Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can't be sure.

--Meursault in Camus' The Outsider

"His mother died last night."
"No shit?"

--2 FBI agents in Chase's The Sopranos

Part 1: Background
*Skip to Part 2 if you're not really interested in the history of the show and just want to know about the claim I make in my title and how it applies to this season. Go ahead and skip. Part 1 is just for sissies anyway.*

The Sopranos was not meant to be three seasons long. It wasn't meant to be two seasons long. Initially it wasn't even supposed to be one season long, but simply a movie. Even so, David Chase's mafia family has taken on a life of its own. What started as an intriguing study of a mafioso seeking assistance from a psychologist has burgeoned (or perhaps degenerated) into an absurdist soap opera.

David Chase has told the story that he was motivated to tell. He doesn't understand why we keep clamoring for more. No matter what pains he takes to make us lose interest in his characters, we apparently remain interested. He slaps us with unlikely coincidence, skewers us with occasionally awful dialogue (though we know he's capable of producing the good stuff), and kicks us with moralizing that would make Oliver Stone blush.

And we say, "Tell us another story about that mafia guy in Jersey. C'mon, please!"

I didn't pay to see the first season of The Sopranos; I had access (seemingly) to every channel in existence as some kind of punitive bonus for having subscribed to the NFL Ticket. I remember HBO aired The Larry Sanders Show and Dennis Miller back-to-back every evening, and I was convinced (and remain convinced) that television is three hundred gajillion times better when the characters can curse.

The Larry Sanders Show is quite probably the finest sitcom in television history. And it's only partly because of the cursing, really. But as much as I liked Sanders, I was unprepared for Tony Soprano. I had to hear him describe his dream about the ducks before I realized how much I had missed David Chase's dream imagery.

I know there are those who will look down their noses at me for confessing to a fondness for Chase. Didn't he do that icky Northern Exposure show, with all of those stock characters? The sleazily mellow dj? The hyper-patriotic ex-military rich guy? The uptight, conceited doctor from New York? And didn't he have those dream sequences that tasted like Bergmann-lite?

If that's what you saw in Northern Exposure, I can't fault you. It's what I saw, too--at first. But those characters grew. They really did take on lives of their own. They figured out how to talk in their own cadences. And the dream sequences struck me as hilarious, often brilliant.

Mock me if you must, but I was glad to see Chase handling dreams again. At the same time that his reportedly 'realistic portrayal' of mafia life was striking a refreshing chord with everyone else, I felt as if I was striking up a conversation with an old friend.

And it was a very fine conversation indeed. Chase struggled with dialogue in the early episodes of Northern Exposure, but ultimately found his way to his characters' voices. In The Sopranos there was no period of any awkwardness whatsoever. Tony Soprano sprang fully armed from Chase's mind.

Chase was eager to tell his story; and he told it well.

And we listened eagerly, too eagerly. When he finished talking, we refused to believe that the story was over. We insisted on hearing more. Chase was something of a latter-day Conan Doyle, an author whose character's fate appeared to be less in his own hands than in the hands of the audience. We demanded more.

And so came the second season. Having little further to explore in the character of Anthony, Chase turned to melodrama. He mocked his own storyline by dragging in one overwrought character after another: the hysterical sister, the uncontrollable ex-con, and some kind of a mother/maiden/whore pastiche from Italy. Anthony and his psychologist rarely talked to one another--and when they did, they spatted.

It was childish. But still the characters seemed more real than any of the people we were likely to see on the other channels--if only because they occasionally used the f-word. So we continued to watch.

My wife and I canceled our HBO subscription when DirecTV first asked us to pay for it; but we renewed the subscription for the second season of The Sopranos. Once that season ended, we canceled our subscription to HBO once again, I assumed for the final time.

I was wrong. My wife insisted on resubscribing for the third season of The Sopranos. I asked her why and reminded her of how disappointing the second season had been. "This time Chase knew what he was getting into," she replied. "He had to throw things together last season. This time he'll know that he doesn't have to do everything in the first episode."

