Bada-bing
*** SPOILER ALERT: If you're waiting to see the finale of The Sopranos, you might want to avert your eyes ***
I had almost forgotten how much The Sopranos meant to us when we were in Basel. One of our few major complaints about the past few years was the lack of English-language TV (this was as much a function of our landlords, who had a German satellite instead of cable, which would have at least given us more options than just CNN). It's not that we would have spent that much time watching TV (that would kind of defeat the purpose of living in a foreign country), but there were times on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or when Gretchen was home all day with Baby, or when you just wanted something familiar, that we would have killed for some crappy American television fare.
So, in the absence of TV, we made do with DVDs. And while Gretchen almost wore out the DVD player with Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, the show we most often watched together was The Sopranos. Before moving to Switzerland we had been too cheap to get HBO so we had never seen it, even though everything I had read about it made me think I would love it. Once it became apparent how bleak our TV situation was, I ordered the first four seasons and later picked up the fifth. With travel and other time constraints we were only able to watch it in fits and starts (since each episode is a full hour with no commercials and could often be intense, it wasn't necessarily an every-night affair), but we were always glad when we did. And we were saddened when we finally finished the fifth season before Baby was born. It's kind of strange, but one of the things I'll always associate with my time in Basel is a drama/comedy about mobsters in New Jersey.
We were still overseas until midway through the sixth and final season (which actually spread out over two years), and we didn't want to start watching again when we got back because of all the episodes we missed. So that made for a tough decision regarding last night's finale--should we watch it even though we've missed two years of things leading up to it, or should we wait until it comes out on DVD and hope in the meantime that we somehow don't find out how it ended despite widespread media coverage. In the end we decided to watch, and I'm glad we did (even if we couldn't figure who half the characters were since a number of regulars had obviously been killed in the intervening years).
The big story this morning was about how pissed off a lot of people were that it didn't provide any closure. But I liked that, and thought the last 5 minutes or so were absolutely brilliant--possibly the most tense non-event I can remember seeing. Anything that would have me singing Journey's execrable "Don't Stop Believing" to myself the next day had to be doing something right. Besides, since the whole show dealt with ambiguities and shades of gray, why should there necessarily be a black-and-white ending where everything is tied up with a neat little bow?
I had almost forgotten how much The Sopranos meant to us when we were in Basel. One of our few major complaints about the past few years was the lack of English-language TV (this was as much a function of our landlords, who had a German satellite instead of cable, which would have at least given us more options than just CNN). It's not that we would have spent that much time watching TV (that would kind of defeat the purpose of living in a foreign country), but there were times on a rainy Sunday afternoon, or when Gretchen was home all day with Baby, or when you just wanted something familiar, that we would have killed for some crappy American television fare.
So, in the absence of TV, we made do with DVDs. And while Gretchen almost wore out the DVD player with Sex and the City and Desperate Housewives, the show we most often watched together was The Sopranos. Before moving to Switzerland we had been too cheap to get HBO so we had never seen it, even though everything I had read about it made me think I would love it. Once it became apparent how bleak our TV situation was, I ordered the first four seasons and later picked up the fifth. With travel and other time constraints we were only able to watch it in fits and starts (since each episode is a full hour with no commercials and could often be intense, it wasn't necessarily an every-night affair), but we were always glad when we did. And we were saddened when we finally finished the fifth season before Baby was born. It's kind of strange, but one of the things I'll always associate with my time in Basel is a drama/comedy about mobsters in New Jersey.
We were still overseas until midway through the sixth and final season (which actually spread out over two years), and we didn't want to start watching again when we got back because of all the episodes we missed. So that made for a tough decision regarding last night's finale--should we watch it even though we've missed two years of things leading up to it, or should we wait until it comes out on DVD and hope in the meantime that we somehow don't find out how it ended despite widespread media coverage. In the end we decided to watch, and I'm glad we did (even if we couldn't figure who half the characters were since a number of regulars had obviously been killed in the intervening years).
The big story this morning was about how pissed off a lot of people were that it didn't provide any closure. But I liked that, and thought the last 5 minutes or so were absolutely brilliant--possibly the most tense non-event I can remember seeing. Anything that would have me singing Journey's execrable "Don't Stop Believing" to myself the next day had to be doing something right. Besides, since the whole show dealt with ambiguities and shades of gray, why should there necessarily be a black-and-white ending where everything is tied up with a neat little bow?
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