Note: I’ve moved this back to the top because the stuff from Andy Ferguson is so perfect.

I don’t mean to be a spoilsport, but again, I just don’t get this media elite obsession with The Sopranos. Let’s grant that it’s a great show. A truly great show. Let’s put it up on the shelf with Buffy, Homicide, and the other great hour-long dramas. Heck, if you want to, put it at the top of the list. The amount of attention being given over to the series finale seems slightly turbo. Driving to work this morning, both of my sports-talk radio stations were dissecting it; it was the cover of the New Yorker last week; in addition to VLM’s entry below, Dean Barnett has a highly intelligent analysis of it, too.

But when we see the numbers on the broadcast tomorrow, I suspect we’ll be looking at a show with around (maybe) 15 million viewers, probably fewer. At its peak, The Sopranos was doing 13.4 million viewers. This season, using a new-and-improved Nielsen system, the show has averaged between 10 million and 11 million per episode, including people who watch it on DVR and using On Demand.

That puts The Sopranos in the same neighborhood as CSI: New York and Two and a Half Men. Yet for some reason, The Sopranos got a send-off to rival the ends of M*A*S*H and Seinfeld, shows with bona fide mass-appeal.

If this is all about saluting quality television, then I’m all for it. I can’t wait for the BSG New Yorker cover next year. And I’m eagerly anticipating the massive coverage of the soon-to-be-departed Veronica Mars.

But something tells me that the Soprano-mania is about something more. There’s a certain clubby-ness to the Sopranos coverage. A Bos-Was axis of elitism, if you will.

Enough sourness. Even if it is getting obnoxiously disproportionate treatment, David Chase, the writers, cast, and crew are to be congratulated for putting together such great television. And HBO is to be congratulated for backing the series. Programming executives at other networks could learn a thing or two from them.

Update: I’m a nitwit, of course, because Andrew Ferguson made this argument, only better and funnier, a long time ago. Have a taste:

THE SOPRANOS airs the fourth, or maybe the fifth, episode of its television season this Sunday. Or is it the sixth? It’s very hard to keep track. In any case, the show is still sailing along on an updraft of favorable publicity that is extraordinary even by the standards of television, where hallucinatory embellishment and repetition are basic communication strategies. The coverage and critical notices that swarmed over the show’s season premiere, when it debuted on the cable channel HBO four or five or six weeks ago, read more like advertising than journalism. And there’s no sign of a trailing off.

Bonus: Here’s more Ferguson, putting his finger on exactly what bothers me:

A very large majority of Americans don’t even have access to HBO and therefore, of course, to The Sopranos. It costs money to watch The Sopranos — an extra 200 dollars or more a year for people who already get cable, and much more than that for people who would have to initiate cable service and then add the premium channels to boot. Difficult as it is for some of us to believe, most people in the United States have chosen not to spend the extra money. What this means is that, relative to the universe of TV watchers, The Sopranos isn’t being seen by very many people. On any given night in prime time, 80 million Americans or more will be staring at the television in a futile attempt to obliterate the piled-up frustrations and petty resentments and failed dreams that constitute their pathetic little lives. Or maybe they’re just watching TV to pass the time. Whichever. The important point is, not many of them are watching The Sopranos, which on a typical Sunday will be seen by roughly 8 million viewers — or one out of ten of the total.

This makes it a great triumph for HBO, but only a middling success measured against the standards of network commercial television. For network TV, a smash superboffo megahit — excuse the technical terminology — would be Survivor, the sadistic reality show that will sometimes snag
40 million viewers or more. On its face, then, The Sopranos’s 8 million looks like small potatoes.

But what potatoes! Among the couch spuds will be (it’s safe to say) the entire combined editorial and business staffs of GQ, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and so on, and the staffs, excluding paperboys, of every sizable newspaper from the New York Times down to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. And all of them (likewise safe to say) seem oblivious to the possibility that anyone else is not watching. They continue to write their stories about their particular entertainment obsession, all of which assume that The Sopranos is a mass phenomenon on the order of, say, the televised Olympics or a runaway hit movie like Titanic. But of course it isn’t.

The saturation coverage of The Sopranos is another instance of a cultural development that has become increasingly un-ignorable, though still stubbornly ignored. Along with the rest of the American elite — “the top one percent,” to borrow a useful figure of speech — the mainstream organs of opinion and news have detached themselves from the common life to a degree we haven’t seen in many years. It should go without saying that just about every subject television touches it renders idiotic — think of politics brought to you by Hardball, high finance brought to you by CNBC, even weather brought to you by the hysterics on the Weather Channel — but once upon a time you could say this in its defense: TV created a kind of shared experience for the country at large. We all trusted Walter Cronkite, we all laughed at Laugh-In, we all accepted Ed Sullivan’s taste. The wealthy and the working class, the banker and the baker: They all watched the same crap.

Not any more. The Sopranos is the entertainment equivalent of the gated community. The well-to-do now retreat to their own corner of the television world, with the obliviousness that has always been a hallmark of the rich and privileged.

