Warning!!!! SPOILER. Sort of. I don’t actually give away the ending, but if you haven’t seen it, don’t read this post beforehand because I talk about it in general terms and mention some possible endings that didn’t happen. On the other hand, you should feel free to read my predictions from before the start of the season. You’ll be amazed at my prescience. Hahaha.)

[SPOILER]

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The finale makes total sense if you assume that The Sopranos is a comedy. Not just sometimes funny. A comedy. A dark comedy. It has always had a comic structure – we see through the characters’ pretensions – and over the seasons it has generally moved toward being a comedy in substance as well.

That’s not to say that Adriana’s murder was hilarious. And the Big Pussy storyline had the inevitability of tragedy. But the overall premise of the show is explicitly about incongruities — a mobster family with the usual suburban problems, except instead of Timmy hiding the broken vase under the couch, Timmy shoots his babysitter in the head and buries her in five locations. The eruptions of brutal violence are not funny, but they are all the more overwhelming because they happen within a comic framework.

The characters are almost all comic. Tony. Artie. Paulie. Silvio. Janice. Dr. Kupferberg. Ralphie. Steve Buscemi’s Tony. Johnny Sack. Tony’s mother. These are great comic turns, transcendently written and acted. Carmela, on the other hand, is pulled between her desire to have a normal, happy family and her recognition that her family life is built on abnormal evil; her reconciliation with Tony was, I thought, tragic. (Melfi is resolutely non-comic, which maybe explains why she’s one of my least favorite characters.)

So, I imagine the writers sitting around trying to figure out what to do with this semi-last season. They want to give Tony some peace. So, they shoot him in the gut as a way of clearing his head. If Tony is given a second chance, how much of the value in his life will he be able to see? How soft can Tony go? Then we had the Vito story line, which was pure comedy. (And more, of course, because it’s the Sopranos.) “I wonder what would happen if we put one of these guys into a sleepy New England town,” said one writer. “Yeah, and made him gay,” said another. “And can we work the word ‘johnnycakes’ into it somehow?” wondered a third. (This entire conversation would have happened entirely in David Chase’s head.)

And then the writers tried to figure out what ending would shock us. Tony kills Carmela? AJ gets whacked? Furio strangles Tony with his pony tail? Paulie Walnuts is appointed head of FEMA? What final scene would we not be ready for?

When they hit on the idea they went with, the writers must have had a good laugh.

I thought it worked. [Tags: sopranos tv entertainment]

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