Back In Business

BARRY WETCHER/HBO
Tony rolls the dice in a scene from this season's 'Sopranos'

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If the characters are facing obstacles, so is the show. For the first time, it's airing not in the winter or spring but directly against the major broadcast networks' heavily promoted fall debuts. But it couldn't have picked a more auspicious year to do so; this fall's slate of new programs is the most uninspired, creatively bankrupt set of debuts in several years. There are the shameless knockoffs, like CSI: Miami, a less imaginative product extension than Vanilla Coke. There are the retreads, like the WB's remake of Family Affair, with kids so saccharinely cute and a laugh track so obtrusive that the new series really could have been made in the '60s. Then there are the garden-variety, playing-it-safe choices that make up the bulk of the lineup: another lumpy guy is married to a hot woman on a cbs Monday-night sitcom! John Ritter is a dad who can't figure out his teenage daughters!

One reason: the networks tried creativity last year and got burned. Critics touted Fox's form-breaking cia serial 24 as last fall's runaway hit, and it was among critics. The networks took other risks Alias, Scrubs but not a single new show became a breakout hit. So broadcast execs retrenched. In July, at an annual TV reporters' meeting in Pasadena, Calif., they said flatly that they're programming not for critics, who prize innovation and surprises, but for ordinary folks, who want to veg out after a stressful day with something familiar and comforting but slightly less harmful than a fifth of Smirnoff.

It's classic populism we're making TV for the people, not for the pointy-heads and as The Sopranos demonstrates, it is a load of crap. The show's highest-rated episode drew an audience of more than 11 million (not counting viewers of its repeat episodes), though only a third of American TVs (about 38 million) even have HBO. Not only will ordinary folks watch a show that demands constant attention, resists easy closure, relies on subtext and is rich with metaphor they will pay near usurious subscription fees for it. In one new episode, Tony sees squirrels eating the feed he left out for ducks in his backyard. The scene harks back to the 1999 pilot, in which a family of ducks landed in the Soprano pool, leading to Tony's first panic attack (they triggered anxieties about his family). Broadcast networks increasingly believe it's highfalutin to air dramas like 24 that require viewers to remember what happened the week before.

Broadcast executives say that because they need huge audiences to draw advertising dollars, and are restricted by Federal Communications Commission content standards, they have to play more to the middle. "We cancel shows left and right that get audiences that are the size of cable hits," says nbc entertainment president Jeff Zucker. "I'm a huge admirer of HBO," says cbs president Les Moonves, "[but] there is a word that describes us: it's broadcaster, with broad being the operative word."

HBO, perhaps managing expectations for the season's highly hyped debut, also downplays the showdown. "We're in a different business," demurs HBO chairman-ceo Chris Albrecht. Says Chase: "I never really have paid attention to ratings." But somebody at HBO does: a memo tacked on Chase's bulletin board listed ratings for episodes from last year. And, business-model differences or no, a Sopranos viewer is still two fewer eyeballs for those new-car ads. "[The networks] are afraid to endorse controversial and innovative programming because they're afraid they'll lose the mainstream, but they're losing much of it anyway," says David Milch, who co-created NYPD Blue for abc and is now developing a western for HBO. "The truth is, the public the mainstream will respond to that programming."

The Sopranos' debut date also launches the show into the publicity wake of the bout of national scab-ripping that is the Sept. 11 anniversary. Ironically, Chase has told the story of how, when he shopped around The Sopranos to the networks in the '90s, executives would ask if Tony could do an occasional good deed like, one suggested, help the fbi catch a terrorist. And after Sept. 11, the question arose whether the terrorists might have done in Tony Soprano whether Americans were now less willing to accept dark dramas about morally suspect characters.

"I'm a worrier by nature," Chase says, "so I did begin to think that. But then I began to read articles about 'the death of irony' and how [the new climate] is going to require more family films, people are going to want less complexity, people are going to want more simpleminded, escapist fare. Like that's any different than before Sept. 11!" Says Gandolfini: "9/11, I hope it's changed us. If we haven't learned something from it, that's the real f______ tragedy. But I can only do my job. If [the show] is not relevant, it's not relevant."

In fact, it's more relevant than ever. The new episodes have a few World Trade Center references, and Chase cut the Twin Towers from the credits, where they used to be visible in the rearview mirror of Tony's car. But the disaster really echoes in more oblique ways, as when Carmela badgers Tony to start estate planning in case anything should "happen" to him. "Watch the f______ news," she says. "Everything comes to an end!"

The Sopranos has always been masterly at being timeless and up to the moment at once. In the late '90s, the show was a tale of moral struggles in boom times. It analogizes even better to the white-collar scandals of 2002. "The Enrons, the Grubmans and the Global Crossings ... those guys are bigger criminals than the Sopranos," says Pantoliano. "The thing I like about The Sopranos is that if you cross someone, there is retribution. If you are a rat, you will be punished."

The new episodes are not perfect a storyline about a Native American protest over Columbus Day is uncharacteristically heavy-handed in airing Italian-American and other ethnic grievances. But they are close enough. Chase says he already knows how he plans to end the series, and the looming fed investigation and conflicts with the New York Mafia point toward a climactic showdown. But even as the cordon tightens around Tony, the show's emotional range expands. For all its flashy violence, it has become a work of aching sadness and irony about people who can't say what they feel and so express themselves with bullets and money. In the season premiere, Tony's nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli) finds an ex-cop who, Tony tells him, killed Chris' father when he was a baby. Chris realizes that Tony the closest thing he has to a father may be lying to him, using him, but he sadistically kills the cop anyway. Then he visits his mother, tries fumblingly to talk to her about the dad he never knew and asks her to make him a fluffernutter. The cliche is to say that you don't know whether to pity or despise him. But really you know you must do both. F. Scott Fitzgerald said the mark of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at once. It is also the mark of a first-rate TV show.

Yeah, yeah, you say, but who gets whacked? Well, there is an affecting, resonant death in the opening episodes (sorry, I'm not saying who), but it comes in a traffic accident, not a Mob hit. That's the trick of The Sopranos: it pulls you in with the tease of intrigue and death, and it ends up enthralling you with the passion and sadness of ordinary life.

Still, Chase and his stars are adamant about ending the show after next year's season 5 (though they leave open the possibility of Sopranos movies). There will be loose ends to tie up, and a producer who is willing to kill his baby won't hesitate to kill characters. "There are actors who don't know it," says Chase, grinning, "but because of the needs of the story, the Angel of Death hovered right over their heads and then moved on." Nobody is safe, because The Sopranos, bless its criminal heart, is not safe TV.