As of this writing, The Sopranos has been off the air for nearly a decade, yet it remains very much at the center of the conversation about “quality” television even after the many landmark series that have appeared during that decade. One reason for this ongoing prominence is that programs such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad were so clearly and so heavily influenced by The Sopranos, both aesthetically and thematically. Another reason is that none of the genuinely interesting and innovative programs that have appeared since the debut of The Sopranos at the beginning of 1999 has exceeded the achievement of The Sopranos as a work of television art, leaving the series still arguably the greatest ever to have appeared on American television, despite the fact that the competition for this laurel is far stiffer now than when The Sopranos was first broadcast. Finally, a crucial reason why The Sopranos remains relevant to discussions about American popular culture is that it remains genuinely relevant to American life, having dealt with so many fundamental issues that remain with us today and that promise to remain with us for some time to come.
This volume has surveyed the way in which The Sopranos engages with these issues, arguing that this engagement is best understood within the context of the series’ overall participation in the phenomenon of postmodernism, which Fredric Jameson has argued is itself the direct cultural result of the characteristics of capitalism in its late, global, consumerist phase. We have also noted that the particularly stark and sudden cut-to-black ending of The Sopranos is highly appropriate for a postmodern series, given Jameson’s insistence that an inability to imagine history proceeding forward from the present in any coherent way is a key characteristic of postmodern thought. In particular, Jameson sees this inability as part of a general loss of historical sense and especially of a decline in “utopian” energies in the late capitalist era. In short, for Jameson, one key result of late capitalism is the almost total destruction of the ability to imagine anything that goes beyond capitalism, and that corrects its obvious structural flaws and inequities.
We have argued that The Sopranos similarly lacks utopian energies and that, while the series is consistently critical of capitalism, it offers almost nothing in the way of alternatives to it other than vaguely nostalgic references to bygone practices that have already been swept away by history. And yet, despite the seeming totality of its ending, the series goes on, and viewers continue to be entertained and amazed by it. In closing, then, we would like to make note of the fact that Jameson himself has argued that postmodernism is not necessarily an indication that history has reached its literal endpoint but that, instead, the postmodern might well be
little more than a transitional period between two stages of capitalism, in which the earlier forms of the economic are in the process of being restructured on a global scale, including the older forms of labor and its traditional organizational institutions and concepts. That a new international proletariat (taking forms we cannot yet imagine) will reemerge from this convulsive upheaval it needs no prophet to predict: we ourselves are still in the trough, however, and no one can say how long we will stay there. (Postmodernism, 417)
This upbeat turn is consistent with a long history of commentary on capitalism. After all, Marx and Engels, in The Communist Manifesto, argued long ago that capitalism could never be defeated as a historical force until its triumph was complete. That is, they felt that capitalism would ultimately prove its own worst enemy, bringing about its own downfall, but only after all of its other enemies had been vanquished. If it is true that the appearance of postmodernism is a cultural marker of the impending completion of the long historical process of capitalist modernization, then the end may well be nigh for capitalism as we know it. What comes next might be socialism or it might be barbarism; it is impossible to see from our current “trough” which it will be or even which is more likely, but there is at least a chance that it will be the former, ushering in a new historical period of equality, affluence, and respect for the dignity and value of all individual human beings. That being the case, it is also possible that The Sopranos might be an indicator of a crucial historical moment, a harbinger not just of coming achievements in the world of television, but of a glorious future for the world at large. Tony Soprano might feel that he came in at the end, but maybe that end was just a prelude to a new beginning.