Preparing for the Last Two Sopranos...

This is a season for bitter-sweet endings to extraordinary stories. Harry Potter makes his seventh and final appearance in J. K. Rowling's novels this July. Tony Soprano makes his final two appearances this month on HBO. You don't have to go any further than that.

I'll be writing more about Harry in July.

But now about Tony. The Sopranos changed television in so many ways it's difficult to fathom what it was like before the 1999 debut. There were no startling, original series on cable - just movies, by and large. The cutting-edge shows on network TV back then were NYPD Blue, with an occasional naked backside, and Law and Order, with an innovative formulaic plot structure. The Sopranos gave us not only real language and nudity, but a story that broke every expectation. Only in the Godfather saga, justly recognized as one of the best series of movies ever made, did we come to identify so strongly with patent murderers.

And that's where we are on the doorstep of the final two episodes, to play out this coming Sunday and next, the end of the second part of the Sixth Season, the end of the beginning of the New Golden Age of Television. Who in his or her right mind could want Tony to die, or any of his family and people? On one level, very true and convincing, they are just like most of us - upper middle class people, struggling to make it and stay afloat in a hostile world. On another level, equally true and undeniable, certainly Tony and his associates are brutal and savage - we see them maim and murder just about every week.

Probably because of these conflicting tides, it's not easy to venture predictions about how The Sopranos will end, about who will be left alive in just a little over a week. I'll offer mine here in my review of the next-to-last episode, tomorrow evening...

Useful links:

The Sopranos as a Nuts-and-Bolts Triumph of Non-Network TV

Only Idiots Don't Watch Television