Did the ending in a homey Bloomfield, New Jersey, diner called Holsten’s really mean to imply that Tony Soprano was about to meet the kind of brutish end he had dished out so many times himself? Was the man who entered the diner and slipped into the men’s room an obvious homage to the famous pre-whacking restaurant scene in The Godfather?

Chase’s obsessive control over every aspect of The Sopranos elevated it to what many saw as art, even as he grumbled throughout the show’s run about being confined to what he considered a demeaningly commercial medium. To Chase watchers, it was unthinkable that anything in those final scenes was pure happenstance.

He confirmed that he had settled on an ending years before the series ended, one in which Tony and family would be having dinner “and a guy would come in”. “There was nothing definite about what happened, but there was a clean trend on view, a sense of what Tony and Carmela’s future looked like. Whether it happened that night or some other night doesn’t really matter.”

The fact that the ending was so widely and heatedly debated only affirmed the intense attachment that viewers felt for the series. The finale was watched, in its various showings, by an estimated 18 million people—gigantic by cable television standards, and especially so for HBO which reaches only about 29 million homes. Many more watched the finale of Friends on NBC; fewer were still talking about it weeks and months later.

The Sopranos ending is still being talked about, referenced and parodied. And the fallout is still being felt. That black screen perfectly symbolised the black hole that the departure of The Sopranos left in the television landscape. What show is going to fill the gap it leaves behind?

That gap is inevitably most noticeable in the lineup of programs at HBO. No network could ever hope to match the extended influence of The Sopranos, but only HBO will be judged on how well its subsequent programs measure up.

HBO’s first try at a replacement, a Zen drama called John From Cincinnati, proved inscrutable and unwatchable. And Mad Men, an evocative new drama about advertising agencies in the 1960s that ended up on American Movie Classics after HBO passed it on, was identified by Entertainment Weekly as the new show with the most buzz.

HBO has always been about generating buzz more than ratings; and for eight years it owned the most buzz-worthy show in the business. One of the busiest writers on The Sopranos, Matt Weiner, created Mad Men, tailoring it specifically for HBO. But HBO still passed—a mistake, one of the network’s top executives later admitted.

HBO may never quite be the same without The Sopranos and, many critics would say, neither will the rest of television.