The Sopranos Ended on a Journey Song Chase's Own Writers' Room Hated
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David Chase chose Journey's “Don't Stop Believin'” to soundtrack the final moments of The Sopranos, in part because he liked the lyric about how “the movie never ends, it goes on and on and on and on.” The decision was sealed, the Guardian reports, when he floated the idea to his writers' room and everyone reacted in uniform revulsion.
The Guardian's account of the Tribeca film festival premiere of the documentary Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos frames the whole saga as unfinished business: Tony's attempts at self-improvement, Carmela's delicate program of rationalization, the capitalistic churning of America, all continuing ad infinitum.
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Uniform revulsion from the writers' room is, in its own way, a useful signal: a song everyone already loved would have done the audience's feeling for it, while a choice that makes the room flinch leaves the last scene arguing with its own soundtrack.
Or the flinch was about fit — a relentlessly upbeat song laid over a show whose polarizing cut-to-black finale settles nothing, after a room full of writers had already recoiled from it. The Guardian notes the legacy has only grown since then, picking up a wave of younger obsessives during the idle streaming hours of the pandemic.