You’ll recall when “The Sopranos” was coming to an end, we were rather consumed with tracking the details obsessively (as we’re wont to do with certain topics).
Thankfully, we’ve moved on, but we can’t help but notice this recent interview that creator David Chase gave an interview included in “The Sopranos’: The Complete Book,” published this week, where he goes off on his audience and their disappointment with the Sopranos finale (dude, your audience is Jersey, what did you expect?).
The always-bilious Chase apparently woke up and someone shit in his cornflakes as he was seemingly extra sour. “The pathetic thing — to me — was how much they wanted [Tony’s] blood, after cheering him on for eight years,” Chase sneered about his audiences need for closure in the form of dead Tony.
Chase was exasperated and dumbfounded by audience’s dissatisfaction and railed hard contemptuously. “[Tony] 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’…”
Excerpts from the interview published in Entertainment Weekly, Chase even railed against the characters with scorn and derision.
“People have said that the Soprano family’s whole life goes in the toilet in the last episode.But look at it: A.J.’s not going to become a citizen-soldier or join the Peace Corps to try to help the world; he’ll 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’s not going to be a housewife-whore like her mother. She’ll learn to operate in the world in a way that Carmela never did.”
Youch. As for his controversial choice of Journey to end the series: everyone thought he was crazy, but then eventually came around. “When we were scouting locations, I actually took several songs in the van and played them for the crew. I’d never done that before. When the Journey song came on, everybody went, ”Oh no! Jesus, David, what are you thinking?” But then they started to say, ”You know what? This is kind of good. This is a great fucking song!”
