'The Sopranos' signs off

[Brian Damage]

There may be no better measure of the quality of "The Sopranos" than this: With one hour left tonight, most hard-core fans have no idea how creator David Chase will wrap things up.

Like, who will live or die.

This much is safe to say: When the final credits roll, don't expect Chase to serve up those brief codas on what happened during the rest of each character's life.

Or maybe he will, just because we don't expect him to.

Chase throws a good changeup. He also has a good fastball and a mean curve, and HBO has let him show them all. The network shrugged off his bad pitches because it knew in the end he would pitch a very good game.

And that's what "The Sopranos" has been: A very good game. A very good television show.

Was it the best TV show ever? Who knows? Who cares? How do you say it was better than "The West Wing" or "M*A*S*H" or "I'll Fly Away" or "The Cosby Show"?

The best of "The Sopranos" - Paulie and Christopher shivering in the car in the Pinelands, Carmela vowing to keep Tony alive - can stand with the best of any other show. That's enough.

As for influence, "The Sopranos" wasn't the first show to demonstrate a market for intelligent, multilayered adult drama. TV has done that since "Playhouse 90" and "Roots." What "The Sopranos" did advance, obviously, was graphic content, without which we would likely never have seen "The Wire" or "Deadwood."

"The Sopranos" didn't cause any fundamental shift in television simply because television today is too diffuse.

"I Love Lucy" changed TV. "All in the Family" did, too, because most of America shared them.

Probably 80% of the country has never seen "The Sopranos," reflecting the ironic fact that while we have more pop culture than ever, we have ever less of it in common. Huge chunks of pop culture today, from hip hop to instant-messaging networks, might as well exist on a separate planet from other chunks.

Helping to carve a TV niche, which "The Sopranos" did, is not the same as driving a broad-based shift in perceptions, which "The Sopranos" did not.

The mob drama that did cause that kind of shift was "The Godfather," which "The Sopranos" never was and never wanted to be.

James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano never was designed to be Marlon Brando's Don Corleone. Corleone was chillingly comfortable with who he was. Tony knows he's caught in his own web and doesn't like it.

Chase's real triumph with Tony, as with the other characters, was making most of his life strikingly mundane. Paulie Walnuts clips grocery coupons. Christopher can't understand why a big movie producer wasn't impressed by a muffin basket.

That's why Chase has always been able to say, with a straight face, he wasn't writing a mob drama. Hey, Carmela just wants her kid to get into a good school, like every other parent.

The difference, of course, is that not everyone has a mobster husband to use as leverage. When Carmela plays that card, it becomes clear just who she is.

In fact, Edie Falco's Carmela has in many ways become the show's most revealing character.

While she talks a good values game and pretends she has kept her head above the toxic water in which her husband swims, she hasn't, and she knows it. She's too fond of the life Tony's blood money buys.

Her only issue has been how to live with that - whether going to confession provides absolution from her enabling hypocrisy.

That's the kind of question the average TV drama isn't going to be exploring, and certainly not in the depth of "The Sopranos."

Yet Chase is just as comfortable having Tony discuss Chi-Lites records, or dropping wonderful dark humor next to scenes of crushing violence.

It's hard to think who else would have had two racketeers complaining how hard it is to shake anybody down today because when chain stores move in, expenses must be approved by corporate headquarters.

Chase has suggested that with tonight's wrapup he will have exhausted all there is to say about Tony and his crew. That's a point some critics think Chase reached two years ago. But he has earned the right to the floor, and it's likely those critics will watch the final installment, just to see what happens.

Because after all these years, they still don't know.

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