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Cover: The Sopranos: The Final Season (continued)

By Mervyn Rothstein

When it comes to the women of "The Sopranos," some viewers still harbor a wish for the return of Adriana, Christopher's fiancée, who was, for all intents and purposes, knocked off two seasons ago, in the middle of a bare and desolate wood—though we never saw her body. Well, viewers, according to David Chase, you should abandon all hope.

"Honest to God, she will never come back," Chase told his question-and-answer audience emphatically. "She's dead." He does, however, regret her passing. "She really added something" to the show, he said. Drea de Matteo, who played her, "was really good, very different from every other woman you see on television. That was a loss. We didn't want to do it. But we had to."

And where is that body we never did see? "Rotting in a coal mine in Pennsylvania," Chase announced. At least, "we decided that's probably what happened."

Last season, homosexuality became a major theme, with the outing, ousting and offing of Tony's mob aide Vito Spatafore. Was the decision to focus on a gay Mafioso based on all the recent newspaper headlines about the battle over gay marriage? Well, actually, Chase said, the idea came from the actor, Joe Gannascoli, who played Spatafore. "He came to us with a book about a gay wiseguy in Brooklyn," Chase said. "He's the only actor who ever suggested a story line."

The prime engineer of Vito's demise was the gleefully yet matter-of-factly evil Phil Leotardo, the acting chief of the New York mob. Leotardo is portrayed by Frank Vincent, an Italian-American actor whose film specialty, for more than 30 years, has been violence—offing, and being offed, with the best of them. Vincent, now 67, first garnered notice as the tough Salvy in Martin Scorsese's 1980 classic Raging Bull. As Billy Batts in Goodfellas, he was offed by Joe Pesci (in real life, a longtime friend). But Vincent and his friendly baseball bat got even with Pesci five years later in Casino.

Yet despite the crucial role that carnage has played in his career, Vincent says he is ambivalent about its constant depiction. "It's not good, but it's a necessary evil to portray the genre," he told Cigar Aficionado.

But today's mega-bloodshed disturbs him. "When Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney shot people, they fell down and that was it. Now, because of technology, it's much more graphic. I guess it's not good for the culture. I don't know how to justify it. But as an actor, it's part of what you do, something we have to do. And after all, it's make-believe. Superman flies. Spider-Man jumps around buildings. It shouldn't be taken too seriously. It's entertainment. You have the option not to watch it or show it to your kids."

His character, of course, is among the most violent—a distinction notable on a series like "The Sopranos." "Phil was away in prison for 20 years," Vincent says. "He put up with a lot of bullshit. He's home now, and in a position where he can get what in his own mind he sees as the rewards for everything he went through. He worked hard to be a successful gangster and got sidetracked, and now he's out of jail and looking for his due."

Will Phil be any different in the final nine episodes from the way he was last year? "He's not so different," Vincent says. "He's a force to be reckoned with." But beyond that, he says, he can't be more specific. Besides, he doesn't really know for sure yet.

"We don't know what David's writing," he says. "All I know is I have to go to work one day later this month—I have a lot of scenes. And I don't know what happens after that. Whatever David's doing in his mind is what he's doing. He doesn't give you any idea of what's coming next."

One thing Chase apparently does do, Vincent says, is telephone an actor who is about to go the way of all flesh. "From what I hear, if he's going to assassinate you, he calls you"—which can sometimes mistakenly put the fear of God (or Chase) into an actor.

"An interesting thing happened a few months ago," Vincent recalls. "I came home, and there was David's voice on the answering machine. We're friendly, I know him socially, but there he was, saying, 'Frank, this is David, give me a call.' It was too late to call back that night, and I had to wait until the next morning. All night long I was thinking, Why is David calling me? What does he want? That morning at 10, the phone rang, and it's David, and he says, 'Remember that guy on Bloomfield Avenue?' He was asking me about things that actually happened to gangsters in this area. So I dodged a bullet. He hasn't made that phone call to me yet. I'm still here."

But the bullet no one can dodge is the end of the series. "'The Sopranos' has really been a shot in the arm for my career," Vincent says. "As you get older in this business, there are only so many roles you can do." But he says he isn't worried—he has several projects in the works, including commercials and a film in development. "You have to have a lot of balls in the air at the same time, and if two become reality, that's good."

One that is close to becoming reality is his own cigar line. "It's in the development stage," Vincent says. "They will have Connecticut wrappers. And it will be a light cigar. I don't like heavy cigars."

A native of North Adams, Massachusetts, Vincent grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, and at an early age fell in love with music, studying piano, trumpet and drums, but settling on percussion. He started a band that he called Frank Vincent and the Aristocats, and he soon began working with a guitarist named Joe Pesci. In his first film, made in 1976 and called The Death Collector, Vincent's character went to meet his maker while sitting on the toilet.

