Image: Observer.com
Perhaps the surest sign — after all the Internet chatter and unfounded Post hysteria and exclusive Star-Ledger interviews from France — that the Sopranos finale was the most significant event in recent media-land memory is that it has brought out the truly big guns to cover it. Two weeks ago The New Yorker put Tony on its cover and devoted its “Comment” item to a meditation on the show not from Nancy Franklin or Anthony Lane or even designated meditator Adam Gopnik but from the capo himself, David Remnick, who more typically writes about the Middle East, or Bill Clinton. And then comes today’s Observer, with a cover essay on the show’s demise under the byline of Peter W. Kaplan, who Nexis shows last wrote for the paper he edits two and a half years ago (and, says Nexis, which might well be wrong, only once before that!*), when the then-broadsheet left its longtime townhouse home on East 64th Street for the officebound confines of the Flatiron district. (The two editors-in-chief are both, like Tony, Jersey boys, which may or may not explain anything.) We learn that Kaplan liked the ending and that Bogdanovich, though shocked by it, did, too; we learn that David Chase, Kaplan says, “embraced ambiguity and looked for poetry in the Bush administration” (like Jacob Weisberg!) and that “[i]t was, so far, the best last episode in TV history.” We can’t say we disagree with any of that.
Tony’s Blackout [NYO]
* Um, yeah, wrong. Simply clicking on his byline on the Observer site yields four citations.
