It's Called Telling A Story, David

(Posting looks like a big question mark for today, by the way – lots of other stuff going on at the moment..)

I honestly was willing to let sleeping dogs lie over this, as they say, but David Chase, creator of “The Sopranos,” just ticked me off big time (not a thing to do with politics here, but I have to vent).

This is what Chase said here…

Breaking his silence months after the HBO mob drama ended its run, he is offering a belated explanation for that blackout at the restaurant (i.e., the screen went dark at the very end of the last episode with no further explanation). He strongly suggests that, no, Tony Soprano didn't get whacked moments later as he munched onion rings with his family at Holsten's. And mostly Chase wonders why so many viewers got so worked up over the series' non-finish.

"There WAS a war going on that week, and attempted terror attacks in London," says Chase. "But these people were talking about onion rings."

…

Chase says the New Jersey mob boss "had been people's alter ego. They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted 'justice' ...

"The pathetic thing -- to me -- was how much they wanted HIS blood, after cheering him on for eight years."

Wow.

So fan devotion to your TV show is “pathetic”? You blame your audience for getting worked up over the fact that you didn’t bother to write an ending for your TV series? Your audience that patiently endured the breaks that lasted FOREVER between seasons when your show aired?

Now before I go on here, I should come clean and state that I never watched the final episode, even though I had slogged through the series for all but the first season (and I read a recap of that year to familiarize myself, including the attempted hit on Tony by his mother and the death of boss Jackie Aprile that led to Tony’s ascendancy).

And the reason why I never watched the last episode is because, when it aired, I was in a location without access to HBO. I had decided to watch the last episode when I returned home, but after hearing about the blackout, the onion rings and Meadow’s apparently clumsy attempts at parallel parking, I decided that I had better things to do than watch that and took a pass on the finale.

Truth be told, even though “The Sopranos” was well written and well acted, watching the show was an unutterably depressing experience. All of the characters were traveling a downward arc of one type or another, and maybe I just decided that I couldn’t subject myself to it any more.

And I love what Chase tells us here…

He defends the bleak, seemingly inconclusive ending as appropriate -- and even a little hopeful.

A.J. will "probably be a low-level movie producer. But he's not going to be a killer like his father, is he? Meadow may not become a pediatrician or even a lawyer ... but she'll learn to operate in the world in ways that Carmela never did.

Uh, hey David, do you think you could have bothered to construct your stories in such a way that the viewer could intuit all of that without you having to explain it?

And given all of this, I think Chase himself asks the $64,000 question, so to speak, here…

"Why would we entertain people for eight years only to give them the finger?"

Why indeed?