Bye Bye, Bada Bing
Dick Meyer is editorial director of CBSNews.com
I especially liked the whimsical ways Chase evoked the great and unpunctuated continuum of life with movie references. In the final scene (the most sophisticated scene in television drama ever in my book), Tony and his family are having dinner in a diner. There are menacing signs everywhere. The scariest comes when a suspicious character goes into the bathroom, a reference to Michael Corleone's famous hit on the "The Turk" and a crooked cop in "The Godfather."
On the lighter side, Meadow's future mother-in-law was played by Donna Pescow. Ms. Pescow played Annette in "Saturday Night Fever," the Brooklyn girl who had a crush on John Travolta's Tony Manero. I guess Annette grew up and married a capo in the suburbs. But of course that's not the end of her story.