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But Livia's death finally brings us back to what "The Sopranos" is: the story of Tony's head. He goes back to his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). "She's dead," he ventures hopefully. "So we're probably done here, right?" Not even close. Like last season, the season really kicks into gear when we get back, in Episode 3, to that therapy room, which is where the real story of "The Sopranos" takes place. Tony is now on a ghost hunt, chasing his unresolved issues — with his mother, with the way he makes his living — into the past, through some well-executed flashback scenes, and a surprising revelation about what triggers his fainting spells. And as we see Tony's childhood life, we suddenly realize how much, perhaps tragically, Anthony, Jr. has in common with Dad. It may yet turn out that "The Sopranos," like "The Godfather," is the story of the son as much as the father.
As the Eminem controversy, among dozens of other events, shows, Americans may love to condemn evil and to gawk at it, but we're not very big on understanding it. This is what continues to make "The Sopranos" the best series on TV: it makes the audience into Tony's psychiatrist. It requires not that you suspend judgment of him, but that, like the stone-faced Dr. Melfi, you not let your revulsion for him blind you to understanding him. And I know I'm a broken record about this, but that's why "The Sopranos" is finally a better drama than the critically-hot "The West Wing," which examines evil at an arm's length, if at all, and never allows your faith in any of its characters to be shaken for more than a few commercial breaks. (Witness the Feb. 21 episode, in which President Bartlet suddenly and implausibly ended his decision — which barely lasted a sweeps month — to move to the center and become a political pragmatist, all because he had a heart-to-heart with his Surgeon General, who happens to be his daughter's godmother.)
In Episode 2, Tony sits down to watch Meadow's tape of "Public Enemy," with an academic introduction added for the student viewer: "Tom Powers in 'Public Enemy' and Rico in 'Little Caesar' are not two men, nor are they merely characters — they are a problem that sooner or later we, the public, must solve." I suspect we'll never "solve" Tony Soprano — Chase is too much of a psychological realist to tie things up that neatly. The thrill is in trying. But to fulfill his creation's promise, Chase has to remember what his show is and isn't about. He's said he will probably quit the show after four seasons, which means that, having multiplied the characters and plots, now's the time for the show's universe to begin collapsing in on Tony again. (In simpler terms, maybe it's time for some people to start dying.)
And he, and the rest of the writers, need to keep reining themselves in. I notice, writing this, that most of the more revealing, rich incidents and deconstructible scenes that come to mind are from the second episode, which nonetheless is the worst of the first three. I don't think this is an accident. It's astounding, when you re-watch the episode on tape, how richly layered it is. When Tony hears his mother has died, the scene gives you in a few seconds his relief (Livia might have testified against him in a racketeering case), his immediate guilt, Carmela's tough, intense, unrewarded support of him, Meadow's anger and Anthony, Jr.'s awkward adolescent confusion. At his mother's wake, Tony opens a cabinet door, and in the mirror on the back of the door, for a split-second, you see the image of Big Pussy, the friend, associate and turncoat Tony killed at the end of the last season and Tony — who isn't looking at the mirror — betrays a instantaneous twitch of memory. (For a big lunk, Gandolfini can convey a world of emotion with the tiniest flinch or eye flicker.) There are moments within moments here. But as narrative, it's a mess.
In other words, as Meadow's Columbia-University videotape betrays, there's still a bit of the film student in Chase: a little overweening, a little show-offy, a little tempted to let his art get in the way of his story. Hence the show's occasional attempts to become another kind of show: a dark, Lynchian comedy (Richie having sex with Janice with a gun pointed at her head, with Livia in earshot upstairs), a Hollywood satire, a Cheever-in-Jersey send-up of suburbia. (It can also be just plain vain, as in a future episode that shoehorns in a puzzling, scatalogical joke about a New York Daily News gossip columnist who wrote spoilers about the show.) Like North Jersey itself, "The Sopranos's" weakness lies in its sprawl. Every episode of "The Sopranos" could be discussed at length in a film-studies class. But not every one is great TV.
This, of course, is the kind of criticism you give an A student that you know can do A+ work. "The Sopranos" is a show we're lucky to have, one that, as the beautifully constructed third episode shows, is only getting more interesting. But as one of that episode's violent, illuminating flashbacks shows (I'll spare you the details), sometimes being a success in this business is just a matter of knowing when to artfully use a meat cleaver.