Michael Imperioli

Completing the run of one of the most acclaimed television shows in broadcast history, season 6, part II of The Sopranos will be remembered mostly not for what happened during the season, but for what didn't happen at the very end. Creator David Chase pulled off a series ending that was as controversial as it was surprising and unforgettable, leaving countless fans to look away from the show and to blogs and articles for answers to the biggest mystery since "who shot J.R.?": what happened to Tony Soprano?

Several crises threaten Tony and his crew; for starters, rival boss Johnny Sack (Vince Curatola) is in prison, and the always-tense relations between the New Jersey and New York families are strained through the unpredictable behavior of Sack's surrogates. Then there are the inevitable power struggles that ensue when certain family members are eliminated, by natural and other causes.

Facing an indeterminate sentence of weeks/months/years until new episodes, fans of The Sopranos are advised to take the fifth; season, that is. At this point, superlatives don't do The Sopranos justice, but justice was at last served to this benchmark series. The Sopranos rubbed out The West Wing to take home its first Emmy for Outstanding Dramatic Series. Michael Imperioli and Drea de Matteo also earned Best Supporting Actor and Actress honors for some of their finest hours as Christopher and Adriana.

Carmela to Tony: "Everything comes to an end." True enough, Mrs. Sope, but on The Sopranos, the end comes sooner for some than others. Though for some the widely debated fourth season contained too much yakking instead of whacking, and an emphasis on domestic family over business Family, what critic James Agee once said of the Marx Brothers applies to The Sopranos: "The worst thing they might ever make would be better worth seeing than most other things I can think of." And in most respects, The Sopranos remains television's gold standard.

"So," Tony Soprano asks analyst Dr. Melfi in the wake of not-so-dearly-departed Livia's death, "we're probably done here, right?" Sorry, Tone, not by a long shot. Unresolved mother issues are the least of the Family man's troubles in the brutal and controversial third season of The Sopranos. Ranked by TV Guide among the top five greatest series ever, The Sopranos justified its eleven-month hiatus with some of its best, and most hotly debated, episodes that continue the saga of the New Jersey mob boss juggling the pressures of his often intersecting personal and professional lives.

In its second season, The Sopranos sustains the edgy intelligence and unpredictable, genre-warping narrative momentum that made this modern mob saga the most critically acclaimed series of the late 1990s. Creator-producer David Chase repeatedly defies formula to let the narrative turn as a direct consequence of the characters' behavior, letting everyone in this rogue's gallery of Mafiosi, friends, and family evolve and deepen.

The Sopranos, writer-producer-director David Chase's extraordinary television series, is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home: Like 1999's other screen touchstone, American Beauty, the HBO series chronicles a dysfunctional, suburban American family in bold relief. And for protagonist Tony Soprano, there's the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan and his own, nouveau riche brood.