Okay, so it wasn’t like the big Northeast blackout back in August 2003. That’s when the lights went out on 40 million people and the final tab for lost business and melted ice cream was somewhere north of $8 billion. But still, it wasn’t pretty when TV screens went dark last Sunday at 9:59:59 pm. Eleven million people shouted, “What the fuck?” and then groaned with the realization that David Chase had meant what he said. “The Sopranos” was really, truly over.
Eight years, 86 episodes. That’s one hell of a lot of content. Even if you kept the pit stops to a bare minimum, watching the whole thing nonstop on the tube would take more than three and a half days. Translate the show into print, and you’d have a boxed set about the size of Anthony Trollop’s Palliser novels, the legendary six-volume series about an upper-class family in Victorian England that every literature major means to read someday.
No wonder, then, that we feel like we’ve gotten to know some dozens of people – Tony, Carmella, their extended families, Tony’s Mafia cronies and rivals, his psychiatrist and her colleagues, FBI surveillance teams – rather well. Unlike just about anything else on television, there’s been enough time for a set of characters to say lots and lots of things, only some of which are tied to the plot or are immediately revelatory. People mumble, get confused, lie, confess, contradict themselves, make jokes, are boring – all the things that people in the off-camera world do all the time but which characters on camera almost never do, in large part because our warp-speed world has induced mass attention-deficit disorder and created a public attention span so short that we were already bored by the end of the mini-blackout with which director David Chase announced the end of his epic series.
But by insisting on taking the time to tell a story fully and completely, “The Sopranos” has allowed us to rediscover something that our perfection-seeking culture has all but forgotten, namely that lasting change in human behavior almost never happens. Now and then Mafia don Tony, with the help of his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, almost manages to rein in his rage and his sociopathic tendencies, but never entirely, and never for long. After years of rationalizing her marriage to a career criminal, Carmela Soprano almost manages to extract herself from her compromised life – but in the end, the rewards of being first lady in local Mafia circles are too good to pass up. Daughter Meadow almost makes it out of this tainted nest into a career as a human rights lawyer, but instead becomes engaged to another Mafia offspring and dedicates herself to defending the rights not of the downtrodden but of her own Mafia father. Son A.J. almost becomes an aware and sensitive human being, but instead sells his emerging soul for a new BMW and a movie production job arranged by his father.
Honoring her professional obligation to a client, Dr. Melfi plays it straight almost to the end, but finally she is unable to withstand the ridicule of her colleagues and acts out her own humiliation on Tony. Christopher, Tony’s nephew, almost succeeds at being sober and insightful, but ultimately fails at both; Janice, Tony’s sister, almost manages to get past a brutal childhood, but invariably winds up re-enacting it with her own children.
As might be expected after eight years and 86 episodes, much has happened. Marriages, divorces, births, deaths, breakdowns, breakthroughs, successes, failures. No one has stood still. Everyone has been through adventures and traumas both large and small. And yet, on the last night, as Tony, Carmela, and A.J. sit in a diner and Meadow burst through the front door to meet them, the only real difference between the first time we met them and this moment is that they have become more themselves than ever.