Kevin: A quick announcement before we start. Control Z Rewritten is now on Patreon. The main feed stays free always, but if you want more, there's the full script of every episode, a bonus series I plan to do where I take apart alternate history that somebody else already made, a vote on which decision I cover next, and a printed map of the world as it looks at the end of one of these timelines, mailed out every December. And that's on Patreon.com slash CTRLZ Rewritten all one word. And if that's not for you, that's okay. Listening and telling somebody about the show is the best way to show your support. So thank you for listening and on with the show. This episode contains spoilers for iconic TV shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Lost, Parks and Recreation, Mad Men, The Leftovers, and Ozark. If any of those are still on your list, pause here and come back. Additionally, if you're sensitive to strong language, I must tell you that I quote an F bomb in this episode. Listener discretion advised. Early 2005, Los Angeles. A car on Ocean Park Boulevard near Santa Monica Airport. David Chase is at the wheel. He's the creator of The Sopranos, the HBO drama about a New Jersey mob boss who gets panic attacks and sees a psychiatrist. The show turned James Gandalfini into a star and ushered in the golden age of television. It has about two years left until it ends. Chase already knows how it ends. He's carried the final scene in his head for years. Every episode opens with Tony Soprano driving through the Lincoln Tunnel out of New York and home to New Jersey. The last scene sends him the other way. Tony drives from New Jersey back into Manhattan at night to a meeting he won't walk out of. Then Chase drives past a little breakfast place, and a thought arrives from nowhere. Tony should get whacked in a place like that. Breakfast Spot beats the tunnel. And two years later, in the series finale, it becomes a diner in New Jersey with a jukebox on every table. The scene Chase films there, the final moment of the show, ends in 10 seconds of abrupt darkness that people will spend years arguing over. But what if that thought never comes to end? What if David Chase decides to keep the ending he already has? Let's hit Ctrl-Z. Welcome to Control-Z Rewritten, the podcast where I take the biggest decisions in history and ask, what happens if they go the other way? Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls with alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision where we hit Control-Z, try it the other way, and see what changes. Sopranos premiered on HBO on January 10th, 1999, back when the channel mostly showed movies and boxing. It ran 86 episodes over eight years and won 21 Emmys, including Best Drama twice. David Chase created the show, and he signs off on every episode before it airs. He's directed exactly one himself, the first one, filmed in 1997, and he decides the finale will be his second. He works out the ending during the 21-month gap between the fifth season and the sixth. And going into that stretch, the tunnel scene is still the plan. That fateful drive past the breakfast place changes his mind, and when he finally writes the ending, he puts the family in a booth instead. The secrecy around those pages is absolute. Chase's team hands crew members scripts with the ending torn out or swapped for a decoy. And one fake version closes with Tony raking leaves in his yard. People who read it compliment Chase on his choice. In March of 2007, the show's location scouts pick Holstons, an ice cream parlor and candy shop in Bloomfield, New Jersey, for the final scene. The town council votes to deny a filming permit because members consider the series an insult to Italian Americans. Then the council discovers it holds no legal power to refuse a crew that meets the local code. And he is forced to issue the permit. The last scene needs the song Don't Stop Believin by Journey, and two of the song's three writers clear it right away. But the third is Steve Perry, the voice on the record, and he says no. He's watched Martin Scorsese play beautiful songs over massacres. And as he explains later, I really didn't want my song playing while a whole family got whacked. Chase relays the ending to Perry's representatives under a vow of secrecy, a family eating dinner. But he leaves out the cut to black. So Perry signs off on Thursday, June 7th, three days before the final broadcast. Chase had already filmed the scene back in March. On Sunday, June 10th, 2007, 12 million people tune in, the show's biggest audience in three years. The final season puts Tony in a shooting war with Fay Leotardo, and the finale ends it pretty fast. Fay runs the Lupertazzi family, the rival New York organization based in Brooklyn, and one of Tony's men shoots him at a gas station payphone right in front of his wife. Phil's second in command, Rich Di Consini, has already agreed to peace with Tony and lets the hit happen. Tony learns that prosecutors are preparing various serious charges against him. He then visits his uncle in a convalescent home and finds an old man who no longer recognizes his face. Back in the premiere of that final season on a boat, Tony's brother-in-law Bobby says