Some actors from The Sopranos have won awards, Emmys, Golden Globes, et. al. At least one has achieved another kind of infamy. Federico Castelluccio, who played the Italian hit man Furio, has sold a painting inspired by the show for $175,000. The image, a variation on the famous 15th century dual portrait, Duke and Duchess of Urbino, is called The Duke and Duchess of North Caldwell. That would be Tony and Carmela Soprano of Caldwell, New Jersey.

Federico, who has no less that eight film roles to his credit for release this year, doesn't need to paint to pay the rent. He paints because he's an artist and -- clearly -- a good one. This original work was created after his appearance on the show. As Furio Giunta, the Italian made the mistake of becoming a wee bit too enamored with his boss's wife. Rather than stay in Jersey and potentially have an affair with Carmela, Furio returned to Italy and never came back -- as far as we know. David Chase may have a whole other story that was written and never filmed involving Furio. Chase is funny that way.

Is there a new trend in the television landscape? Could be. At the TCA panel for Mad Men, creator Matt Weiner, revealed that the show is only going to run four more years.

That's right, the man has a plan. Each season of Mad Men will jump ahead approximately two years, so that when Don Draper's story comes to an end, it will be 1969. Can you imagine how radically the show will look by the end of the 1960s? With their attention to detail, it'll be amazing.

So what's the trend? It's setting an endpoint for a series. Battlestar Galactica did it, and Lost has as well. Traditionally, American television series run and run and run until the creators choose to end or the network calls it quits which usually corresponds to viewers having tuned out.

Last week, the rumors about the Friends movie were shot down by Warners. Now, you can put The Sopranos feature in the dead zone, too. Who's the voice of authority with the lowdown on what's really going on in David Chase's fevered mind? A psychiatrist, of course.

Okay, seriously, he's not a shrink, he just played one on The Sopranos. Director-actor Peter Bogdanovich was asked about a possible big-screen Sopranos and he said it's not going to happen.

"I spoke to David Chase a month ago, and he said no. He said he thought about it, and he can't figure out a way to do it. So I don't think it will ever happen. I don't think you can ever say never, but my hunch is it won't happen."

Bogdanovich should know. He played Dr. Melfi's psychiatrist, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, and he spoke directly to Chase. No middle men, the big enchilada himself, the creator of The Sopranos himself, told it to him straight.

By the time Heroes kicks off season three, babies will have been born that were conceived after the season two finale but arrived in time for the season three premiere. That's a long wait by anyone's standards. Anyone except David Chase anyway. It's not as bad as all that though. NBC has seen fit to commission the web series, Heroes: Going Postal to make that wait just a little easier to take.

The series kicks off next Monday on NBC.com, and they've started the hype machine up this week with a trailer. The new character you see in the picture is Echo DeMille. He's a mild mannered mailman, with a secret. But as the trailer tells us, sooner or later, secrets will kill. The three part series is made by the same people behind the show and new episodes will appear on the following Mondays. It's unclear what role, if any, the regular heroes will play in the web series, but there is a familiar face that pops up in the trailer. See for yourself, after the jump.

TV Guide is reporting that the complete series of The Sopranos will be available as a box set on Nov. 11, 2008, with a $400 price tag. That seems like a heckuva deal to me, given that fact that most seasons of any given show cost anywhere from $30 to $60. The individual seasons of The Sopranos sell for $60 each on the HBO Web site, and the complete series was released last year for $515.

So let's do the math here: Six seasons (TV Guide says seven, but the official HBO site refers to Season Six, Parts 1 and 2, as one season, so we'll go with that) divided by $400 comes out to $66.66 per season.

Now we'll have even more opportunities to get lost over Lost. ABC announced today that the 2009 and 2010 seasons will be 17 hours each, not 16 as previously planned.

We can thank the WGA strike, which knocked three hours off the current season. The extra hour will be added to Part 2 of the season finale airing May 29.

When all is said and done, the series will wrap with the same number of episodes that producers and ABC negotiated last year. "We were supposed to do 16-16-16, but we ended up doing 14 this season, so we owe two," co-creator Damon Lindelof told The Hollywood Reporter.

Back in November we reported that a movie version of the award-winning HBO series The Sopranos would not be happening. The source of that information was none other than show creator David Chase. So, you would think that this information would be very reliable. Mmmm, perhaps not. For, you see, another rumor has popped up from a resource even more reliable than the man who actually created the program.

