the lives of others

The Monday-morning quarterbacking at the water cooler has come and gone. Now the"real" Sopranos fans are crawling out of the termite-infested woodwork, one of who altered series creator David Chase's Wikipedia entry: “David Chase (…) is a homosexual American television writer, director and producer.” Aw. c'mon, get over it. HBO, network of the Sopranos and many other highly addictive series, markets itself cleverly: "It's not TV. It's HBO." Well, as Fresh Air's TV critic David Bianculi said (more or less) in his post-mortem of the series finale on Monday, "It is TV."

Kudos to David Chase (flanked above by James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, who play Tony and Carmela Soprano, for anyone who's been living under a rock) for making us care so much about the conclusion of Tony and his famlies' stories. And bully for all of us in getting so involved, but at the end of the day, we all have our own lives to lead. The rabid Sopranos fan who felt compelled to deface Chase's Wikipedia entry is perhaps just a more extreme version of the viewers who couldn't hang with the fact that Chase didn't fashion an ending that would give viewers a sense of finality (Some of the righteous would have been cheered to see Tony buy the farm, others may have wanted him to name names and enter the Witness Protection Program). But David Chase was never about tying about loose ends in the way many movies, fiction, and TV shows do these days. Our culture loves story (and has from time immmemorial). And why not? The neat, narrative arc is seductively symmetrical.

When the story doesn't turn out in the way we expected, we are disappointed and sometimes even a bit pissed off. I've had the experience more than once vis a vis American Idol (yeah, I know, I know), most recently when the most excellent Melinda Doolittle was sent packing prematurely. I'm not much of a sports fan, but when Serena Williams lost at the French Open a couple of weeks ago to the positively feral Justine Henin (who happens to be ranked number one in women's tennis rankings), I was peeved and felt out of sorts for the rest of the day. No matter. We choose our heroes (or our anti-heroes, in the case of Tony and company), and we want to see certain outcomes. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose, so long as we can maintain perspective, something the Wikipedia whacko was unable to do.