James Gandolfini, killing them softly
The 12-million viewers who tuned into the final episode of "The Sopranos" in 2007 thought there was a good chance Tony Soprano would get whacked. There was an irrefutable logic to such a denouement: the mob boss had cheated death so many times; the HBO show was done; its brilliant creator, David Chase, was a stickler for classical dramatic theory; and somehow gutting the sole protagonist like a Jacobean-Jersey tragic…