When "The Sopranos" was first casting, he auditioned for the role of Uncle Junior. His competitors include Dominic Chianese, who got the part, and Tony Sirico, who became Paulie Walnuts. It took three more years for Chase to decide to make Vincent a part of the "Sopranos" TV family.

And now, Vincent says, he thinks "The Sopranos" is coming to its end at just the right moment. "The show has been on the air for a long time," he says. "And I think it's great that it's leaving while it's still at the top."

Throughout the show's existence, Italian-Americans have complained about the way they are depicted. Some of the characters, for example, make explicitly racist statements, especially about African Americans. (What African Americans say to him about those words, Chase told his McGraw-Hill Building audience, is, "'Thank you, because we know that's what you people say about us.'")

How does he respond to the Italian Americans who complain? He tells them that they should ask themselves why the show is so enduring, why people feel it is so valued. "But," he said, "they don't ask themselves that question."

While an actor, such as Joe Gannascoli, may suggest a story line, no one is likely to suggest a line change. Unlike in some movies, Chase said, there is no ad-libbing on "The Sopranos." The actors stick to the script. "Not that I'm opposed to it," he said. "In a movie it might be one thing. Martin Scorsese does things that way. But a TV show has a factory aspect. It has to keep going."

At first, an episode took eight days to shoot, he said, but in recent seasons, as things got more complex, it has been more like 12. "We're writing one show, ending the show prior, coming up with stories for the shows ahead, prepping direction, casting." It is, he said, a production line that has been constantly rolling. Until now.

So what's next for Chase? "I don't have any strict plan," he said. "I want to take time off, and maybe direct and write a movie."

And television? "I've been working in television a long time, 30 years now. After this I have no further interest in working in TV—anywhere, whether it's network or cable. I've done it. I don't want to do that anymore."

As he once said, network TV is in the business of selling, not of creating art. "Their object is to keep you in a good mood, so you buy things," he said. They don't want to upset viewers. "They really want you to buy cars."

That said, though, Chase acknowledged that "you never can tell what will happen. When I bashed the networks it didn't mean that there's nothing good ever done on a network. It's just that there are a lot of strictures. I worked on a lot of network things in my own career that I point to and say, you know, I have pride in it."

Intense pride is something he feels, and should feel, about "The Sopranos." And who knows, perhaps that pride will make him change his mind—and maybe even influence the story's climactic moments.

A year ago, in a talk with the Times, Chase told a reporter that he would "three-quarters miss doing" the series, "one-quarter not." (Gandolfini, who had earlier said that for him it was "half and half," decided that Chase's estimate seemed right.) Chase insisted at the time that "this is the absolute end." But then he added that he "could not promise that we would not come back and do a movie," if in a few years he got an idea "for a really great 'Sopranos' movie."

"I don't think that will happen," he told the Times. "But if one morning somebody woke up and said this would make a really good, concise, contained 'Sopranos' story, I wouldn't rule that out."

It would be tough to make a "Sopranos" movie without Tony Soprano. So maybe Tony will live to fight again. We'll find out in June.

Chase once said that for him, it was important that television should provide its viewers with "a little bit of poetry." Over the last eight years, that's what he has done, in every episode. And now all of us are eagerly awaiting the last stanza, the last verse, of Chase's epic and tragic poem about American life in the twenty-first century.

Mervyn Rothstein is an editor at The New York Times.

A Sopranos Finale
by Jeff Greenfield

If you want to understand a media phenomenon like "The Sopranos," who better to turn to than Jerry Della Femina, the advertising legend who grew up in a Brooklyn neighborhood that was home to a regiment of aspiring Tony Sopranos.

"Tony takes his daughter to hunt for a college and winds up killing a mobster who was on the lam—every father's dream," says Della Femina. "Tony maintains his happy home and still manages to have affairs with Russian hookers—every father's other dream."

Well, maybe that's not the whole story; not when you have a cast of characters as rich and complex as any in popular fiction. Not when you have the pitch-perfect balance of sudden violence and off-the-wall humor. (Tony's crime buddies, and Tony himself, are somewhat out of phase with current events and the English language. Tony hears Dr. Jennifer Melfi note that "revenge is a dish best served cold," and puts it this way: "Revenge is a dish of cold cuts." On the subject of current events, Bobby Bacala notes, "Quasimodo predicted all of this.")

But the college-tour murder episode—one of the most acclaimed in the program's seven-year run on HBO—does hint at the power of this saga to draw in not just the largest audience for any cable drama, but one of the most fanatically devoted that any drama, in any form, has won. The episode captures the dramatic pun at the heart of the series: the fact that Tony Soprano is a "family" man, in both senses of the word (and that both families are weighing him down).

