But the Sopranos wasn’t a tragedy, that’s part of the point of the ending and a frequent reminder throughout the show. Tony doesn’t have a tragic flaw, in order to have a tragic flaw you need to be basically a good person. Tony is a mobster, a natural born thief and murderer, a constant philanderer and an all around jerk. He’s not a good person with a tragic flaw, he’s a scumbag with good survival instincts. I don’t think there is going to be a movie, for one thing Chase doesn’t want it. As he said every season he got to work with 13 hours, he got more time to play with in 1 season that the entire Godfather trilogy, and because he was on HBO he could do pretty much anything he wanted with those 13 hours, no censors to speak of to deal with. If he did a movie he’d have 2 or 3 hours to work with and he’d have to argue with the MPAA, why take the demotion. It’s not like HBO wanted to get rid of the show, he’d been talking about ending it for years, they kept writing him bigger and bigger checks, if he wanted to keep the show going in any form all he had to do was say “yes”, he said “no”.
As for being too cool for the rules of drama, screw the rules of drama, screw them in a place that used to be illegal in most states. The goal is to tell the story you want to and hopefully the audience likes it too, if the rules of drama don’t let you do that the rules of drama are wrong. Again this is stuff Chase talked about during the course of the show, that the show was selected time slices in the characters lives, there was stuff that went on before the show, there was stuff going on at the same time you weren’t going to see, and no matter who lived and who died there was going to be stuff that happened after the show. The question isn’t whether Chase is better or worse than anybody, the question is whether the story he wanted to tell fit nicely within completely synthetic artificially constructed rules, and the answer from the first minute of the first episode has always been no. The Sopranos was never a classically defined drama of any category, it was what it was, it wasn’t a tragedy either classical or modern, it wasn’t a comedy, it wasn’t existential except for the one or two dream episodes every year, it just was.