It seems we’ve barely begun to scrape the surface of last night’s episode of The Sopranos. I’ve been receiving multiple emails regarding the significance of every single detail in the diner scene–particularly the other patrons. The man at the counter is supposedly Nikki Leotardo, Phil’s nephew who made an appearance last season (technically the first half of the season)–we can assume why he went to the bathroom, a la The Godfather. The two African Americans are apparently the same men who tried to kill Tony in the “car-jacking” in Season One (and by order of Uncle Junior). The boy scouts were all at the train store when Bobby was gunned down. The trucker in the back booth once had to identify his brother’s body in some truck heist gone bad (one that involved Christopher).

What this means is that Tony gets it. The sudden blackness of the screen is how he would have experienced the hit in his own eyes (so to speak). Remember his talk with Bobby about how a hit happens? That you probably don’t even know it?

And I thought I was clever for realizing Patsy Parisi’s wife was played by the same woman from Saturday Night Fever and the short-lived sitcom Angie (Donna Pescow).

“That was fucking weird.” At the very end of the read-through for the final episode of The Sopranos, that was supposedly all James Gandolfini could say while Edie Falco started to cry. Now that the series has finally ended, the sentiment makes much more sense.

At the same time, as far as great television show finales go, this one was in many appropriate. We couldn’t get enough of New Jersey’s mob family and as such we are left dying for more. And while much remains unresolved, several plotlines have been concluded: Tony has finally made peace with Uncle Junior, who will spend his dying days in a decrepit mental institution (Tony is all the more sad when he reminds his senile uncle that their family “once” ran New Jersey). Paulie Walnuts was, is, and always will be the good soldier, leaving us where he’s always been, in front of Satriale’s, catching some rays (though soon to be heading the cursed Cifaretto crew). Anthony Jr. will continue to struggle while seeing his therapist, sounding more and more like his father (including his last line about remembering the good times–a touching reference to the end of Season One). Phil Leotardo’s reign finally came to an end–thanks to an FBI tip–getting shot and inadvertently having his head crushed by his own tire (and thereby no open casket, the ultimate insult). As I long suspected, Butchie Deconcini would play a crucial role til the end, though I didn’t think as a peacemaker. We can assume he rises in the ranks as well, maybe even heading that family.

Or maybe not. Could an ambush have been in the works? Fans will be talking about the final scene at the diner for a long time. It could easily have been family coming together, just like the end of the first season, but there was barely a second you actually felt comfortable watching. Was Tony going to be arrested? (We know he was probably going to be indicted. What did the FBI agent say? “We’re gonna win this thing.”) What was the deal with the guy at the counter who goes to use the bathroom? (Notice as Tony flips through the jukebox selections, the first song we see is “This Magic Moment,” played in the first episode of this season.) Who were the two African Americans who walk in at the very end? Why did we have to watch Meadow make several attempts to parallel park, then run across the street looking frazzled? Tony looks up and … The End?

The darkness on my screen, lasting for maybe ten seconds or more, made me think the set went out (there would have been riots at Comcast). But instead, that was how David Chase wanted to leave it: Their lives and their stories will continue to go on–it was just our stop and we had to get off (forced off, really).

No doubt Chase will have lots of explaining to do. Will there ever be a followup? How about a Christmas Special? One thing I do know is I am passing on “John From Cincinnati,” canceling my Platinum Package with Comcast (yes, I know, that means goodbye to “Passion Cove,” “Hotel Erotica,” and “Sex Games Cancun”) and getting on with my life. Who knows, I might actually get something done.

From Galley Brother B.J.:

First, Pirates of the Carribean is remade from a classic ride with a timeless story to a crappy movie tie in, that will have to get changed in 5 years when everyone forgets who Captain Jack Sparrow is. And, now they’re putting pirates on Tom Sawyer Island (an attraction designed by Walt Disney).

I have not historically been kind to realtors, but this awesome post on NAR’s former chief economist is the meanest, awesomest thing ever. EVER.

Check out the graphic. All hail The Big Picture!

Not really, because this has nothing to do with the open, but here’s a rad Agassi story from back in the day:

Q. There’s a story that you were in a batting cage once and ran at the machine and hit line drives. Is that true?

ANDRE AGASSI: Yeah, it is.

Q. When was that?

ANDRE AGASSI: I don’t remember. A year, couple years ago. Time moves quick. It was a long time ago, I think. Probably longer than that even now.

I’m used to moving forward and hitting, and hitting moving objects so…

Q. How hard were the pitches coming?

ANDRE AGASSI: It was cranked up. I don’t know. They said 90, but I don’t know.

Q. Little easier with a racquet than a bat.

ANDRE AGASSI: Yeah, but it’s a pitching machine. The thing’s coming ?? 90 miles an hour looks slow if it’s not moving. That thing was just coming straight ahead, so I could hit it with a toothpick.

Ever wonder what arcade games were like in the Soviet Union? Thanks to Wired, now we know: A Soviet military manual explained that the game, mostly knock-offs of early Japanese games, were meant for “entertainment and active leisure, as well as the development of visual-estimation abilities.”

Also, none of them kept high scores.

Courtesy of Galley Brother B.J., the Long Beach Armada now have the longest name in professional sports: the Long Beach Armada of Los Angeles of California of the United States of North America Including Barrow, Alaska.

For reals.