THE SOPRANOS (2007)

Now 16 years removed from the moment Tony Soprano stepped into Holsten’s ice cream parlour, the fate of everyone’s favourite HBO antihero has been debated and dissected for roughly twice as long as The Sopranos was even on the air. Is Tony dead? Is the Member’s Only jacket guy his killer? Has Meadow learned to parallel park yet? (On that last question, a 2002 Chevy Silverado Super Bowl ad, directed by Sopranos mastermind David Chase and considered “canon,” answers that question with a definitive: yes, finally.) In the pre-Twitter days, it is hard to overstate just how badly the cut-to-black ending went over with audiences – there’s an Orson Wellesian War of the Worlds air to the situation, with HBO subscribers frantically calling their cable suppliers thinking that they lost their signal at the most important moment in television history. But I’ve learned to love the ending, as existentially loaded and ultimately satisfying as the entire series. To demand a definitive answer to Tony’s plight is to miss the point. As the family/Family man complains to Dr. Melfi in the very first episode, “I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Endings, they’re not easy to live through.