'Sopranos' fans are split on the 'zoom to black' ending

Tim Scannell , a research consultant from Quincy, prefers concrete information from his TV set. So when the screen went blank -- mid-song, mid-scene, mid-tension -- at the end of "The Sopranos" on Sunday night, he immediately assumed that his cable had gone out. And when his son later tried to read meaning into the series' final scene, counting the creamers beside a coffee cup in a search for grand significance, Scannell, 53, would have none of it.

"I'm not in the camp that we're all trying to read into some existential message here," he said. He was looking for plot. He understood the need for a twist. But not like this: Tony Soprano and his family eating onion rings, a glimpse of shady and wholesome characters in a suburban diner, a vague sense of doom, and then: nothing.

"If Tony was in a dream sequence and he was in a coma since getting shot and he woke up in a wheelchair next to his uncle there, that woul d have been OK. That's believable," Scannell said. "To have the thing just zoom to black -- not even fade to black -- and have absolutely no point at all, it made no sense."

It was a common reaction among "Sopranos" fans yesterday, who took to the Internet and the airwaves to vent their anger about an ending that provided no closure, no epiphanies, no clue to the fate of one of TV's most charismatic and maddening heroes. Talk radio hosts ranted. Fans railed at HBO and called for the head of "Sopranos" creator David Chase.

Yet a sizable group of viewers -- equally passionate, if not equally vocal -- took great satisfaction in Sunday night's surprise, and in the message it seemed to send about the mob.

"It just seemed appropriate to me," said Sarah Besegai, 32, a museum planner from Winchester. "You got that terrible sense of what it must be like to be him, and constantly be worried and be looking at these people. As the viewer, you were right there in it."

That uncertainty was what sold Boston defense attorney Charles Rankin , who called the ending "terrifically fitting and surprising."

The show's writers, Rankin said, managed to "express the inherent ambiguity of people and institutions all along. . . . It was a perfect ending. You don't know what happens."

It was preceded by a few minutes of high dramatic tension, which actress and writer Marianne Leone felt as she watched the finale in her Kingston living room. Leone, who played Christopher Moltisanti's mother on the show, watched with her husband, actor Chris Cooper, and two dogs they had recently rescued. "And you know how dogs are empaths," Leone said by phone yesterday. They were circling the room, on edge, until the end, she said.

Leone had no inside information; as time went on, she said, actors were only given scripts for the scenes in which they appeared. (Actor and director Steve Buscemi, she said, had e-mailed her that day to say he was on pins and needles.) Still, Leone predicted the ending, in a sense. She didn't want Tony to die. And she had a feeling the series wouldn't end with a gunfight between the New York and New Jersey mobs.

"I said to Chris, 'They're going wrap up this war in the first third, and the rest is going to be the family,' " Leone said. "Because you know what? Americans love shows about families."

But Americans also love plot arcs that wrap into neat -- or, at least, unambiguous -- bows. Leone said she respects Chase for resisting that desire. "As a writer and an actor, you want people to like you. That's dangerous," she said. "Chase does not care. I love that."

While the show's finish may not have won Chase much love in other quarters, some fans have found their anger fading into reflection. Jack Foley, 34, a brand and product strategist from Watertown, turned off his TV in a fury Sunday night: "I thought, 'Wow, that's it? That's a terrible ending.' "

But by mid day yesterday, his judgment had evolved. "Perhaps it isn't," he allowed. "Perhaps it's actually a great ending, which you'll appreciate in two days. Or two weeks."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to www.viewerdiscretion.net