This past Sunday, the final installment of writer David Chase’s roughly 90-hour, eight-year meditation on La Cosa Nostra, The Sopranos, aired and I’ve been there for every single minute.
    That was my thing.
    Being from North Jersey, it wasn’t hard to get obsessed about the show. From the opening title sequence we all felt we were in on something. These were our roads and our landmarks. Always in the shadows of the bright lights cast by the big city to the east there was an intimacy that was all our own. By the end of that first hour we knew what we were in on was going to be big.
    This was our thing.
    We knew Silvio’s strip club, Bada Bing where much of the series, including the scene where Ralphie beat his dancer girlfriend to death for getting pregnant, took place is actually a strip club called Satin Dolls. We knew the sporting goods store, Ramsey Outdoor, which the crew took over to satisfy a gambling debt and systematically fleeced and bankrupted is actually a sporting goods store called Ramsey Outdoor. I worked for a year in the same office building where Dr. Melfi was raped. AJ and I attended the same college (I did better than him), just down the road from the state park where Silvio dragged Adrianna by her hair out of the car and murdered her because she was squealing to the feds.
    Graphic? Yes, the show was extremely graphic. Sex and nudity, blood and guts might as well have been named in the opening credits. In spite of this and because of this, for millions and millions of people across the country, the Sopranos was destination television. Indeed, as the series ground on through several seasons more than a few people grew frustrated and threatened to tune out because there was too much talking and not enough wacking.
    This is America. Violence—that’s our thing.
    Tony, Silvio, Chris, Paulie became hugely popular characters; heroes even, while possessing none of the qualities we claim to value. It was clear Chase, the creator of these characters, didn’t like them very much and he went out of his way to force us to hate them, too. Instead we screamed, “More!”
            And so his contempt for his characters became contempt for his audience. Anxiety was the emotion he sought to elicit and he delivered by denying us resolution. Subplots were established and then dropped. Confrontations would build over episode after episode toward a bloody climax, only to be frustrated at the last moment by Chase’s deus ex machine. Another season would end not with a Godfather-like massacre or a taut cliffhanger, but with Tony sitting around a table smiling at the wife he did not respect and the children he resented.
            Did the screen go black in the final scene of the final episode to signify Tony’s own murder?  No. Tony lives on, a small man in a large body with one eye on the front door because of the target on his back; surrounded by friends he doesn’t really trust and a family he doesn’t really love. Why should Tony die? He’s already in hell. You want resolution? Friends starts in an hour.
    That’s not David Chase’s thing.