Here was one of the greatest TV shows ever made, a cast at the top of their game, writers surely brimming with new plots, a dedicated audience eager for more. Yet after only 6 seasons it ends. Why?
Did HBO kill it? But why would they do that? I can’t believe it wasn’t still profitable for them, the ratings for the 6th season were still excellent. But surely the prestige of such a show merited at least a few more seasons.
Everything in that final season seems hurried to me. And I can’t help thinking how much we missed by the show’s premature demise. Several more years of watching James Gandolfini in the greatest role off his career, the loss of that is probably the hardest to bear.
There was some talk of doing a movie or two, before Gandolfini’s demise. But I think people in the cast were mostly ready to move on. There wasn’t a whole lot new to be said about the characters. And while people were sad to see the Soprano family torn apart, in truth, that’s what happens to small crime families that get too big for their britches.
I also think the show did a good job of portraying how the modern changing workforce was reducing the mob’s ability to operate as they’ve done in the past. You can’t shake down an international company like Starbucks or Jamba Juice. It’s just a different landscape.
Most likely it was the cast salaries. They gradually go up year by year. A lot of great shows get axed around season 5 or 6 because it’s too expensive to make anymore.
Six seasons included one that just spun its wheels and recycled the same ideas, too. The Brits are better about this and know when it’s time to move on, even if the audience wants more. But yeah, rising cast salaries and people wanting to move on is the big cause of popular shows ending.
I’m as big a Sopranos fan as there is. I’m currently rewatching the whole series for at least the fifth time. I often thought there could have been an interesting prequel spin off, maybe set in Johnny and Junior’s glory days. Various characters throughout the series lament about “the good old days.” Would have been interesting to see if things were really all that different.
In the end, I guess it was a near perfect show, why mess with it.
Creator David Chase decided to end the series after six seasons. He wanted to leave after season five, but HBO twisted his arm to do season six, which itself was extended to 21 episodes broadcast over two years. Technically HBO could have continued the series without him, but most of the main cast agreed to leave with Chase which made that a non-starter.
If HBO had their druthers, they would be creating Sopranos episodes to this day (no idea how they’d handle Gandolfini’s death, though.) Like you said, the show made them lots and lots and lots of money.
One other reason is that Gandolfini was terrified of being typecast and didnt want to play Tony Soprano anymore. Also, the violent scenes and the intensity he brought to the role was counter to his nature and took a toll.
The Sopranos wasn’t as bad as say Mad Men at retreading territory, but it was really only the first season than had a proper story, and it’s plausible that that was largely taken from I, Claudius (though I’ve never seen any note that it was an inspiration). After that, it was just a series of slice-of-life vignettes of a mob family. There’s no real beginning or end to that. It could just keep going for the rest of time, like As The World Turns, with new generations of actors taking over from the older. But why do that? At a certain point, you’ve run out of anything to say and all that’s left is to introduce soap opera, so that at least something more interesting than driving the kids to school is going on.
Personally, I prefer plotlines. I’m glad that the writers were able to keep it fairly real-world and not delve headlong into soap opera land, but eventually, that is where they would have gotten to. But, they also should be criticized for never being able to come up with another interesting plot after the first season.
As I’ve said before, in other threads, the Japanese do it right in animation. They have a plot. It might be a 1 season plot, it might be a 2 season plot. That’s all they do and then they end the show. There’s no stretching things out for the sake of money. Instead, they set a new show in the same universe as the old one, when they have a plot for it, and re-use the name of the old series. The producers get the cash grab, and the viewers aren’t stuck with second-hand storylines that serve only to prevent the story from ever moving on. It’s a win-win and an improvement in all ways to the American system of trying to suck every last cent out of a property, without bothering to keep the quality that originally interested people.
Personally, I would rather that the Sopranos ended after season 1. The following seasons weren’t bad, but there was no reason for them to exist, except to keep a group of - supposedly creative - people in steady employment.
One thing that struck me as odd was Melfi’s remarkable tolerance for Tony’s foibles, especially considering all the things he more or less admitted to while in her office. It took her six years to realize she might have been “an enabler”? Pull the other one! If that were true, she couldn’t have been much of a psychiatrist.
The plot line where he was trying to woo her with things like trips to the Caribbean was just plain silly. And we never did find out what happened to Furio after he told his boss back in Naples that he was in love with Tony’s wife, did we?
Janet popping Richie while he was eating supper was pure gold, though! :o
I agree with you inasmuch as American producers do need to know when to “move on” wrt a series, like their Brit and Japanese counterparts, but I’m less certain that it applies wrt The Sopranos.
Yes, some seasons/plotlines did seem to meander and go nowhere, and it did take several more seasons than really necessary to move the show to its fairly inevitable conclusions, but overall I think they did a very good job with the series.
The Sopranos could have been condensed down to three, maybe four seasons, without diminishing (perhaps even enhancing) its overall quality.
In True Romance, nobody could have cut Dennis Hopper’s hand the way Gandolfini did. I was 100% convinced he was a sadistic creep who positively loved his work!