Entertainment, TV, Television - Navy Times

‘The Sopranos’ swan song feels bittersweet

Art isn’t easy.

There’s no doubt any short list of TV’s greatest shows would have “The Sopranos,” the HBO landmark that concludes Sunday (9 ET/PT), at or near the top. Greatness, though, can be easier to spot than to watch.

Clearly for many viewers (particularly the hefty percentage who have deserted the show since its ratings peak), this profane, profound exploration of the dark side of the American dream was a show more to be admired than enjoyed. At his own pace, creator David Chase allowed his show to unfold in its own time and its own way, ignoring expectations and breaking conventions as it went. Emotionally and physically raw, alternately funny and horrifying, “Sopranos” is calm when you expect a storm and violent just when you’ve been lulled into a sense of peace.

This season, Chase has used his closing episodes to strip the last vestige of sympathy from Tony Soprano, so incomparably played by James Gandolfini. Tony is in hiding, near defenseless, wallowing in self-pity and self-justification and waiting to see if his crimes and incompetence will come home to roost.

That’s why I’m guessing (and it’s only a guess) Tony survives. As the season has made clear, Tony is not some great tragic figure — and he hasn’t earned some grand “White Heat” finale.

Repellent and attractive in near-equal measure, Tony is a series creation unlike any other. Television had seen flamboyant anti-heroes before — J.R. Ewing being a prime example — and the American cultural landscape is littered with mobsters.

But Tony is a non-hero, the mobster as Babbitt, a banal thug with mother issues who succeeded only because those around him were even stupider or less lucky.

Let the movies offer grand godfathers. Tony was a life-size criminal in a show that paid rapt attention to details of everyday life, from Tony’s tastelessly gaudy home to his contentious marriage with the complicit Carmela (the equally fabulous Edie Falco). The show was firmly grounded in the New Jersey soil, which made its occasional flights of fancy all the more unsettling.

Still, as impeccably produced as every episode may have been, from an audience standpoint neither Tony nor the show was able to support the time lavished upon them. Too many gaps sprang up between seasons; too many story lines went nowhere; too many great characters disappeared with no suitable replacements, starting, sadly, with the loss of the irreplaceable Nancy Marchand as Livia. As for Tony, eight years is a long time to spend with a low-level hood, no matter how brilliantly written or played.

Yet now that Tony’s leaving, we don’t want him to go. He leaves us with memories of a show both hard to watch and hard to miss, that made great demands on an audience and offered great rewards in exchange.

It was art, and that’s not easy to lose.