I have been counting the days until The Sopranos is finally back on the air. Tonight will mark the beginning of the show's seventh and last season. (OK, technically we will be in season 6, part 2.)
But now that this long-anticipated return and farewell has arrived, I feel sadness, not relief. Only nine episodes before the show becomes television history.
This highly sophisticated show helped usher in a golden age of television, bringing to our home screens scripts and productions of fresh quality and creativity.
To be sure, the revolution had started earlier. Many historians of American television mark the big change with St. Elsewhere, which ran for six seasons starting in 1982.
But it was The Sopranos that showed television writing can rival the best of film and theater. It was The Sopranos that exposed network television for the total waste of time it had become. It was The Sopranos that led to other sterling HBO dramas, such as Six Feet Under and Big Love.
I'm no shill for HBO, but I do think it's important to ask what about The Sopranos has been so thought-provoking. Here's what I think it is: Like Six Feet Under and Big Love, The Sopranos is based on a hook that, at first glance, seems far removed from the real-life world of the viewer. But this hook allows the show to explore sides of American life that are both forbidden and intimately familiar.
For The Sopranos, the hook is the Mafia; for Big Love it is polygamy; for Six Feet Under, the funeral business and preparing the dead.
What is startling is that all three shows return and return to a similar theme: American life, in the coddled, cosseted suburbs, is cruel, never crueler than when it pretends to be normal.
But all three shows also (strangely enough) celebrate the family, and the possibility (even when it doesn't look much like it) of connection and love.
David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, reveals his fury about the hypocrisies and injustices of the world by creating characters who act out his sense of betrayal and rage. Tony Soprano is a Mafioso and a killer, but he is also an Everyman; he lives in the Mafia world, but he also lives in a version of our own world, which has its own ways of being ruthless and bloody. The same introspective mind-set is seen in Six Feet Under, created by Alan Ball, and Big Love, co-created by Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer.
Each of these series presents life's dilemmas, contradictions and madnesses. Each shows how cruel human nature can be and how hard it is to survive life's injustices with any semblance of dignity and hope.
Tony Soprano is a man with a tough family business to maintain and memories of a brutal father that haunt him. He has the cruelest of mothers, a woman who dominates through lies and manipulation. Though Tony loves his wife and children, his mistrust of women makes fidelity impossible. Each affair, however, exacts a price, driving Tony further into despair. Crippling anxiety attacks, brought on by memories of his parents' brutality, send him into therapy.
Tony's therapist, Jennifer Melfi, struggles with a question most therapists face: Are ruthless, cruel people capable of change? Which leads to a more universal question: Since so many who are ruthless and cruel hold power in our society and our world, what is the hope for the future?
Big Love examines family life - yes, polygamous family life - but as in The Sopranos, a family is a family. All families struggle to survive rivalries and jealousies, those that exist between its members and those from the outside.
Six Feet Under involved the most neurotic of families, but one that, again, managed to experience authentic contact and caring. The final episode of Six Feet Under was some of the finest TV ever: After bearing witness to a family that faced death and extreme loss, and was finally able to wish one another well, in various fashions, the audience witnessed a 10-minute tableau of time moving forward, revealing how all of the lives of this family unfolded and ended.
The Sopranos led to all of this sterling, insightful work. Since David Chase has always punished Tony for his cruelties and lapses, and since I just cannot see Tony in a witness-protection program, the future for him and his family is troubling at best.
Even more troubling is the future of television without the Chase model. It will be awful to say goodbye to Tony, to his family, to his community. But it will be unbearable if Chase's exit also means an end of the Golden Age he helped make possible.
...................................................................
Contact SaraKay Smullens through her website.
