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Today's All TV column is mostly a farewell to "Everwood," with some thoughts on two new improvised sitcoms: Lifetime's "Lovespring" (better than you'd think, given the channel) and Comedy Central's "Dog Bites Man" (not nearly as good as you'd hope, given the channel).

Also, shortly after "The Sopranos" finale ended, I did a live, typo-riddled chat that the kind folks at NJ.com have mostly cleaned up for the transcript.

UPDATE: Don't forget about "Deadweek" over at Matt's blog, and in perhaps the best news of the week, HBO and David Milch have agreed to wrap up "Deadwood" with two two-hour movies. It's not a fourth season, but it's something.

The Post Mortem

It wasn�t a good weekend for the University of Texas. The men�s baseball team (seeded third nationaly) was eliminated from the Austin regional. The women�s softball team was eliminated as Cat Osterman ended her nine-year career at the university. Seriously, it�s as if she was taking remedial classes with Vince Young and managed to extend her college career for nearly a decade. Even Jennie Finch wasn�t able to stick around this long.

Out in Fullerton, the K-Dawg�Kevin Costner�made his appearance at Goodwin Field which means that the ESPN cameras were obviously there. Security was intense as fans lined up deep to demand their money back from Rumor Has It.

Just kidding, nobody saw that movie.

Fullerton does take its law an order seriously. Security was so strict, it wouldn�t have been out of place to see this sign: �Re-elect Sean �Kill A Commie� O�Scanlon�God, Guns and Guts Keep Us Safe From Hippie Nuts.� The security was friendly, kind of like the staff in Roadhouse, just not as personable. Fullerton somehow managed to find enough people with the abrasiveness of Principal Richard Vernon (RIP) combined with the Napoleon complex of a hall monitor.

The only reason CS Fullerton would need this much security would be if Chris Henry was in attendance. Otherwise, it�s just overkill. Like do you really need to shake down the five-year-old carrying a backpack? If the kid is being used to mule in alcohol for his father, so be it. The head of security must have been beaten up a lot as a kid.

• It seems a right of passage for NFL quarterbacks to fight off rumors that they are gay. (Blame Billy Crystal and his character on Soap.) Carson Palmer is not making it an easier holding functions like this. Even Kordell Stewart would have more sense than that.

• An American made a splashy debut in the CFL this weekend. Former Chapman quarterback Patrick Josten completed 3 of 4 passes for 50 yards and 1 touchdown for Hamilton.

• Hmm, Albert Pujols body is already breaking down, eh? That ought to help steroid rumors. Of course, the guy is inching closer to 40 (he has to be at least 38) so maybe this is a case of an older man�s body breaking down.

• Other celebrities in attendance on Saturday night at Goodwin Field�the sports editor for the local newspaper in Orange County. Heard he was haranguing a writer for the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

AND FINALLY

There are those who will argue that the Simpson have lost something. Nothing could be further from the truth, as evidenced on Sunday night. The NFL was deciding who to award the league�s next franchise to, Los Angeles or Springfield. An elderly blonde announced that she �didn�t kill her husband to take control of his team just to let Los Angeles have another team.� If cartoon shows were NFL quarterbacks, the Simpsons would be Otto Graham and the Family Guy would be Kordell.

'Sopranos' shoot 'im up

"The Sopranos" episode 12 review:

Don't think of it as a season finale. You might feel happier that way.

HBO has been careful to call January's final eight shows "bonus episodes" for this season. At first, I assumed that was just clever language to avoid having to negotiate a new season's salary for the actors. But the only way to rationalize last night's meandering, closure-light episode is if you believe that David Chase considers all 20 episodes to be of a piece.

But fact is, this is the last episode we'll get for seven months. An eyeblink compared to the last hiatus, but season five closed with the double-barreled power of "Long-Term Parking" and "All Due Respect," and "Kaisha" wasn't nearly in that class. And by opening the hour with a dedication to the late John Patterson, who had directed all the previous season finales, Chase and company were calling this a finale of some kind.

I've heard all the complaints about this season, but this was the first time all year where I felt genuinely unsatisfied. I know I've been writing for weeks that we were heading towards an implosion, and that I didn't think much would be resolved before January. But it's one thing to predict it and another thing to experience it.

Chase has always had a fondness for zagging when the audience expects him to zig, and sometimes it feels like he goes zagging off just because he can. He wants to wean viewers off of all the TV narrative traditions they've been suckling since birth, but some of those traditions are there for a reason, and have been long before TV existed. Steven Bochco didn't say that if you show a gun in the first act, you have to fire it by the third; Anton Chekhov did.

I'm not insisting we needed all-out war between Phil and Tony, or Carmela to visit the FBI offices in search of Adriana, or Paulie to die of cancer. But we needed something interesting to happen in one of the arcs, rather than the crude jokes Chase and company tried to disguise as resolutions, like Carmela abandoning the Ade search as soon as Tony revived the spec house, or Phil's heart attack tabling the war.

To read the rest, click here, then come back to comment. I should note that, in the light of the morning, I realize I neglected to say much about the Tony/Phil hospital scene, which was really very good. But we can talk more about that in the comments. What did everybody else think?