Monk

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Although I have been somewhat down on "The Sopranos" since the great third season, as the show seemed to cave to criticism of being too violent and misogynistic, as though these aren't the keys to truly great entertainment, I did stick to the show throughout. And it's worth getting an article to capture the wild controversy of the way the series ended.

( article )

But the main difference between “The Sopranos” and its spawn wasn’t prurience, it was ambition. Most shows overreach, or “jump the shark,” when they pile on too much melodrama and too many dead bodies. On “The Sopranos” it was the opposite: The show lost its way when it put murders and mischief aside and weighed itself down in ponderous character sketches and too many Bergmanesque dream sequences.

... Last season was particularly low on whimsy and the playful black humor that was so much a part of the series’s charm, and the first two episodes of the final season are mostly solemn and self-serious.

It’s just as well. Way back in the fourth season, when Tony resisted Carmela’s pleas that he protect his loved ones’ future with some estate planning, she told him to grow up. “Let me tell you something,” Carmela snapped. “Everything comes to an end.”

-- Alessandra Stanley for The New York Times

It had been my feeling that after that great exceptional third season, the show bowed down to the firestorm of criticism of all that wonderfully cathartic violence and sexism, and one only tuned in in the hope of seeing some spark of its former self and usually ended up disappointed. Well, here's hoping that it ends in a bang returning to it's old nasty self.

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