David Chase Can Kiss My [cut to black]

Brilliant or uninspired? No matter what you think about it, the series Finale to The Sopranos on Sunday night, which I watched because the Tonys were so interminably boring, was completely unsatisfying to someone like me.

I need closure. I WANT closure. I like plays that have beginnings, middles and ends. This is referred to as "observing the Aristotelian Unities of Time and Place" which is just a fancy-schmancy way of saying that "it makes sense."

Sunday night's closing to The Sopranos did not make any sense. Oh, I "got it" that it was up to me to fill in the blanks, any way I saw fit. I "know" about art, and about how it's "all in the eye of the beholder".

But I have a hot flash for Mr. Chase. TV ain't art. It never was art and it never will be art. That "tv as art" boat sailed at the close of the 1950's when shows like Omnibus and The Bell Telephone Hour started going off the air, to be replaced by hour-long western anthologies and half-hour mindless sitcoms. And why was that? Because the sales departments of networks could charge more for a minute of a successful western or sitcom than it could for an entire hour of high-falutin' "art." That's why.

I have no axe to grind against Mr. Chase. I'm sure it was his best effort. But do you know what? The Series finale to Six Feet Under was 10,000 times more gratifying than whatever it was that I sat through last Sunday night.

I didn't much care for The Sopranos, either as people or as a television series, when it was on. I like it, and them, even less now.

And that includes the horse Mr. Chase rode in on.