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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Ticked off at Tony

We're two days into the aftermath of HBO's groundbreaking series "Sopranos," and people are still up in arms over the show's ending.

I've never watched "Sopranos," but if my favorite show ended simply with the main character snacking on onion rings, I imagine I'd be ticked off too. Writers and the cast say the ending was "satisfying," but many viewers would disagree.

As the final scene showed Tony and his family eating onion rings in a New Jersey diner, the scene cut to black for 10 seconds and left many in fear that their cable had gone out. The only worse thing imaginable was that it hadn't. And many fans were left feeling the popular series ended unresolved.

Producer David Chase won't comment on the ending and and requested the shows other writers do the same in hopes that viewers will define their own ending, according to USA Today.

However, fans are quick to call foul play.

"I can understand people felling like Chase stuck a middle finger in the face of a lot of dedicated viewers," Rick Porter wrote on the entertainment Web site Zap2It.com.

Are any of you fans of the show and what did you think of its ending?

7 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I've never seen The Soprano's either, but it sounds a lot like some of the compalints for movies like The Birds. For some reason there is this sector of viewers that just seem to demand some type of final and complete resoultion. It's almost as if they don't want to have to bother using their own imagination to come up with ideas as to how things might end up, or how things might keep going for that matter.

3:04 PM  
Blogger Stephanie Netherton said...

Mindy,

I don't remember how The Birds ended. Didn't all the birds just go away? I understand people being irritated with that. I think very little television requires any thought whatsoever to enjoy it. Just look at reality television! That's exactly why those shows are such a hit.

3:08 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

In The Birds, the main characters move slowly out of the house and hop in the car (w/ the caged loved birds I think) and drive away, but we don't know that they ever make it out of town and of course, we never know what becomes of the town either. It's very open ended.

I look at this way, the creators of these characters realize that the viewers have taken the characters into their homes and feel like they know them and so creators are trying to have an ending that allows viewers to each customize their own ending, even if it's just in our imaginations. The downside is that most TV viewers are just too lazy to do it and thus become frustrated.

3:59 PM  
Blogger Stephanie Netherton said...

Oh, I remember that now! That was ridiculous!

And I agree with everything you said. But forget about the fans. If you'd written a show like this and you'd created these characters, wouldn't you want some closure for your storyline?

I can't imagine it to be very "satisfying" as they all say. It's like writing a story and not giving it an ending.

4:08 PM  
Blogger Sammy said...

Chris Jay (who works with Robinson Film Center) wrote a nice little blog about the last episode at http://hippotheque.blogspot.com/

There's a movie version of the Haunting of Hill House called The Haunting with Owen Wilson, Liam Neeson, and Catherine Zeta-Jones. The ending had this real elaborate and dramatic ending where this woman confronted the ghosts and it all ended happily. In the book, the woman just went crazy, got in her car, drove into a tree, and it was over. I like that ending wayyy better.

4:17 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

I'd be willing to put some money down on the fact that they do have an ending in their minds (probably even on paper, tucked away somewhere, hoarding it until it can be auctioned off for insane sums of money on the chance they never have another hit show again, and need to come up with some quick cash. Let's face it, this is Hollywood we're talking about.), they've just elected not to share it w/ the rest of us dopes! :)

4:17 PM  
Blogger Unknown said...

Sammy,

There's an older version of that movie where she does drive into the tree in order to kill herself so that she can stay at the house forever.

5:06 PM  

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