Ending continues a bad television tradition
By now, everyone knows about the series finale of The Sopranos, where the ending left viewers with far more questions than answers. HBO's website was inundated with so many angry emails immediately afterwards that the site crashed. Sopranos creator David Chase decided he was doing people a favor by leaving the question of what happens, especially to Tony Soprano, up to the imagination of the audience. Once again, a TV honcho doesn't get it. Audiences watch TV shows, especially those with continuing story lines, to eventually get closure. People watch to be entertained. They don't want to invest all their precious spare time in a program, only to have to wind up getting headaches trying to think of what might have happened. They want loose ends all tidy & tied up so that they, like the producers who made untold piles of money selling rerun rights, can move on.
This is not the first time a network program has done this to viewers. Far from it. Here are some previous examples:
M*A*S*H: In the finale of a program that was technically labeled a sitcom, they managed to 1) have the main character, Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda), suffer a nervous breakdown; 2) Have a young Korean mother accidently smother her baby; 3) Have company chaplain Father Mulcahy (William Christopher) suddenly go deaf and have him not tell anyone and put on a brave front; 4) With a furious battle going on, a shortage of surgeons, and casualties piling on, have surgeon BJ Honeycutt (Mike Farrell) abandon the unit due to a paperwork snafu; 5) Towards the end of the finale, when we find out where the characters go next, they give out very vague information about the futures of Majors Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers) & Margaret (Hot Lips) Houlihan (Loretta Swit). In the latter's case, they only say that she's "going to work at a stateside hospital." Duh. 6) In what may have been a far-fetched last straw, they have Sgt. Max Klinger (Jamie Farr), who spent much of the show's run trying to get out of Korea, suddenly deciding to stay in Korea. Oh, please.
Dallas: Did JR (Larry Hagman) shoot himself after talking to the devil in the mirror (don't ask) or not?
Cheers: After weeks of creating a huge build up, Cheers basically had most of the characters stay where they were, with the notable exception of Dr. Fraser Crane (Kelsey Grammer) who was spun off to a separate sitcom. What is mystifying about this is that during the last few months of the show's run, they had his wife Lillith (Bebe Neuwirth) leave him for another man, then shortly before the finale reconcile with him. When the Fraser spin off debuts, Fraser is divorced from Lillith. So what was the point of the reconciliation beforehand? And was the part where Lillith left Fraser even necessary in the first place? Couldn't they have just written her out without all the drama? Cheers was also supposed to be a sitcom, meaning that they're theoretically supposed to make people laugh.
As lame as those finales were, at least those shows got finales. Gilligan's Island and Married....With Children were denied their finales by their respective networks, even though in both cases, final episodes had been written, cast, & planned.
Nikki Finke of DeadlineHollywoodDaily.com Link wrote that the finale of The Sopranos "....craps into the faces of the fans." Finke also adds that "This is the reason America hates Hollywood."