Whacking the Critics

Nothing will ever beat “The Sopranos” as fodder for critical confusion and excess — not even Shakespeare, who would have loved the Monday morning quarterbacks who tried to figure out its meaning. (Two critics have compared Tony Soprano to King Lear in this newspaper alone, and I’m one of them.) Had “Hamlet” appeared first on HBO, Shakespeare would have been up all night afterward, surfing the Internet to gauge the response to the slings and arrows of his title character’s outrageous fortune.Does anyone doubt that the show’s creator, David Chase, dreamed up his dénouement on Sunday night just to confound his audience and his critics? It seems likely that he devoted much of Monday to chortling over the way his brilliant, unexpected non-wrap-up left several troubling and still-unanswered questions, among them:What caused Alessandra Stanley, the New York Times television critic, to completely misinterpret the episode’s final moment? She definitively stated in Monday’s Times: “Tony remains alive, still in business, his wife and children are safe, but he resumes his criminal enterprise.” In the episode the rest of us watched, the show ended with no such clarity about Tony’s future.How will David Remnick, the editor of the New Yorker, reconcile the fade-to-black ending with his recent comparison of “The Sopranos” to “a sprawling social novel of the nineteenth century”? He told us that Dickens “would have seen a kinsman” in the creator of Paulie Walnuts, but it’s doubtful that Dickens would have concluded “Oliver Twist” with a Journey song and a blank page.And how will Alan Sepinwall, the television critic of the Newark Star-Ledger and perhaps America’s foremost “Sopranos” critic, use his Monday mornings without the latest chapter of Mr. Chase’s murky narratives to deconstruct? Maybe he’ll read a book.For decades, television critics suffered as second-class citizens in a world where scholars and essayists preferred plays, operas, and ballet as an opportunity to expound on grand theories and great ideas. “The Sopranos” changed all that, and gave dozens of pale, miserable video pundits something to slam their fists on the table about. Finally, television had achieved the stature of literature — and did so with humor, bloodshed, and ample amounts of mayhem and nudity.By 10:18 p.m. on Sunday night, Mr. Sepinwall had already posted his interpretation of the episode on his must-read “What’s Alan Watching?” blog. “I don’t consider it a cliffhanger,” he concluded quickly, “something to set up a movie, as I doubt there will ever be a movie (and if there is, it’ll be set in the past). [Chase] did it because he hates the conventions of TV series narrative in general, and putting a bow on things in particular.”Unlike the blog-less Ms. Stanley, Mr. Sepinwall has had plenty of time and space to expound on Mr. Chase’s vision, and his Web site has become the go-to blog for “Sopranos” crazies and, rumor has it, Mr. Chase himself. His interpretation of the ending — that it was Mr. Chase messing with storytelling conventions and audience expectations yet again, as he had been for eight years — made more sense than any other commentary on the episode.But that, of course, didn’t stop the hundreds of would-be George Bernard Shaws, who raced to their laptops after the episode to weigh in with their theories. (My favorite comment was posted on the “Television Without Pity” Web site on Sunday night at around 10:30 p.m. from an anonymous blogger who reported that “my cat is now staring endlessly at the black television screen.”)At his blog “The House Next Door,” the erudite Matt Zoller Seitz (also of the Newark Star-Ledger, Tony Soprano’s daily paper) had — as he often did — a terrific take on the final moment. “The lack of resolution — the absolute and deliberate failure, or more accurately, refusal, to end this thing — was exactly right,” he posted at 12:05 Monday morning. “It felt more violent, more disturbing, more unfair than even the most savage murders Chase has depicted over the course of six seasons, because the victim was us. He ended the series by whacking the viewer.”Smart and insightful, but obviously untrue — as Mr. Seitz and others proved Monday by their ability to analyze and interpret Mr. Chase’s final hour. One of the lasting legacies of “The Sopranos” may be that television criticism belongs not to the old critical warhorses like the Times and the New Yorker, but to the bloggers and mid-level critics who watch television with passion, not disdain. Their reviews and essays embrace the narrative power of television by chronicling it week after bloody week.As HBO defines the future of the medium by mounting serial dramas and comedies — like “The Sopranos” and “Sex and the City” and even, in some ways, “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — it will be the bloggers and insta-critics following closely behind that make it exciting, interpreting and Monday-morning-quarterbacking in ways that have changed the face of criticism. Mr. Chase wasn’t whacking the audience; he was whacking the old-school critical establishment for creating lofty literary expectations he had no desire to fulfill.

Whacking the Critics

Whacking the Critics

More from the New York Sun

Billy Idol Still Has Some Rebel Yell To Give

Jaguar Still Can’t Seem To Turn the Corner

‘10 Kilos’ Gets Weighed Down by Familiar Genre Fare

‘The Marching Band’ Plays a Familiar Tune, But With Spirit and Social Awareness

USS Doris Miller

Johnson Warns Kushner Not To ‘Bet Against’ House Republicans After President’s Son-in-Law Meets With Jeffries

As Buc-ee’s Focuses on Dotting Red-State Landscape With Mega-Gas Stations, Consumer Backlash Emerges Over Trademark Lawsuit

Newsom Signs Bill — Dubbed ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’ by Opponents — To Curb Public Access to Immigrant Aid Advisers

More from the New York Sun

Billy Idol Still Has Some Rebel Yell To Give

Jaguar Still Can’t Seem To Turn the Corner

‘10 Kilos’ Gets Weighed Down by Familiar Genre Fare

‘The Marching Band’ Plays a Familiar Tune, But With Spirit and Social Awareness

USS Doris Miller

Johnson Warns Kushner Not To ‘Bet Against’ House Republicans After President’s Son-in-Law Meets With Jeffries

As Buc-ee’s Focuses on Dotting Red-State Landscape With Mega-Gas Stations, Consumer Backlash Emerges Over Trademark Lawsuit

Newsom Signs Bill — Dubbed ‘Stop Nick Shirley Act’ by Opponents — To Curb Public Access to Immigrant Aid Advisers