I've never had a show where I couldn't miss an episode. Network tv isn't all that great. So there's HBO...'cept they repear everything ALL the time.

But the storylines were good with twists and turns. Feel like you got to know the characters. I know I'll miss the show, but I feel it's time for it to end.

This is My first visit here as a poster however, I have been lurking here for a while.

There is not much more that I can add to what everyone has said here about this classic TV series. What I will say, is that I have been watching TV shows for over fifty years and I have never seen a series that comes even close to the quality and excitement of the Sopranos.

As everyone else here, I look forward to tonights conclusion however, it will be with sadness knowing that this will be the last episode forever.

The Sopranos was art in the form of a TV show, which made it also one of the most misunderstood TV shows ever as well. Art is supposed to reveal it's virtues in ways the artist sees fit, not the observer, and really good art is supposed to confound and challenge you at times. By all conventions, The Sopranos was violent when it should have been poignant, poignant when it should have been violent, meandering when it was supposed to advance the plot, and funny when it should have been anything but.

Oh, the humor alone just killed me, but people forget about it. When people say "current drama show" is better than The Sopranos, I know they are wrong simply because of how funny The Sopranos was, and how deftly they tied it in to everything else. Watching The Sopranos, you are at times on edge of your seat suspense, reeling in horror, or belly laughing at what Paulie just said. There was simply nothing else like it.

The Sopranos is a beloved show today, but I think it will be even more beloved as time goes on and people realize it fully as the artistic triumph it was.

Bon'anima.

thanks, this show has been a major part of my life.

The beauty of this show is that it works on so many levels.

For those that simply wanted the thrills and action a mob-centric series would offer, they found it here.
For those that could see and appreciate the subtlety and imagery, the Sopranos delivered.
Still others were captivated by the truly memorable characters, perfectly cast, masterfully developed.
Brilliant performances on a consistent level from the cast, most notably James Gandolfini and Edie Falco.

I've never had a television series, or any entertainment medium, captivate me the way The Sopranos has.

To David Chase, the writers, directors, staff and cast....thank you.

Thanks for a hell of a ride, and thanks to HBO for taking a shot on an idea so many passed on before, and for allowing David Chase to present his vision.

We are just over an hour away from the end of the greatest series in television history, and I am torn between anticipation and apprehension.

Lastly thanks to FoMW and the admin/mod team for creating a vehicle to discuss this all and fully appreciate all the show has to offer.

Thank you to Fly, for giving us all an open, opinionated, yet civil forum to discuss the best television show this century will ever see.

While Chase's vision was without a doubt, brilliant, and the writers talents were phenomenol, it was the actors who brought the characters to life for us. Even Georgie, and the way he took each and every beating from Tony.

But without the fans, and we all know Chase and company could not argue, this show would be shit. We anxiously awaited every Sunday, and we paced for months upon months during long hiatus', not yet willing to give up no matter how frustrated we were at the amount of time it took to finish scripts and perfect this thing of ours.

So thank you to eveyone out there, who spent their free time trolling boards and websites for information, and passing that information and updates along to the rest of us. Those speculations, sometimes fake spoilers, pics from the set during filming, cast interviews, and rumors was what kept us here all this time. It was our life line, sustaining us until we could have the real thing. And it was all of the die hard fans out there that made sure that their number one show stayed alive, on TV and on here.

Thank You!

This morning, a coworker commented on the final episode , "I feel as though I wasted the last 7 years of my life. How can Chase end the series like that".

My only comment as , "I'm sorry that you feel that way".

I have enjoyed all 86 episodes , but I am partitially glad that it is over. This will never be eclipsed. The show could not have began or ended , any better than what we saw.

Thank you for the Sunday evening entertainment over the past several years.

This writer from the Atlantic puts its better than I can:

Which is what the show comes down to, in the end - a wicked man in a wicked profession, who has intimations that something else, something better, might be out there waiting to be claimed ... but in the end prefers living the only life he knows.

As Matt Zoller Seitz puts it, "Chase's attitude toward people .. [is that] they are what they are, they rarely change, and when they do, they stay changed for as long as it takes to realize that they were more comfortable with their old selves, at which point they revert." Tony Soprano is a mobster, born and raised - or made, if you will - and a mobster is what he decides to remain; in his beginning was his end.

Complaining about the ambiguous, "life goes on, but you could be killed at any moment" conclusion, Matt notes that "at the end of Anna Karenina we find out what happens to Anna, and it's not because Tolstoy sold out." But we do find out what happens to Tony: He leaves therapy, and with at any chance of getting out of the family business, and at the same time it becomes clear that none of his nearest and dearest will be getting out either. Carmela gave up on escape a season ago; A.J. is bought off by his parents and will doubtless end up a mobbed-up club owner soon enough; Meadow is headed for marriage to a mafioso's son and a lucrative job as a lawyer defending, well, people like her dad. (Her conversation with Tony, where she justifies giving up medicine by describing how watching him hauled away in handcuffs taught her that “the state can crush the individual," is one of the best moments of the finale, not just because he gets off the incredulous line "Jersey?" in reply, but because for a moment you can see him wrestling with the urge to tell her that the Mob isn't worth defending - wrestling and, as always, winning.)

The Sopranos was a show about whether the Soprano family, both nuclear and extended, escapes damnation, and the ending answers the only question that matters: They don't.

I should note that the theme of damnation doesn't make The Sopranos a Christian show by any means; it's too dark for that, too despairing in its treatment of its characters, both criminals and civilians. It's not atheistic so much as anti-humanistic: God may exist, and indeed the show contains numerous incidents, from Tony and Christopher's near-death experiences to Paulie's Marian vision, that could reasonably be interpreted as encounters with the numinous. But if heaven is throwing ladders down, human beings are incapable of climbing them, and divine grace is nowhere to be found. This has made it increasingly unpleasant to watch, which in a way is a good thing; it shouldn't be pleasant to watch people choose hell over and over again, and in these last twelve episodes, in particular, Chase did a good job of stripping away the element of voyeurism that often made the show morally problematic.

(I like Seitz' point that even the landscape turned hellish: "from the constant desolate winds moaning under every outdoor scene to that meeting of the families that took place in an abandoned factory that looked like the belly of the Nostromo in 'Alien.'")

But I'm not sure it needed six seasons to make its despairing point, and while part of me is glad to have had as many Sopranos episodes as we did, I didn't feel the sense of loss watching the finale that I've felt in the last episode of other great shows I've loved. I'll miss the show, but I'm also glad its done. You can only stare into the abyss for so long.

i need to see melfi now that this great show is over, very sad and depressed
been watching it from the very first episode, and dont think anything has or ever will compare to it.
thankyou to FOMW for providing an avenue here to discuss all things soprano, its a shame i found out about it so late!
most of all thanx must go out to david chase and co, who has given us something unique, confronting, special and down right brilliant. it will be with me forever and highly missed.