Part 2: Freshly ground

She was right. Chase didn't try to do everything in the first episode. He barely tried to do anything. If Chase had asked me to believe that the FBI had bugged Tony's house somewhere between the end of season two and the beginning of season three, I would have believed it.

But I had to be shown exactly how the FBI installed the bug. As opposed to last season's hyper-dramatic opener, this season's was hyper-staid. Things really became interesting, however, in the second episode.

Nancy Marchand, the actress who plays Tony's mother (Livy) died in the offseason. But Chase didn't replace her with another actress. In order for her to have a new conversation with Tony, he had him interact with a body double for Livy and then superimposed images of Livy's face delivering lines that she had delivered in past episodes. The challenge for Chase was to create a genuine-sounding dialogue out of scraps. And he did; it must have been an awful lot of fun to write.

Whoever was in charge of making Livy's disembodied head look proportional and properly lit when superimposed on another actress' body--whoever was handed that unenviable task failed miserably. But Chase let the floating head go because he had managed to make the dialogue work.

In his zeal to overcome a certain aesthetic challenge, in other words, he seems to have lost sight of the fact that he was playing games with the head of a woman who had only recently died. It's a trifle tasteless, but I think Chase knows that. I think he thinks that our continued fascination with The Sopranos is tasteless. Moreover, I think he uses this episode to prove to us how tasteless, how crude, how thoughtless our fascination with The Sopranos really is.

He follows the scene involving the disembodied head with some of the most awkward dialogue he's written since the early episodes of Northern Exposure. Tony's wife Carmella learns from Livy's housekeeper, Svetlana, that Livy has died. Carmella has a hard time saying Svetlana's name, but doesn't shorten it. Neither does she rely on pronouns as often as we might expect. In three consecutive sentences (check the tape if you don't believe me), she uses Svetlana's name three times. Then there is a long pause, during which the viewer is invited to reflect on Carmella's awkward, but persistent invocation of the housekeeper's name. And finally, just as the viewer realizes that the name Svetlana was said at least one time too many, Carmella opens her mouth again. Once again, she does not use the word 'she,' as we might expect a person to do in ordinary conversation. The first word out of her mouth is Svetlana, yet again, for the fourth time in as many sentences.

Having used the disembodied head to demonstrate that he can pull off tricks with dialogue, Chase now goes out of his way to demonstrate that dialogue doesn't matter anyway. We don't care how awkwardly the characters talk so long as they keep shooting one another.

Not two minutes later, the scene has changed to the bedroom of Tony, Jr., who is cursing Robert Frost for having written a poem as incomprehensible as "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." He is trying to do a 'close reading' (his words) of the poem for his high school English class, but it seems like it must be hard for him to concentrate with the death metal music that he has blaring in the background. His sister Meadow charges into the room to rescue him with a painfully facile interpretation of the poem, an interpretation that the boy construes as very wise.

Here Chase spells out for the reader the importance of paying attention to details in order to get to the meaning of things. But he simultaneously demonstrates that people are willing to settle on the first layer of meaning that pops into their heads. More importantly, however, he shows us that the meaning of The Sopranos (the significance of vacillating between good and bad dialogue, for instance) is likely to be drowned out by anything that is as gory and attention-getting as the plots of a mafia family (plots symbolized, perhaps, by the death metal music).

When Anthony visits his psychologist in the wake of his mother's death, he alludes tersely to the fact that the panic attacks that prompted him to seek therapy in the first place seem to be tied to his relationship with his mother: "Well, she's dead. I guess that means we're done."

I guess it means you are, Tony.

But I understand. We keep throwing money at HBO to throw at David Chase to make him pull Tony's strings. And he'll keep pulling those strings because he's a human being who can only stand to have so much money thrown at him before he responds. But he doesn't have to like it. And he's decent enough to tell those of us who are paying attention that there isn't anything worth paying attention to anymore.

Message received, Mr. Chase. And very much appreciated.

For what it's worth, I forgive you.





Recommended: Yes

Average Program Rating: TV PG -- parental guidance suggested