of death in their line of work, you probably don't even hear it when it happens. The show replays that exact moment one week before the finale, in the closing seconds of the penultimate episode. The final episode ends at Holston's. Tony arrives first. He flips the tabletop jukebox past I've Gotta Be Me by Tony Bennett and picks Journey. His wife Carmela joins him, followed shortly after by his son, AJ. A man in a members only jacket glances over from the counter a few times and then walks to the bathroom. It's the same move Michael Coiglione makes in The Godfather before pulling a hidden gun, a scene Tony names earlier in the series as his favorite. Outside the diner, his daughter Meadow struggles to parallel park. The onion rings come to the table, and Tony calls them the best in the state. The bell over the door rings, and Tony looks up. And then nothingness. Ten seconds of it, and then credits in silence. Chase wanted the darkness to run unbroken to the end of the broadcast with no credits at all, but the Directors Guild of America refused to allow it. Across the country, the People smack their TVs and their cable boxes. Matthew Gilbert, the Boston Globe critic, spends those seconds sure that his set has failed and that he's just missed the ending he was specifically assigned to review. Some fans call it a ripoff. But critics start to defend it within days, and the reviews grow warmer every year after. Chase has already flown to France, and in the morning after the broadcast he gives exactly one interview. He tells Alan Seppenwall of The Star Ledger, the New Jersey paper Tony picks up from his driveway, I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there. But the country ignores him. On June 16th, the New York Times reports on thousands of fans studying the episode frame by frame, looking for clues. On June 19th, then Senator Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign releases a shot for shot parody. In it, Senator Clinton is flipping a diner jukebox while her husband, former President Bill Clinton, grumbles over carrot sticks in place of onion rings while they wait for their daughter Chelsea to park the car. The door rings and the camera goes black. A million people watched this campaign ad in the early days of internet video because it copied a famous television scene that was only nine days old. Journey's twenty six year old song sells a thousand downloads on June ninth. And 6,500 on June 11th, then climbs to number 17 on iTunes while radio play jumps 150% in two days. The broadcast leaves the country with one question: Is Tony Soprano alive or dead? In November of 2008, Nielsen SoundScan, the company that tracks American record sales, announces that Don't Stop Believin has become the first song recorded before the internet. To pass 2 million paid downloads, more than any other old record on iTunes. It becomes a staple of every karaoke bar in America. And in May of 2009, the Fox musical series Glee ends its first episode with a show choir version that debuts at number four on the charts, five spots higher than the original ever reached. By 2024, the recording industry certifies the Journey Original 18 times platinum. A marker for 18 million copies sold and streamed, and the most downloaded song of the 20th century. Now back to June of 2007. Reporters spend the next 17 years putting the question to David Chase. On June 19th, 2013, James Gandalfini dies of a heart attack in Rome at 51 years of age. And mourners drive to Holston's to the corner booth with an engraved portrait. Claque reading reserved for the Soprano family, because that table is where the country last saw Tony Soprano. In 2014, a scholar named Martha Nokamson, after years of conversations with Chase, asks him over coffee whether Tony is dead. The news site Vox prints his answer, no, he isn't, in giant letters on a black page. And by nightfall, his publicist calls the quote misconstrued. The scene, quote, raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer. Unquote. In January of 2019, Seppenwall and fellow critic Matt Zoller Seitz publish a book of interviews with him. And in it, Chase calls the finale that death scene. Seitz asks if he's heard his own choice of words. And after a long silence, Chase answers, fuck you guys, then says he was describing an ending he threw out years earlier. In November of 2021, Chase sits for a Hollywood Reporter podcast promoting the prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark, which stars Gandalfini's son Michael as a teenage Tony Soprano. He describes the tunnel ending he abandoned, and headlines around the world declare the answer settled. Dead. Six days later, Chase sends a statement through sites telling everyone to believe whatever will make them stop asking. In February of 2024, Holston's co-owner Chris Carly replaces booths that six decades of repairs can no longer hold together. And he lists the famous one on eBay with a $3,000 opening bid. More than 200 bids later, it sells on March 4th for $83,000, jukebox not included. In September of 2024, HBO airs a two-part documentary for the show's 25th anniversary by the filmmaker Alex Gibney. Who sits Chase in a replica of the office where Tony sees