If you're in the camp that believes that Tony was whacked by the Members-Only jacketed man in the final blackout of The Sopranos, then you'll probably be pleased to know that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. has taken a shot at the HBO drama, too.

During a recent speech at New Jersey's Rutgers University, Justice Alito opined that the Emmy-winning series besmirched not only Italians, but citizens of the Garden State, too. "You have a trifecta - gangsters, Italian-Americans, New Jersey - wedded in the popular American imagination," he said to a crowd of about 100. He was speaking about the stereotypes Italian-Americans have had to live with in the United States. Clearly, The Sopranos would be just the kind of depiction to draw his ire. After all, Uncle Junior and Paulie Walnuts are not characters to be emulated and admired, and creator David Chase never said they were.

Creating a story about a crime family wasn't enough. Now, David Chase is accused of being a criminal; he supposedly stole plotlines from a retired judge and used them on The Sopranos.

According to Chase's testimony, he offered the former judge, Robert Baer, compensation back in 1995 before the show hit the airwaves. Baer refused payment. Baer changed his mind around 2002 when he filed the lawsuit (coincidentally, the show was already a big hit). As an additional note, the lawsuit has already been dismissed twice and the dismissal was overturned each time.

According to an interview in the latest GQ magazine, Sopranos creator David Chase probably crushed the dreams of show fans as he told them not to expect a movie based on the series. Show devotees were left dangling with the end of the series' six and a half year run on HBO. There has been rampant speculation that a film adaption would be in the works.

Chase told the magazine, "There is no thought about making a movie now and chances are we will probably not do it. But, at the same time, I'm a writer, and this is how my mind works: I could wake up some morning or James Gandolfini (Sopranos star) could wake up some morning and say 'how about it?' If it was great enough, we might be tempted to do it, but I don't think that's going to happen."

The series creator went on to say that everyone has moved on, including himself. At least he didn't say "fuggedaboudit."

David Chase (The Sopranos) won two TCA/TV Critics awards on Saturday night in a ceremony at the Beverly Hilton.

The first, for Outstanding Achievement in Drama, was presented by TCA member Molly Willow of The Columbus Dispatch.

"After eight years of some of the best writing and performances ever on television...we didn't want to see it end -- and as it turns out, we didn't have to," Willow deadpanned, referring to the much debated finale in which Tony Soprano cut to black.

"Reserve lots of money for Christmas, 2008."

That's the word from HBO Home Video head Henry McGee, speaking at the DVD and Beyond industry conference. He's talking about a Sopranos complete set. TVShowsOnDVD.com verified the info with McGee, and says it will be an expensive set. Though I wonder what they mean by expensive, since TV fans are used to paying $150-300 for complete sets.

Maybe the set will have commentary by David Chase on that series finale, or maybe deleted scenes or other info that will give more closure (for you fans who need that). Or maybe they'll be more of that black scene, which Chase wanted to last 20 seconds longer than it did (HBO talked him out of it).

OK, if you're not all exhausted by the Sopranos talk and examination of that final scene, let me bring up yet another take on the episode, via a friend of TV critic Roger Catlin at The Hartford Courant.

During the scene in the safehouse in the episode, there an an episode of The Twilight Zone playing on the television. An alert viewer figured out that it was the 1963 episode "The Bard," where a TV writer gets help from the ghost of William Shakespeare, who gets angry at the meddling from advertisers and the network and eventually punches an actor (Burt Reynolds).

I'll admit I was first "miffled" by most ambiguous ending ever in the history of series endings. But I'm beginning to come around to the the side that sees The Sopranos finale as "brilliant" rather than "lame." David Chase left us wanting more, and that's pretty awesome. Besides, according to Ken Levine, it could have been a lot worse.

On his blog, Ken, a veteran sitcom writer, hilariously reminds us just how annoying The Sopranos finale would have been on network television. For starters, a countdown clock would have run across the bottom of our television screens for at least a month leading up to the finale. The two-hour finale would have been preceded by a one-hour clip show hosted by Bob Costas. Janice would have gotten her own spin-off called Widow With Children.

Give David Chase some credit. He promised Alan Sepinwall of the Newark Star-Ledger an interview right after the finale of The Sopranos aired. Sure enough, even though he's on a sabbatical in France and is denying all interview requests, he kept his promise and spoke to Sepinwall yesterday, despite the controversy surrounding how his series closed out its run.

Did he reveal what happened in final scene, where Tony Soprano eyes some shady figures while waiting for his family to arrive for dinner, after it cut to black? Of course not. But he did try to allay fan's assertions that he pulled the rug out from under them.