The Sopranos, season 6

Junior, deep in dementia, shoots Tony in the kitchen and hides in a closet. The coma that follows gives the season its strangest passage - Tony as a travelling salesman in someone else's life, a hotel bar, a doorway with light in it - and his recovery gives it its theme: a man briefly convinced that every day is a gift, testing how long that conviction can survive his own nature.

Vito is seen at a gay club, flees to New Hampshire, samples an entire other life, and comes back anyway; what Phil Leotardo does about it is both personal and a pretext. Phil has decided the Soprano family is unserious - small, sloppy, insufficiently punished - and every negotiation with him ends one insult short of war.

Christopher, sober and half-out the door with a film project, drives off a road at night with Tony beside him, and what Tony does in the wreck - and feels afterward, in Las Vegas, at the edge of the desert - is the series' last word on him. AJ finds despair, a pool, and a rope that is too short.

The war, when it comes, is fast: Bobby in a train shop, Silvio outside the Bing, Phil at a gas station in front of his grandchildren. It ends in a diner, with onion rings, a bell on the door, Meadow parking badly, and a cut to black that has been argued about ever since.