his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi? The movie ends with Chase leaning in and beginning an answer. The truth is, before the picture cuts to black. No answer holds. And here is where we press Ctrl Z. It's late 2006 in the production offices at Silver Cup Studios in Queens. David Chase sits down to write the last pages of the final script, and the ending he's carried for years goes on to the page unchanged. The last scene is a drive into Manhattan and a gun. Location managers book a small restaurant on Mulberry Street in Little Italy, the old Italian neighborhood in Lower Manhattan, and pull night permits for the approach to the Lincoln Tunnel. Decoy pages go out to the crew, and what they're guarding is a murder. In March, Chase directs James Gandalfini's last scene from a camera car on the tunnel ramp. On Sunday, June 10, 2007, the last episode of The Sopranos airs. For 55 minutes, the country watches Phil Leotardo die at a payphone, prosecutors begin to close in on Tony, and an old man failed to recognize his own nephew. With four minutes left, Butch Di Consini calls. He wants Tony to come finalize the peace deal in person at a restaurant of the Lupratazzi family's choosing. At dusk, Tony's escalade rolls out, and America watches the opening credits run backward, the turnpike, the tolls, and the skyline coming up through the windshield instead of falling away behind it. The car goes into the Lincoln Tunnel and comes out the wrong side. In a back room on Mulberry Street, Butch stands and reaches out to shake Tony's hand. At that moment, a man steps through the kitchen doorway and fires twice. Chase holds the camera on Tony's body while it goes still, and the credits run in silence over a dead man on a restaurant floor. Bobby was right on the boat. Tony never heard it. In living rooms the sound is a gasp, and then nothing. The people who spent years wanting this man dead watch it happen, and what they feel is satisfaction. By Monday, the reviews agree. Alan Seppenwall calls the death inevitable and earned. Every major critic reaches for the godfather. Chase flies to France and gives one interview, and the questions in it are about Gandalfini, about the monstrous mother he turned into Libya Soprano, and about what he makes next. On june nineteenth, Hillary Clinton's campaign announces its official song, Celine Dion's U and I, with a plain web video of the senator sitting at a laptop. The political press covers it for maybe an afternoon. On september sixteenth, the Sopranos takes the Emmy for best drama, and its creator wins for writing the finale. In October, Chase sits down with a magazine writer and describes what the applause sounded like from where he was standing. The audience wanted to see Tony go face down in Linguini, he says. They wanted justice, which he finds disgusting after they rooted for him for six seasons. Still, they got it anyway. Steve Perry spends June of 2007 the way he spends any June as Steve Perry. He co-wrote and sang Don't Stop Believin, and nine years after walking away from Journey, he still holds the power to block any use of the recording. But David Chase doesn't need it for this scene. So all summer, the song plays where it's always played, in stadiums between innings and at wedding receptions after the slow songs. Its climb is underway already, though, and it stays gradual. In 2005, the song cracked a weekly iTunes Top 10 after turning up on Family Guy and the MTV reality show Laguna Beach in the same week, and the Chicago White Sox carried it through a World Series run that same year. Journey finds a new singer on YouTube in 2007 named Arnell Panetta and goes back on the road with him. Then in May of 2009, a Fox musical TV show called Glee closes its first episode with a show choir version. When the cover debuts at number four, the whole country remembers the song. The Journey Original passes two million downloads in 2011, but the revival belongs to a room full of teenagers and matching sweaters, not the ambiguous fate of TV's most famous mob boss. David Chase spends those years talking about the work. In 2008, he loses the Director's Gate Award for the finale to the pilot episode of Mad Men. made by one of his own Sopranos writers, Matthew Weiner. His twenty twelve rock and roll movie Not Fade Away comes and goes. Reporters ask him about Gandalfini and about Livia. When critics rank the show's greatest episodes, the winner is Pine Barons, the episode where two of Tony's men chase a Russian gangster into the snow and lose him. The finale places well down those lists. Admired but settled. On june nineteenth, twenty thirteen, James Gandalfini dies of a heart attack in Rome at 51. Mourn drive to North Caldwell, New Jersey, and leave flowers along the driveway of the house that played the soprano home, the one Tony walks down every morning for the newspaper. HBO clears an entire night for the show. The tribute reel opens on the pilot, Tony in the backyard feeding the ducks, whose departure brings on his first panic attack. And it closes on a body on a restaurant floor in Little Italy. The obituaries call their performance the greatest television has produced, whole from the first episode to the last. In 2014, Martha Nokamson meets Chase at a