As with all things pop cultural in Israel, the Sopranos has recently come to an end slightly later than it did in America. Israel seems to work on a permanent two or three month delay (sometimes more) than the rest of the TV watching world, and there are no exceptions even for pop cultural phenomena as intense as David Chase’s mafia black comedy/social satire. In the interests of full disclosure, I must confess that I have not seen the controversial final episode of the Sopranos. In fact, I haven’t watched it for over three years or more. I must also, and with greater trepidation, confess the reason why: I don’t like it.

As perhaps the only person in the known universe who doesn’t like the Sopranos, I feel an obligation to explain myself before being stoned to death by a mob of outraged New Jerseyites hell-bent on revenge. The reason I don’t like the Sopranos is not because of the excessive violence, sex or foul language, it is not because of the show’s interminable self-consciousness and orgiastic love of self-reference, and it isn’t because the show is unnecessarily convoluted and obscure. The reason I don’t like the Sopranos is that the Sopranos is and was bad.

Perhaps not overwhelmingly, Showgirls-esque bad, but something slightly worse: depressingly mediocre and determined to overcome its mediocrity through the pageantry of sociopathology and the aforementioned violence, sex and language. None of which are problematic in and of themselves, but when married to artistic cowardice become simply offensive to the intelligence. The truth is that the Sopranos is a fairly uninteresting middle-class soap opera which advertises itself as an artistic masterpiece by virtue of its explicitness. To embrace perversity in the name of embracing perversity is perfectly honorable, to embrace perversity out of a desperate need to hide the fact of one’s own mediocrity is cheap, manipulative and, above all, boring.

Contrary to the assertions of its cast and creators, the purpose of the Sopranos was never epater les bourgeois. Far from shocking the middle class, the Sopranos exists to reassure the middle class, to make them feel important, interesting and, more than anything else, dangerous. Millions tuned in to watch Tony Soprano claiming to be intrigued by the contradiction between his comfortable, middle class lifestyle and its attendant neuroses and the violent, brutal world of his mafia empire. The truth was entirely the opposite: the audience tuned in to erase that contradiction in their own minds. They tuned in not to see how Tony Soprano was different from them, but to be reassured that he was exactly like them. Far from being shocking, Tony Soprano’s endless parade of atrocities made the Soprano’s middle-class, educated audience feel better about themselves. The show served as a perverse form of self-help for the bored suburbanites and their offspring who tuned in to the show on a basis that can only be described as semi-religious.

Divorced from the discomforts of urban life, shielded by their wealth and geographical location from violence, sex, drugs and excessive swearing, the fact that a man engaged in such things also worried about his bills, his children’s futures, the state of his marriage, his aging parents, cleaning his pool and the excigencies of middle age assured the Sopranos’ audience that, despite the vulnerable delicacy of their privileged lives, a violent, stupid, promiscuous killer could be obsessed and distressed by precisely the same issues that obsessed and distressed them. In so doing, they achieved a momentary reassurance that they too were masculine, ferocious and capable of instilling fear among friends and enemies alike.

This bizarre double game worked only because of the manner in which the Sopranos took on the form of the most reassuring genre of suburban entertainment: the soap opera. And indeed, the Sopranos has never been much more than a soap opera for mediocre suburbanites in desperate need of comfort and catharsis. Tony Soprano, by being one of them, also reminds them that however brutal a man may be, he will always need to sort it out at the next meeting with his shrink. And his audience can remind themselves that however sheltered and thus effeminate they may have become, they are still capable of beating strippers to death and erasing their enemies with a shotgun blast to the chest, should they so choose. Which, of course, in the name of decorum, they will not.

The violence in the Sopranos, therefore, never existed for the sake of realism, despite Chase’s ridiculous claims to the contrary. It was there for the best and worst of reasons, as reassuring, socially acceptable pornography for the middle classes. As the means through which the pathetic tale of decadent suburbanites could be redeemed -- American Beauty style -- through acts of extreme brutality depicted in the name of a non-existent artistic integrity. It allowed its audience to, like Dante, transcend itself while descending into the depths of the Inferno, endlessly titillated by the sadism on display in the name of righteousness.

This is, of course, the purpose of most popular entertainment. Where the Sopranos crossed the line between mediocrity and outright awfulness was in its pretension to be anything more than simply that. HBO’s Rome, for instance, which freely embraced its own lasciviousness, and in doing so managed a degree of accuracy unknown to the Sopranos, could never have hoped to become a pop culture phenomenon. Such phenomena only occur when the most middle class of aphorisms is followed: give the customer what they want.