Goodbye, 'Sopranos': I Never Knew You...Literally

I feel that I'm part of a tiny minority today. Almost everyone I heard on the radio and many bloggers I read were talking about the last episode of 'The Sopranos.' Even Chris Matthews devoted some time to it during 'Hardball.'

But I'm not mourning the passing of 'The Sopranos.' That's because my wife and I got rid of HBO a few years back. We never watched the network because none of the programming appealed to us. So, we had the cable people whack it. So, no 'Sopranos' for us.

The decision to get rid of HBO wasn't a moral one. At least not the way you might think. Some readers will likely jump to the conclusion that being a pastor and wife (or a librarian and husband), that we had moral qualms about HBO's programming. Maybe if we'd ever watched HBO--other than to see the excellent Elizabeth I just before we rubbed the network out of our cable package--we would have had moral qualms.

But the only morality involved was our moral squeamishness over wasting money. That's what we were doing by continuing to pay for a network that we weren't watching.

As to why HBO's program previews didn't lure us in, it seemed to me that most of what they offered was dark and cynical, a slightly more extreme version of the stuff you can watch on conventional TV every night of the week. I'm tired of dark and cynical, frankly. There's enough dark and cynical in the world, thank you very much.

Give me a little honestly hopeful any day. Or informative. Or just entertaining. Maybe 'The Sopranos' has been all these things. But I'll never know. And I'm okay with that.