David Chase Hits CTRL+Z
from CTRL+Z: Rewritten Hosted by Kevin Perez-Allen
SPOILER ALERT: This episode discusses the endings of The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Lost, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, The Leftovers, and Ozark. On June 10th, 2007, David Chase ended The Sopranos with a family eating onion rings in a New Jersey ice cream parlor, a bell over the door, and 10 seconds of black. Viewers across the country hit their cable boxes. The Boston Globe's television critic sat through those seconds certain his set had died and taken the review with it. Chase had spent years planning something else. Tony Soprano drives out of the Lincoln Tunnel at the top of all 86 hours of the show, and the last scene sent him back the other way, into Manhattan at night, to a meeting he wasn't walking out of. Then, driving down Ocean Park Boulevard in Los Angeles in 2005, Chase passed a little breakfast place, and a thought arrived: Tony should get it somewhere like that. The breakfast place won. What if it hadn't? This week we hit CTRL+Z on the last pages of the final script, and follow the ripple to today: a song that stays where it was in 1981, a corner booth in Bloomfield that stays furniture, a documentary that ends on an answer, and a decade of showrunners deciding what they owe an audience when the credits come. Nobody ever asks David Chase what happened to Tony Soprano, because 12 million people watched it happen.
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