After storming into TV viewers collective consciousness eight and a half years ago, The Sopranos stumbled out punch drunk and not knowing when to quit last night. The first two seasons were absolutely brilliant with top notch acting and writing. Ever since then David Chase and his team have taken longer and longer between successive seasons as all manner of famous and not so famous actors have gotten in on the action.

In engineering there is an old saying that in every project there comes a time when you have to shoot the engineers and get on with the job. It appears that someone needed to whack Mr. Chase at some point and finish the damn story about four years ago. As the wait time for each season stretched out the result seemed to be that Chase was just trying to jam in too many meandering, pointless story lines. The Sopranos needed some serious editing, but most definitely not the kind the final episode got last night.

By the time we finished watching that final hour last night, it seemed like they had shot three or four hours of footage from three or four separate scripts produced by different writers and then just through threw together randoms sequences from each into a one hour episode. At the end Chase looked at what they had wrought and just said “Aw Fuck It!” and turned off the lights. That was without a doubt the most unsatisfying ending I have ever seen. For a series that brought us so many brilliant performances over the years along with exposing some great but obscure music to go out in this way was a disgrace.