(2 of 3)
Chase, a wry, soft-spoken man with the perpetually weary mien of a medieval abbot, reserves the second-guessing for himself. The first season's success and the second's hype create "self-induced" pressure. HBO has spent $10 million to promote the series. Chris Albrecht, HBO's president of original programming, says it is "an image-making, branding show" that is crucial to hooking and keeping subscribers. Add backlash-happy critics and, Chase frets, the follow-up must be judged either Godfather II or Godfather III.
In fact, the second season begins as richly as the last, but stranger and eerier. The first installment (Jan. 16, 9 p.m. E.T.) plays Sinatra's It Was a Very Good Year over an opening montage of the principals, which seems vain (yeah, we saw all those best-of-'99 lists too) until the irony reveals itself. For despite Tony's therapy-induced triumph last season--discovering that his own mother had manipulated his uncle into ordering a hit on him, he rose from depression to smite his enemies--it has been a very bad year indeed for Tony. His uncle is in jail and Livia is hospitalized, yet nothing is over, least of all the drama with that mafiosa Medea--though Tony says, "She's dead to me," to anyone who'll listen, as if to convince himself. Livia gets stronger the weaker her body grows, and has gained an ally--perhaps--in Tony's sister Pavarti, ne Janice (Aida Turturro), a free-spirited, canny "Vishnu-come-lately" who has blown in from Seattle to minister to Ma. Alienated from both his wife and his psychiatrist, Tony is filled with rage, self-medicating and without emotional support. Where last season ended like a gunshot, this one begins like a hangover. "Realizing [his mother] was his enemy is one thing," says writer and co-executive producer Robin Green. "Dealing with it is another."
Perhaps the series' greatest achievement is marrying art and psychiatry in a culture addicted to putting itself and its public figures on the couch. (Consider: Tony is a philandering, appetite-enslaved, compartmentalizing baby boomer from a dysfunctional family who longs for the executive power of his predecessors and has a daughter, Meadow, with a Woodstock-era name. Remind you of any world leader you know?) Chase's show reflects his experiences in therapy and his ambivalence about it. "It helped me when I was depressed, screwed up, didn't understand my own impulses," he says. "But Tony has put his finger on some of the weaknesses of psychiatry. You don't take a stand. Everything's relative. 'I killed 15 people today.' 'Well, how could it be otherwise, considering the mother you have?'" Yet Tony's therapist, Dr. Melfi (played with brilliant modulation by Lorraine Bracco), is no enabler. She's a surrogate narrator; her sessions clarify the story and muddle it, through Tony's alternating breakthroughs and self-deceptions. And, this season especially, she's an audience surrogate, an outsider torn between sympathy and disgust for Tony. When she asks, "How many more people have to die for your personal growth?" she impugns the self-absorption of a whole society.