tough for me to start picking it apart and analyzing its relevance because doing so would open up the floodgates for me to re-visit the entire series from start to finish. You know what? Fine. Let's just jump right into the series in general, its legacy, and any general statements I feel like making on it. In bullet form, even.

• The Sopranos instantly joins The Wire atop my list of favorite TV dramas of all time. This is, admittedly, not so different from the top pairing in many other "best drama ever" lists, but what can I say? I think both shows were phenomenal and so do most other people who have seen them. Mad Men and Breaking Bad are near the top as well, but both of those shows are ongoing and I want to withhold final judgment. I think I still put The Wire above The Sopranos when it comes down to picking one absolute greatest show of all time, but The Sopranos holds many other superlatives, including "most iconic," "most definitive," and "most thematically pure." More on this in a bit.
• If I side with the masses in taking The Wire and The Sopranos as my top two all time dramas, let me run counter to popular opinion with this next statement. I think that, contrary to popular opinion, The Sopranos got better and better with time. If this two-part sixth season is to be taken as one season, then it's easily my favorite of the six. If not, Season 5 may prevail over the individual halves of Season 6 taken separately. A lot of people criticize the show for overstaying its welcome by just a little bit, and many think that the final batch of episodes was a bit aimless overall. I totally disagree, as I found several early episodes to be kind of dull or meaningless on their own, but considered every single Season 6 episode to be a fantastic stand-alone piece. While I generally love ranking the individual seasons of a TV show or the books in a series, I'm honestly a bit stumped here since the seasons are largely just loosely serial collections of episodes and since the series in general just feels like one complete work rather than six or seven smaller chunks that can easily be compared against each other the way that, say, all five seasons of The Wire could be. I'll need to re-watch the series from start to finish some day before I can even pretend to have a preference for certain seasons.
• To reiterate, I need to re-watch the series from start to finish some day. There are too many other shows I've seen and enjoyed that I couldn't honestly say that about once I'd finished them for the first time.
• Back to that "thematic purity" thing. I think that, while many great shows are so many things, The Sopranos is, by and large and above all else, primarily concerned with the moral decay of 21st century America. It's a cynical, cynical show, in the end, and while it's easy enough to sympathize with or root for certain characters, not one of them comes off as righteous or innocent. Violence and crime run amok, obviously, but the show delves far deeper, showing the hypocrisy of mob wives, the entitlement of mob kids, the bitterness and jealousy of elderly, and the overall unawareness of everyone over how horrible they're really being. The more I consider various stories and characters from the show's run, the more apparent it becomes that every single person was acting with his or her own best interests in mind at all times. This was not a show where noble heroes made silent sacrifices, and it was better off for avoiding giving its characters any redeeming qualities.
• Tony Soprano is probably the most complex yet well-defined character I've ever seen. Not only are we given valuable insight to his past and his unfiltered opinions in his nearly weekly therapy sessions with Dr. Melfi, but also we're treated to some pretty intense and symbol-laden dream sequences. There are plenty of strongly developed characters out there; Don Draper is a man with a complicated past, Walter White is undergoing a slow but total moral decay before our eyes, and Coach Eric Taylor was an absolutely unwavering rock for both his family and his football team. But there is no character I've ever seen whose mind we are more readily invited straight into than Tony Soprano.
• For what it's worth, I think the series ends with Tony getting whacked. I've read compelling Internet pieces arguing for various interpretations of the controversially abrupt ending, and creator David Chase has refused to explain anything, claiming that doing so would diminish the message, but also promising that there is in fact a definitive ending and that, at least in his mind, things aren't open for interpretation. Once again though, I don't think I'm straying too far from the beaten path with this understanding of the final scene of the series.

Great season, great series, and an ending that was just fine in my book. Now I only wish I had something to look forward to watching as much as I always did The Sopranos.