The Sopranos Creator May Have Accidentally Let Slip the True Ending to the Show
Since The Sopranos finale aired in 2007, fans have speculated about the sudden cut to black and whether it was indeed the moment life in the mob finally caught up with Tony and he was shot by a hitman as he sat with his family in a New Jersey diner.
And in a 2020 interview with the authors Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, with whom he co-wrote The Soprano Sessions (a book all about the epic series) creator David Chase may have accidentally given away what happened.
Prior to this, and since, Chase has been pretty coy about what actually happened to Tony when the screen went black.
During the interview, Chase was asked by Sepinwall whether, when he said he had an "end point" in mind two years prior to writing the finale, he was referring specifically to that scene or just saying he knew he had just two years' worth of stories left in the show.
Chase responded by saying he had "that death scene" in mind at the time. Zoller Seitz immediately pounced on this apparent slip of the tongue and informed Chase that he'd just called it the "death scene?"
The creator went on to explain how the whole cut-to-black technique was in his mind before he conjured up what would eventually hit our screens as the end of what had been 8 epic seasons of gangland drama.
The original plan had been that Tony would be summoned to New York for a sit-down with Johnny Sack. His journey to Manhattan would take him through the Lincoln Tunnel where the cut to black would be used to indicate "something bad" had happened at the sit down on his rivals' patch.
Whether this would have been any more palatable for fans is uncertain. But that ending would have seemed to imply a plethora of different scenarios from a car accident to Tony simply being whacked in the tunnel.
Given that the final scene that eventually aired has been so critically acclaimed and is seen as an iconic moment in noughties TV, it's safe to say Chase made the right call.
And it seems that all those who were adamant from the moment the show ended so abruptly that Tony had indeed been killed were the ones who had it right all along.
Even after letting the cat out of the bag, though, Chase was reluctant to confirm or deny Tony's fate throughout the rest of the interview.
However, he later stated that the whole purpose of creating the last scene of the show in the way that he did, was to show that New Jersey's top mob boss "could have been whacked in the diner" – a fitting end to a show in which the fragility of life was so often laid bare and nobody was ever truly safe.