The Sopranos

This column was first printed in the Age on December 7, 2002

Tony Soprano couldn't have planned it better. How to get fever pitch publicity for a repeat - sorry 'encore presentation'- of The Soprano's? Tell everyone it's a new season, let them sit down on Monday night at 9.30pm, and whammo, show them the old series. Brilliant. Switcheroo successful. Ratings bonanza next year guaranteed.

In version one of this column, the version I wrote when I thought a new season of The Sopranos and long summer evenings was spread before us, I was feeling all warm and loving towards Channel Nine. Pleased that they had relented, and despite the show's language, moved it to the earlier 9.30pm timeslot.

Language aside, there is something a historical about the Mafia and you feel that their particular codes of family and loyalty haven't changed for centuries. This, of course, is what makes The Sopranos such great television - watching the drip drip drip of the present wear down Tony Soprano and the Family (both euphemistic and literal). It's like watching water wear down granite, only pacier. The added bonus is that it's feel good: if the Soprano family is struggling, us ordinary folk can feel less embarrassed about flailing under daily pressures.

Tony needs a therapist, and who can blame him, he's in a stressful line of business. Anxiety attacks, weight problems, kids who don't understand parental authority - it's all very twenty-first century. More to the point the fourth season was all-very post-September 11, and the Twin Towers have been removed from what has to be the best credit sequence on television. In fact it was the presence of the towers in the credits last Monday, which alerted people to the switcheroo. I had thought I was going to sit down to a show which addressed uncertain times, times in which Tony's moving bags of money from the laundry floor to a hole in the garden - a method that just isn't cutting it in terms of financial management. World events are making Carmela jumpy and she's talking investment portfolios; Tony is getting jumpier and talking to his therapist about the fact that a retirement package for someone in his line of work is usually a bullet in the head.

But no, plumbing problems were the main focus of last week's episode, the first of Season Three. Plumbing and the Keystone Cops efforts of the FBI who have bugged every corner of the Soprano house, only to find out that Carmela thinks Tony needs more roughage in his diet. This Monday Tony collapses and Carmela finds him out cold. Now don't get me wrong, Season Three is good. It's all good. But you'll have to wait until next rating periods to enjoy Tony's depressed meditation on the importance of blood family while we watch his nephew Christopher, whose drug problem is proceeding apace, plan his empire and Tony's demise. It will be months before we get to see Tony organise an orgy of Icelandic airhostesses and the efforts of Lola, an undercover FBI agent.

If Lola watched Shark Tracker (today 5pm, channel 9) she'd know that the best way to disorientate a shark is to put a rope around it's tail and hang it upside down in the water for 10 minutes or so. Sure it's a nature documentary, but Marine biologist Richard Fitzpatrick hands-on approach to working with sharks offers some clues to managing dangerous types. And Tony's going need to do something, because no matter what season this is, The Family, it aint what it used to be.

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