by Jared Stroup

Created on: August 23, 2008   Last Updated: September 13, 2008

David Chase's "The Sopranos" (and the Controversial Ending)

After viewing the overwhelmingly appreciated HBO series "The Sopranos" in its entirety, I realized early on that I was watching it the way it was meant to be watched: with as little interruption as possible. This allowed me to see it as a whole, which revealed piles of intensity and a steady thread that may have escaped the weekly viewer; this is one of the many advantages brought on by the advent of television on DVD. Also, I was able to evade the usual conundrum of having to wait seven days to see what happens; I only had to wait until my next portion of leisure time to continue (or conclude), which, in many cases, meant a trilogy of episodes in a single sitting (a highly preferential viewing experience).

No matter the amount of stereotypes conveyed throughout the series (Paulie and Sil, come to mind, albeit comically) Tony Soprano is the mafia equivalent to Spider-Man; he defies caricature, and clich, by exuding basic human problems. He may be ripe with appalling characteristics, but he always manages to evoke a spark of humanity, allowing the viewer to analyze him from a distance, yet still by sympathetic towards his plight. In short, he's an anti-hero and one of the few (if not first) to be garnished that title and still claim the lead in an enormously successful television series. With the introduction of "The Sopranos" to the television catalog, away went the presuppositions that the little screen characters were destined to remain in the two-dimensional world, and the drama displayed be only a shade of what you get with the more evolved forms of entertainment (literature, film, and theater). "The Sopranos" single-handedly evolved television, and despite many people's reservations towards the shows no-holes-barred intensity, this is a fact that can't be ignored and deserves to be, ultimately, widely appreciated.

In the risk of sounding redundant, I will not go into synopsis-type details of the show's essential storyline; it's something that has been virtually unavoidable since the show's premiere. It's a mob show where the characters deal, mostly, with mob-related problems, but more importantly, with familial problems; problems that anybody, no matter their relations with organized crime, can relate to. The brilliant hook is that it's about a mobster who goes to therapy to deal with his mother's unbearable stranglehold over his life; at least at the beginning. By the third season, it has simultaneously

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