TV Review: The Sopranos is back. Tony is gone from the family home, having been kicked out by Carmela. He has been replaced by a bear. The animal has taken his place in mooching about the garden, frightening son Anthony so much that he turns instantly from obnoxious teenager to quivering infant.
It is attracted by the duck food Tony keeps in his yard. Everything began with duck food. In the pilot episode, Tony wondered why he became so panicked when the birds left his swimming-pool. His therapist, Dr Melfi, told him he missed the ducks because he was afraid of losing his family. Somebody oughta whack those ducks.
This series began with a guarantee: a news report announcing the impending release of several Mafiosi, a man telling us that the cops will be busy, the script telling us to expect new blood. And more blood. As Tony's cousin, Steve Buscemi's name appeared in the acting credits, but here he surfaced only as a promise, as a couple of blurred pictures on the news bulletin and in the way Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti recounted the time they chased a Russian through the woods. That particular episode was directed by Buscemi.
David Chase's script was its usual measured self, unhurried and dense, able to shift gear in a moment. A foolhardy waiter who argued about his miserly tip ended up dead, so uniting in murder and parsimony the feuding Paulie and Christopher. Carmine keeled over with a stroke, and when his oxygen runs out there will surely be an inexorable violent rush to fill the vacuum. Meanwhile, James Gandolfini continues to play Tony as a character of glowering intensity, both complex and predictable; something once again displayed in his courting of Dr Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) and how he inflated the charm until a prick of rejection led him to explode with rage.
After that, he returned to visit his family home and the episode ended with Tony in the backyard, rifle in hand, cigar in mouth, waiting for a metaphor to come lumbering past.
At the same time, BBC2 was showing Hawking, a drama based on the scientist's first two years with motor neurone disease. What did we learn? That if he had been American, Stephen Hawking's life would have been given the movie treatment many universes ago. If there's one thing Hollywood knows, it's that a scientist at a blackboard is a nerd, but a scientist in a doctor's surgery is a hero.
This drama was at its keenest away from the equations. As the young cosmologist, Benedict Cumberbatch was excellent, giving his body over to the gathering tremors, realising the common perception of Hawking as a man whose mind grew as his body diminished.
It struggled a little more with the maths. "I want to do something significant," he said, and the script found it in his and Roger Penrose's theorem regarding the origin of the universe. But it reckoned that wasn't enough. Hawking has done some important things, including bringing popular science to the masses, even if his best-known book is as stodgy as any in the genre. He might be as widely known as Einstein, but his theories are not. So the drama ran a parallel story involving two scientists, Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson, who had a much more tangible eureka moment and were given the Nobel prize.
In overcooked, often irrelevant scenes, they explained to journalists how they stumbled upon the sound of the cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang. That discovery helped prove Hawking's theory, but its inclusion here betrayed a lack of faith in the drama of his work, and sometimes even overshadowed it. The thing about that search for those faint embers of the Big Bang is that it was there all the time. It's in the white noise on your radio. It's in the static on your television screen.
As Bill Bryson recently explained, the next time you think there's nothing on the telly, you can always watch the birth of the universe.
Meanwhile, Nighty Night comes towards its conclusion, with its final episode next Monday. This week, Jill - wife, businesswoman, psychopath - arranged the funeral of her husband. He is not, by the way, dead. She had booked him into a hospice under the pretence that he was host to a tumour the size of a watermelon, when his cancer has long since been cured. In a fitting tribute to her resolve, Jill arrived into the church on the back of a horse and spoke of her husband in unforgettable terms.
"He was a bad husband and quite an evil man. He failed to carry out his duties, either in the bedroom, in the shower or while strapped to a washing machine with a hairbrush in the mouth." Finally, her husband checked himself out and arrived home this week to find ads for his funeral in the house and an ad for Jill's beauty parlour beneath a large photo of her on his headstone.
Avoiding the tradition in British sitcoms, Nighty Night has allowed no glint of redemption. Jill, written and played by Julia Davis, is not a hapless fool, but a committed sociopath. It's not interested in why she is this way, only that she is there. It doesn't care for your empathy.
Davis has been working up - or down - to this for a while, most notably with her work with Rob Brydon in Human Remains. And while Nighty Night has sometimes veered into grotesque exaggeration, it has steered steadily through the darkness. Just don't expect any light at the end.
A Truth About Bingo from the Would You Believe team was a programme about ageing that was far more straightforward than its mock-profound title suggested. Presenter Anna Nolan asked young people what they thought about journeying towards old age and older people what it was like once you are there. For instance, ask an older person about some of the problems of ageing and it's the everyday invisibility that jumps out: "Try getting a drink at a bar!" Ask a teenager if they think they'll be having sex in their seventies: "Yeeurgh!" It's one of those areas around which you must tiptoe. The term elderly is out. So is geriatric. Old person should be softened to older person. This, it turns out, plays both ways. The man from Age Action Ireland was making a point: "Most kids that I know . . " he paused. "Not kids. It's ageist, probably, to say kids." Yes. They prefer the term "younger person". Or "dude".
Nolan dressed up as an oldie and walked up Dublin's Grafton Street to get a feel for age, but it begged the question of why the programme chose a thirtysomething presenter to investigate the topic. Perhaps a programme about how we don't listen enough to older people felt it would be given more attention if it weren't presented by one of them.
There was little of any interest to be found in The Games, a week-long reality TV show in which the most minor stars in the firmament compete against each other in various sports. It is its second series, and it says much that there has been nothing yet to rival the exciting moment last year when comedian Bobby Davro did a bellyflop off the high dive. That's Olympic-class banality.
Irish interest came from Shane Lynch, who you might remember as one of the members of Boyzone that were to be found in exile at the back of the stage. He has not been seen in quite some time, but this week appeared on both The Games and Channel 4's bank holiday offering Battle of the Boybands. He was always a man with an unusual sense of style, but since we last saw him he seems to have snagged himself on several fashions and been unable to shake any of them off.
This week he has proven to be a fine athlete and a gracious winner, but those qualities are somewhat obscured by the tattoos that cover his body. He looks as if he fell into a vat of biros, and spent several hours trying to scramble his way out.
In The Games, events seem to have been selected purely on the basis of how little clothing the contestants have to wear while doing them. Lynch has spent most of the evenings in a green Lycra bodysuit. While doing so, he has managed the impressive trick of looking both patriotic and mildly obscene at the same time.