small coffee shop, and they spend the hour on a plotting problem in a chapter she's writing. He picks up the check. In January of 2019, Alan Seppenwall and Matt Zollersitz publish their book of interviews with them, and bookstores shelve it with the other behind-the-scenes titles. In November of 2021, Chase sits for a Hollywood Reporter podcast during the press tour for the Many Saints of Newark and spends a pleasant hour on how the movie got made. Holston's is simply a local ice cream parlor on Broad Street. Bloomfield families come in for Sundays after Little League games, the candy counter does its Christmas business, and the corner booth seats whoever gets there first. When the prequel films its street scenes in 2019, the vans park in Newark, not Bloomfield. In February of 2024, co-owner Chris Carly replaces 60-year-old Booths, and a hauler takes the old seating away with the trash. In September of 2024, Alex Gibney's documentary airs on HBO for the show's 25th anniversary. The interviews and the replica of Dr. Melfi's office cover Chase's whole life, from a New Jersey childhood to the decades he spent writing other people's television. The last thing on screen is Chase. Talking about his mother, and Gibney lets him finish. There is no black screen moment. Damon Lindelof and Carlton Hughes spend the fall of 2009 in a writer's room in LA arguing about how much of their island mystery lost they need to explain. They have six years of hatches, numbers, and a smoke monster to account for, and a network expecting answers. What they hand in on May 23rd, 2010 is a reunion in an afterlife. The survivors of a plane crash finding each other in a church. Long after their own deaths, and it lets most of the island stand unexplained. Reviewers call it a failure of nerve, and they aimed the charge precisely. Two men knew how their show ended and just decided not to say. What happened three years earlier is what gives them that charge. Every critic reviewing Lost watched David Chase carry an ending for years, put it on the screen, and then collect an Emmy for it. Nobody can mount a defense on Lindelof's behalf because there's no precedent set by a revered drama in this timeline, and the complaint hardens into consensus inside of a week. Lindelof carries it to conventions, into interviews, and through his own Twitter mentions for the next four years. And what people hold against him isn't necessarily the island. It's the withholding. Vince Gilligan spends 2013 plotting the Final eight episodes of Breaking Bad, his drama about a chemistry teacher turned Methcook, and he knows exactly where his antihero ends up. On September 29th, Walter White bleeds out on the floor of the lab he built, flat on his back among the tanks, and the camera stays with him while the police come through the door. Reviewers reach for the comparison in the first paragraph. Gilligan takes it as the compliment it is, and tells an interviewer he learned how to finish a story like this from watching Tony Soprano's Last Drive, and that a show with a beginning and a middle owes its audience an end. Michael Schurer spends 2014 trying to close out seven seasons of parks and recreation, and he keeps circling one image. The scene jumps decades forward to a funeral. Leslie Nope and her husband Ben Wyatt sit in the front row. And two Secret Service agents stand behind them, which means one of the two made it to the White House. Sure wants to stop right there, no title spoken, and let the audience decide which one they're guarding. Then somebody in the writer's room says the word lost, and everybody remembers what four years of that has looked like from the outside. Nobody can defend the idea after that. So on february twenty fourth, twenty fifteen, An agent leans down to Leslie and calls her Madam President, because nobody in that writer's room can afford to be Damon Lindelof. Matthew Weiner joined David Chase's staff for the fifth season of The Sopranos and stayed through the end, which put him in the building for the entire argument about how to finish the series. He watched his boss carry a murder scene in his head for years, put it on the air, and then take a standing ovation for it. So on May 17, 2015, Weiner answers his own question. Don Draper sits cross-legged on a hillside above the Pacific Ocean in a stranger's meditation circle. And a smile crosses his face. Then he goes back to New York. The last scene of Mad Men puts him in a conference room at McCann Erickson, pitching a hill full of young people singing about Coca-Cola, and the men across the table love it. A man finds God in California on a Thursday and sells it in New York on Monday. Critics call it the cruelest closing in the medium and one of the most complete, and it lands on the same lists as Walter White on the lab floor and Tony Soprano on a restaurant floor in Little Italy. Weiner has the other version, but he decides against it. He can end on the hillside and the smile, cut before the commercial, and leave the country to decide whether the man found God or found his next campaign. But he watched what his mentor got for answering and what Lindelof got for the opposite. So he makes the trade every showrunner in television is making by 2015. Certainty