You see the effects of his twin burdens in the opening shot of almost every new season. Tony, clad in T-shirt, boxers and a bathrobe—Coriolanus with a gut and an ever-receding hairline—shuffles out the door of his home to fetch the morning paper. His closest relatives include a sometimes demanding wife with aspirations of financial and sexual independence, a perennial screwup of a son, a sister bearing New Age platitudes and 80 or so extra pounds, an uncle who has twice almost killed him (one time, under a delusion that Tony was someone else—maybe). More than that, there are his parents: a father whose mob career dictated the path Tony would take, and an embittered, ice-cold mother who set in motion his near-assassination.

"After all this time," says his shrink, Dr. Melfi, "you still can't accept the fact that you had a mother who didn't love you."

The travails of home provide one powerful reason why "The Sopranos" began with Tony reeling under a panic attack, sending him into one of the most fascinating patient-therapist exchanges since Freud dusted off his couch.

The other reason is his other "family." Like the father of an enormous, feuding brood, Tony must deal with the resentment and jealousy all around him. But unlike his blood family, the rage of this family, if unchecked, would not stop with Oedipal fantasies and a fistful of ProzacÉwhich is why Tony cannot reveal any hint of weakness. When his recovery from a gunshot wound leaves him looking weak, he responds by finding the strongest associate at his headquarters and administering a brutal beating.

So compelling has "The Sopranos" been that even before David Chase, the show's creator, announced the impending end of the series—sometime in June—a cottage industry has grown around The Question: what is the right ending for this saga?

There are those who argue for a reprieve, a dramatic pardon: Tony in a villa in Tuscany, reaping his ill-gotten gains. And it is true that not every mob protagonist dies violently. Don Vito Corleone dies of a heart attack while playing with his grandchild in The Godfather. Henry Hill, Ray Liotta's character in Goodfellas, survives—mope-ishly to be sure—in the witness protection program.

But for me, Tony Soprano is doomed by the very size of his creator's achievement. If this is a genuine tragedy, Tony cannot escape his fate, any more than Hamlet and Ophelia could have run off and opened a bed-and-breakfast outside of Copenhagen. The question is not: "Will Tony die?" but "How—and at whose hands?"

For me, the answer is simple. While the hand that pulls the trigger, or tightens the wire, may come from a mobster—within or without his own circle—the impulse to pull that trigger must come from within his real family. If Tony's tragic flaw is his inability to escape the gravitational pull of his father's life, and the boundless anger and resentment of his mother, then his demise must come at the hands of someone closest to him. (It was, after all, the marital choices of the mothers of Oedipus and Hamlet that set them on their paths to their fates.)

How? There's a strong sentiment among Soprano-holics that Carmela will be Tony's undoing. She knows where the bodies are buried (and the cash as well), and it would not take many more of Tony's adulterous detours to end her patience—especially if she can end up with Tony's money. It's not that hard to imagine her enjoying the good life in Tuscany, perhaps with boy toy Furio at her side. But if David Chase is a creator of true wrath and vengeance, then Tony's fall must come at the hands of his children. Meadow Soprano—the lovely, overachieving embodiment of Tony's hope for something better— will be at the core. Perhaps she and her mother, in a grave act of betrayal, give up Tony to one of his gang rivals; perhaps (ˆ la Sonny Corleone) Tony is told that Meadow's life is in danger, and rushes into a trap, where one or more of his mob family is waiting to dispatch him. And A. J., the perpetual disappointment, has to have a role in Tony's downfall, perhaps unwittingly dispatching his father to his ultimate sit-down.

But maybe there's an ending even truer to what Tony's life has come to mean. In a final scene straight out of an Ellery Queen or "Thin Man" mystery, the FBI gathers all the principals in a room where the corpse of Tony Soprano lies. As the agents look from one highly motivated suspect to another—from restaurateur Artie Bucco and his mob-hating wife, Charmaine, to Bobby and Janice Soprano Baccalieri, with their smoldering anger at Tony's humiliations, to Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti to the just-paroled Johnny Sack—they realize that with so many suspects with so many good reasons to kill Tony, the case will simply never be solved.

And as they all leave the room, Carmela, Meadow and A. J. walk over to Dr. Melfi—and ask her if she does family therapy.

Jeff Greenfield is the senior political correspondent for CNN.

