“Colin’s as much a son to me as you are.”

Year:  2008
Country:  United States
Language:  English
Starring:  Jason Isaacs, Jason Clarke, Annabeth Gish, Fionnula Flanagan, Kevin Chapman, Fiona Erickson, Brian F. O’Byrne, Ethan Embry
Creator:  Blake Masters
Run time:  7 hours, 6 minutes
DVD distributor:  Paramount Home Entertainment

    I am still upset that Brotherhood never got the recognition that was given to The Sopranos.  Not that Brotherhood is that good.  It’s terrific, but it isn’t The Sopranos because nothing is that good.  But it was certainly good enough to have a nice, long run on television.  I was totally into this show.  I was desperate to find out what happened at the end of Season Two, and I was therefore thrilled when I received Season Three on DVD, out September 22nd from Paramount Home Entertainment.  I sat down with my girlfriend, as I did for Season Two, and watched the whole thing beginning to end.  The thing is, this time the end of Season Three was also the end of the show.

     And because it was canceled after the end of Season Three, there is no real closure.  I have read a lot on the internet suggesting that the people making the show knew it would be canceled and therefore they created a sense of closure to the show.  In the sense that Colin has now run off with Michael’s girlfriend, and Tommy has been named Speaker of the House, perhaps.  But I got the sense that a lot more was going to take place.  The dynamic between Freddie and Michael shifted in a huge way over the course of the third season, with Freddie now becoming subordinate to Michael.  But toward the end of the season, Freddie appears to be making a play to get back on top, and Michael is self-destructing with violent insane behaviour.

     I felt as though this was merely a lead-up to some crazy action that was to take place in a potential fourth season, and I would have been very excited to see that fourth season had it aired.  But it didn’t.  And if the producers did know that the series was about to end, they did a pretty poor job of wrapping it up.  It wasn’t even an open-ended, make-of-it-what-you-will Sopranos ending.  It was just the ending of a season story arc.  The culmination of one story line, and the beginning of another.  But it doesn’t matter now, does it?  What remains is this third season, which is as excellent as the rest of the show, and stands up there with the best TV has to offer.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 1:10 pm and is filed under 2008, Cop, Crime, Drama, Gangster, TV series. 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.