is rewarded while ambiguity is punished. Lindelof walks back into the same fire in 2017. He and the novelist Tom Parada and the Leftovers on June 4th with Nora Durst at a kitchen table, telling a story about crossing into another world to find the family she lost, and nobody in the room can confirm a word of it. He defends the choice in every interview he gives that summer, but it doesn't take. Reviewers read it as the man who made lost, doing it a second time, and the show settles into the shape it keeps. A favorite of critics that almost nobody watched, defended by people who spend half the review explaining why the ending isn't a cop out. Chris Mundy ends Ozark on April 29, 2022, with Jonah Bird raising a shotgun in his own living room. Mundy stays on the boy, then on what the shotgun does, and the birds walk out of the house past the body of the man who came to stop them. Reviewers called it the coldest final image on television. The Sopranos arrives on streaming, and a generation that was either in grade school or in diapers in 2007 finds it during the pandemic. They put Tony in memes. They argue about Carmella. About whether Olivia is the real villain and about the ducks in the pool. Two of the show's actors launch a rewatch podcast in 2020 and take three years to get through all 86 episodes. And when they reach the last one, they talk about the lighting and the tunnel and what it was like on the ramp that night in March. Then they thank everybody and the podcast ends. Television learned its lesson from the one that kicked off the age of prestige television. And that lesson was to finish. Every finale that follows answers its question. The good ones land on the lists beside Walter White and Don Draper. The bad ones get the beating Lindelof took twice in front of everybody. The medium agrees on the same rule, which is that a story owes you a body, and the writers who break it find out fast what that costs. Nobody argues about a Sunday night in June of two thousand seven. The people who watched it agree on what they saw, the critics who reviewed it agree with them, and the argument that still continues today in our version of this world never gets started here. Tony Soprano drove out of that tunnel at the beginning of eighty-six episodes of television. On the last one he went back in, and a man in a kitchen doorway of a restaurant finished the story with quite literally a bang. America watched it happen. called the show the best the medium ever produced, and got on. David Chase withheld one answer, and that refusal has kept his show at the forefront of the cultural consciousness for nearly two decades after the final episode aired. The alternate timeline keeps everything else. The Sopranos sits at or near the top of the lists of the best TV shows ever made. Chase collects his writing Emmy that September, and critics rank the finale high among others that deliver what they promise. Viewers watch the show, admire it. And move on to the next one. But in our timeline, 10 seconds of nothingness produced something else. Mourners turned an ice cream parlor in Bloomfield into a memorial. A worn booth sold for $83,000 to a stranger on eBay. Owen Gleberman of Entertainment Weekly figured it out five days after the broadcast when he wrote that the blackout, quote, made the Sopranos live forever. Chase told Alan Seppenwall the morning after that he had no interest in explaining what was on screen. And for 12 years, he never said whether Tony lived or died. Then he called it a death scene in a 2019 book. Two years later, he described the murder he had planned instead. In 2024, he told TV Insider that the scene meant Tony could die and that he never said Tony did. But the question stopped belonging to him the night the show aired. He explained himself once in the spring of 2015 to DGA Quarterly. The effect he wanted was the song title. Either Tony dies at that table or he dies some other time, Chase said. But life is worth it either way. So don't stop believing. Reporters printed the interview and then, to Chase's dismay, went back to asking whether the man in the members only jacket had a gun. The last four minutes of the Sopranos hands the audience Tony's own problem. For eight years, he looked up at every door that opened in every restaurant and every table, because his lifestyle meant a stranger might walk in looking for him. Chase builds the final scene, so the viewer does it too. At the bell, at the man moving toward the bathroom, and at Meadow crossing the street outside. Then the picture stops. Everyone in the country is left sitting in a diner watching a door. Reporters asked James Gandalfini what happened to Tony. He said he had no idea. I thought it was a great ending. You decide. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find it and allows me to understand whether people are actually enjoying it. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thanks for hitting Ctrl-Z with me. Control Z Rewritten is hosted, written, researched, edited, and produced by me, Kevin Perez Allen. If you have a coin flip decision from history you want reversed on a future episode, find the show on YouTube. It's CTRLZ Rewritten, all one word, and leave it in the comments.