How Does "The Sopranos" End?
Cigar Aficionado readers give their predictions

Does it end with a bang or with a whimper or with a whimper and then a bang? In the violent HBO television series about everyday life, through the lens of a Mafia boss, it's always tough to tell what's going to happen, and with the series finale coming up, predictions abound. The fate of Tony Soprano and the rest is anyone's guess and, for now, known only by the show's insidersÉbut no one on the inside will talk. Trust us, we tried.

We instead went to the next best thing to cast and crew: our readers and loyal 'Sopranos" viewers. A Cigar Aficionado Online poll asked the show's aficionados how they thought the series would end and then how the series should end. The responses vary from Tony retiring to Italy to Dr. Melfi shooting him in a tomato garden. Whatever your thoughts, the climax of eight-plus years of deceit, desire, murder, lying and family issues is a must see.

Here are some of the comments Cigar Aficionado received:

What will happen? I think the show will end with Tony being murdered. He has had many close calls and has acquired many enemies over the years. I believe he will be clipped in the last episode.

What should happen? I would much rather see the show end with a bang.

—Austin Peele, Chester, VA

What will happen? Pretty much status quo; OK maybe they kill off Christopher.

What should happen? Furio should come back and whack Tony and whisk Carmela off to Calabria.

—Patrick Denis, Brooklyn, NY

What will happen? It will end with a few of Tony's main people getting whacked. Why? Because of greed and youth. I believe A. J. will end up dead.

What should happen? Everybody smoking cigars.

—Michael Garner, Columbia, MO

What will happen? Tony Soprano is gonna get killed by his Uncle Junior, who is faking his illness to plot against Tony. Anthony Junior is gonna try to do mob duties for his father, bumbling jobs, and then gets killed as a result. Tony is gonna have to kill Christopher because Chris will be too far gone on drugs and will probably be thought to be informing to the feds. Paulie Walnuts gets killed in the war against New York. Silvio either plots with Junior to kill Tony or plots alone against Tony. Furio comes back to try to kill Tony but fails, and either gets killed or gets away.

What should happen? Tony should take some bruises from the people against him. But he should beat Phil of New York in the mob war. Maybe Tony should die at the hands of Uncle Junior to show that the old-school Mafia boys and the old-school ways hold solid.

—Che Parker, Long Beach, CA

What will happen? Tony will go to jail. Chris will try to take over the family.

What should happen? Open-ended so that they come back with a movie.

—Gregory Gast, Severna Park, MD

What will happen? I think with Johnny Sack in the joint, hits all over through both the families will happen. Tony will see the writing on the wall, and start whacking anyone he thinks is betraying him... Until Tony gets whacked! Christopher becomes a writer of a mob series for TV. Hee hee! Who knows? Meadow just might step in after he does! Along with A.J....'

What should happen? Tony and Melfi wind up having an affair and eventually leave the country. After years in Italy, Tony gets whacked by her, as it turns out she is working for Johnny Sack. Fade seeing Tony out picking tomatoes in his garden and Melfi shooting him in the back of the head!

—Paul Torsiello, Parsippany, NJ

What will happen? I think that NY will make a move on Tony, not directly but will use a disgruntled employee (probably Silvio or Paulie). It is possible that they take out Chris and Tony to end the Soprano bloodline. It could be Furio who makes a return.

What should happen? I think the show should end with Tony's crew killing Phil Leotardo and the NY crew. Johnny Sack should get released and continue to have a solid friendship with Jersey. I would love to see Tony and Carmela move down to the shore and retire...but we all know how this will end. Ask Big Paul and The Dapper Don.

—Charles Meyers, APO, AE (Military)

What will happen? Tony Soprano flipping on the mob and going into the witness protection program.

What should happen? It shouldn't end.

—Chris Sama, Newark, DE

What will happen? Tony becoming the boss of all bosses.

What should happen? Tony faking his own death and "retiring" with his family to Italy.

—Jeff Townsend, Oceanside, CA

What will happen? Everyone will get pinched due to someone cooperating [with the feds].

What should happen? With Tony lighting up a Monte No. 2 on some beach as someone comes up behind him and puts a cap in his ass.

—Armand Serafino, Nutley, NJ

What will happen? Tony Soprano and crew get locked up for life by the feds.

What should happen? Tony Soprano and crew get locked up for life by the feds.

—Mario Greci, Hicksville, NY

What will happen? Tony getting whacked.

What should happen? Tony going legit.

—Bill Mendoza, Tucson, AZ

What will happen? No idea!

What should happen? Whitey Bulger style. A thief on the run. The feds get close, but Tony gets outta town. Picture Tony smoking cigars in Danlí, or hanging out in Italy with a certain Wine Spectator and Cigar Aficionado editor. Some way, Tony should end up on top.

—Matthew Bartlett, Nashua, NH

We'll find out soon enough.

—Michael Moretti

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