The Sopranos series finale sparks outrage

Sep 02, 2008 6:01 PM by Cynthia Boris

Posted in Entertainment / Television

So-So Sopranos

Given a full day of hindsight, to register the distaste with how the highly successful HBO series The Sopranos chose to end its eight year run in June 2007, let's look at several things:

HBO is a pay network. The channel normally reaches the type of audience numbers fourth-place NBC posts on their worst night.
Paris Hilton is topic 'A' in entertainment circles -- and after Sunday's night's airing, variations of web searches using "the Sopranos ending stunk" dwarfed search engines hits, thereby knocking Hilton's name from the top of the search list.
Series finales rarely please. And that, number 3 on the above list, is why no matter what creator David Chase did with his final foray into the world of Tony Soprano and his kin, audiences would be displeased.

But this has honestly taken on an entirely new dimension of series-ending loathing. Even non-viewers of the show know about Soprano and his family and their effort to make peace or thoroughly enjoy the life their patriarch's vocation of organized crime brings each of them. So to see, after an epic journey of character development (and often times destruction) to find the family of four sitting at a diner peacefully eating a meal made more than a few fans so livid, Wikipedia had to shut down its Sopranos page. All the negative entries that followed HBO's rolling Sopranos credits forced the network to shut down its website Sunday evening. Prior to those final credits, as the family Soprano sat reflective, there was almost 11 seconds of black screen. As a film fan, and believing that The Sopranos is at its best more dramatic than 60 percent of the movies out there, you can see how the blank screen idea could work. But, knowing how passionate fans are about a beloved program, to send it off in such a way, it looks like Chase found his own way of killing Tony Soprano.