This post written from Starbucks in Florham Park, NJ

What kind of Jersey Boy would I be if I didn’t comment on the last episode of The Sopranos?I’ve been a loyal fan since the first edge of your seat episode to the last anti-climactic finale.

First my opinion about the last episode – IT SUCKED! A fade to black?!? Are you friggin kidding me?!?  Don’t stop believing? That’s not the theme song for the end of a legendary mob show! That’s the ending song for something starring Diane Keaton and Goldie Hawn. So the message is that we can “believe” whatever we want. Can you get any less creative then letting the audience figure it out for themselves? What a cop-out.

I’m a HUGE Seinfeld fan and thought the last episode of one of my all time favorite shows was, well, bad. After seeing the ending of the Sopranos, the Seinfeld finale has skyrocketed to pure genius!

I feel like a weight has been lifted – I feel better having gotten this off my chest. Now, as a marketer I think I know why this happened. The writers lost their connection with their customers – us. They wrote what they wanted not what we needed. Just like Volkswagen did with the Phaeton (read earlier post) they stopped trying to understand what we wanted and why we loved the show to begin with.

We watch the Sopranos to become part of a world that 99% of the country knows nothing about. It’s adult fantasy, role play for grownups; we get to be armchair mobsters. As much as we would never want to see anything depicted on screen happen in real life, we do derive a level of excitement from seeing it unfold from the safety of our living rooms.

Two seasons ago at the height of Sopranos popularity the New Jersey based writers were fired and replaced by a writing team in California. BIG MISTAKE! The allure of the show was that “Jersey” connection; after all, that’s what we’re known for here in the Garden State, Mobsters and toll booths.

The show took a terrible tailspin when the new writers took over, goofy storylines started to appear. Christopher going Hollywood, Vito and Johnny-Cakes (uuugghhh) and the unbearable amount of time spent on AJ’s personality swings. This is not what we want to see. The west coast writers apparently thought we wanted to watch a soap opera and not a show about Jersey mob life.

As much as we don’t like to admit it we watch this show for the “shot out of a cannon” excitement, the violence, the back stabbing, lying, cheating and all that goes along with it. We get to be part of things far removed from our lives. Water coolers everywhere were abuzz with “whack-chat”. Who got whacked, where they were whacked, how they were whacked and why? We love whacking!

Gone were the days of Ralphie Cifaretto smashing his stripper girlfriends head into a guardrail and Richie Aprile running down (twice!) Peter “Beansie” Gaeta with his car. What was all this great mob action replaced with? CLEAVER! I’m glad the show ended, what would have been next, Tony eating a pie at Papa Johns!?!

Yes Phil Leotardo got whacked and had his head squashed like a cantaloupe but that was the only real action the entire episode, plus I’ve seen Criss Angel do that!

You may have another opinion (feel free to comment) about the last appearance of Jersey’s favorite family, you’re entitled, wrong but entitled.

When you lose your connection to your customers you create what you want as opposed to what they want and your business, just like the end of the Sopranos, may just fade to black.

There was one redeming part of the last episode that did make it worth watching. I think I actually learned the secret to livng a happy and prosperous life. Do you remember the part where

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 13th, 2007 at 7:13 pm and is filed under UnbeFRIGGINlievable. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.