LEST I RUN AFOUL of the munificent and trusting folks over at HBO, I won’t tell you what happens in the first four episodes of The Sopranos, whose sixth (and probably final) season premieres this Sunday at 9:00 p.m. Believe me, I wish I could; but like Tony, I took an oath. So I’ll just paint with broad strokes, and also confirm this: Diehard Sopranos fans, however much they may have cursed the extended hiatus between seasons, will not be disappointed.
It’s no exaggeration to say these four episodes rank among the most anticipated in television history. The series last aired fresh material in June of 2004–some 21 months ago. By the end of Season 5, Tony had killed his cousin to settle a bloody row with the New York crew; the leader of that crew, Johnny Sack, had been arrested thanks to a longtime underling’s cooperation with the FBI; Tony and his wife Carmela had reunited (after he agreed to put up over half a million bucks to help her construct a new house); overachieving Soprano daughter Meadow had gotten engaged; and underachieving Soprano son Anthony Junior was fumbling about applying to colleges.
As we rejoin the family in Episode 1, characters acknowledge the amount of time that has passed. (Season 6 does not pick up the day after Johnny Sack’s arrest.) Anthony Junior is now in college, though hanging on by a thread. Carmela is wrangling with building inspectors over her real estate project, and has less qualms than ever about “where the money comes from.” Meadow is still engaged, and seeking an internship at a law firm. Tony is still in therapy. His uncle’s mental health continues to deteriorate. His sister Janice, meanwhile, has an infant with husband Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri. As for Tony’s other “family”–Silvio Dante, Christopher Moltisanti, Paulie Walnuts, and all the rest–one mobster is pondering retirement, while another is about to hear some shocking news concerning his mother. Across the Hudson River, Phil Leotardo, the acting boss of the New York gang while Johnny Sack sits in the slammer awaiting trial, is still privately stewing over his brother’s murder by Tony’s now-deceased cousin.
It’s tricky to say much more than that without giving away the store. Some of the plot threads reflect longstanding motifs, such as Tony’s isolation, Carmela’s insecurities, Anthony Junior’s identity crisis, and lingering tensions between the New Jersey and New York families. Others resurrect more tertiary story lines, including Christopher’s taste for the motion picture industry and Tony’s stake in Barone Sanitation. Episode 1 ends with a cliffhanger that nobody–and I mean nobody–will see coming. Episodes 2 and 3 feature a self-contained subplot so cannily laden with symbolism and metaphor that it could easily inspire an Ivy League term paper. (Episode 3 is also worth watching for Christopher’s unconventional movie pitch and for a riotously funny “conversation” between Tony and Paulie.) In Episode 4, Bobby Bacala does a most unusual favor for a budding rap star. If that all sounds hopelessly vague, just trust me: Most of the action centers around a bizarre plot twist in Episode 1, the details of which are more heavily guarded than the Manhattan Project.
Critics were harsh in their appraisals of Seasons 4 and 5, but the beginning of Season 6 will probably receive an enthusiastic reception. Despite its very real flaws and propensity to leave loose ends untied–don’t hold your breath waiting to discover the fate of the runaway Russian from Season 3–The Sopranos remains the most compelling, brutally realistic drama on television. Since it first debuted in 1999, the show’s chief strength has been its ability to make us care deeply about the fates of wholly detestable people. These are, after all, murderous thugs we’re laughing at–and, at times, rooting for–every week. And Season 6 is as profane and intermittently violent as the rest.
But as Stephen Holden pointed out in a June 1999 New York Times piece, “As much as [The Sopranos] banalizes its mobsters, it refuses to trivialize their viciousness.” The show’s writers frequently march us to the edge of a moral Rubicon, where we may begin to empathize with, say, Tony’s family spats and general unhappiness. Then, sharp as a whip, they snap us back from the precipice, and we realize that, despite our shared frustrations, Tony is in fact nothing like us. He’s a thief and a killer, whose palatial home and thick wads of pocket cash are the product of robbery, intimidation, and more than a few broken kneecaps.
Likewise, the show’s dark humor has always been shrouded in ethical confusion. A witty scene often precedes, or becomes, a terribly bloody scene, and vice versa. (There is a stark example of this at the beginning of Episode 3.) But the unique mixture of absurdity and harrowing violence–of comedy and tragedy–gives the series a “hyper-realism,” as Holden put it, that is unparalleled in contemporary popular culture. Indeed, the comedic dimension of its orgy of depravity is also what sets The Sopranos apart from previous Mafia pictures. As David Remnick has written in the New Yorker, the true brilliance of the show’s creator, David Chase, “was to grasp the transformation of the Mob genre, its passage from tragedy to farce, and, against all odds, make something new.”
For that matter, is The Sopranos really, at root, about the Mafia? Sure, North Jersey Mob culture forms the series’ backdrop. But as Remnick noted: “Mafia life is not so much the central subject as it is the intensifying agent. The conventions of the Mob heighten the conventions and contradictions of a modern family.” This is especially true in the first four episodes of Season 6.
But I’ve already said too much. At this point, longtime fans are counting down the hours until Sunday night.
Duncan Currie is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
