Although the creator of the outstandingly successful mobster TV drama says the fourth series is the last, US television executives are expected to plead the fifth, writes Anna Mundow.
It all started four years ago, when a chunky "waste management consultant" from North Jersey walked into a psychiatrist's office seeking treatment for his panic attacks. Tony Soprano also confessed that if word of the visit leaked out he could wind up with "a steel-jacket antidepressant right in the back of the head". He was that kind of waste management consultant.
The Sopranos launched its fourth season - its darkest and its best - in the US last Monday, attracting 13.4 million viewers, making it the most watched show in the history of the cable channel, HBO. The series has become the mutant that every TV producer prays for: the series that turns into a cultural phenomenon.
It happened fast - in the US after just a few episodes. Suddenly people who previously admitted only to watching documentaries were taping Sopranos episodes and playing them for friends after dinner. They liked the psychology, the irony, the in-jokes, all spiked with New Jersey bad taste and Mafia violence. It was like Woody Allen without the self-indulgence. Most of all it was funny, especially on taboo subjects. Take the first episode of the new season where Tony and Bobby are talking at a diner counter.
Bobby: Things really went downhill after the World Trade Centre. You know Quasimodo predicted all this.
Tony: Who did what?
Bobby: All these problems. The Middle East. The end of the world.
Tony: Nostradamus. Quasimodo's the Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Bobby: Oh, right. Nostradamus.
Tony: Nostradamus and Notre Dame, two different things completely.
\ Bobby: It's interesting, though, they'd be so similar, isn't it? I always thought 'OK, Hunchback of Notre Dame, you also got your quarterback and your halfback of Notre Dame.'
Tony: One's a f***in' cathedral.
Bobby: Obviously, I know, I'm just saying it's interesting the coincidence.
What, you're gonna tell me you never pondered that, the back thing with Notre Dame? Every analysis of The Sopranos' success comes back to the writing, which the actors insist makes their job easy. James Gandolfini, aka Tony, recently remarked that "any actor with the same writing could have done the same thing", while Dominic Chianese, aka Uncle Junior, points out that "the subtext is always there and that's a sign of good writing. The script allows for organic acting."
David Chase, who created The Sopranos after 27 years in television and with shows such as The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure to his credit, is more modest. "I've called this show the Mir space station," he laughs, "because it wasn't supposed to be up there for four years. It wasn't meant to last."
The show not only lasted, it took on a life of its own as its costumes, soundtrack, food and props were repackaged as Sopranos merchandise. The subject of seven books, one college course and countless academic seminars, the mob series has even spawned an architectural style which might be called New Jersey Palazzo.
Architectural Digest took the Soprano house seriously enough to include it in its September issue and a CD-ROM of the plan for Tony and Carmela's home is selling well on the Internet. Actually, it's Victor and Patti Recchia's home. For $699, the Recchias will send you the plan of their five-bedroom, $3.5 million house in North Caldwell, New Jersey, complete with pool, cabana and manicured grounds. The interior of the house was faithfully recreated at Silvercup Studios in Queens, using what set decorator Janet Shaw calls "the New Jersey palette, lots of mauve, peach and pastels".
Shaw is describing not sneering, and so is the series. The Sopranos gets New Jersey right not only because David Chase, like the majority of his team and his cast, grew up there but because it was essential to get New Jersey right if Tony Soprano's family and drama was to become something more than a mobster sitcom. Cosiness is an enemy that Chase constantly undermines.
"There was this sense that America was having this lovefest with The Sopranos," he recalls of the second season, "which was great, but Tony Soprano is a gangster, a criminal, and I just felt it was time to say that again." The result was a shocking episode in which one of Tony's associates brutally murders his pregnant girlfriend.
Chase's biggest gamble - the series structure itself - has provided the biggest payoff. "The trend in mainstream television is for safer, more self-contained dramas," explains David Bianculli, author of Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously. "Networks play safe with shows that you don't have to watch every week or even care that much about. The Sopranos flies in the face of that. It stretches stories out over several weeks, even several seasons so that we are completely drawn in. Chase knows that this is how you introduce and develop fascinating, totally believable characters."
The fourth season raises the stakes further by noticeably darkening the atmosphere. As Tony gallumphs down the driveway in his bathrobe on Sunday morning to retrieve his newspaper, he seems more bowed down than usual. His wife has a crush on another man, his daughter sarcastically calls him "Mr Mob Boss", his lieutenant is serving time on a gun charge, his henchmen are grumbling, the FBI is planting bugs and cash flow is sluggish.
"What two businesses have traditionally been recession proof since time immemorial?" Silvio, the strip-club owner, reassures Tony, "Certain aspects of show business and our thing." And psychiatry. In episode one, everybody seems to have a shrink and those shrinks are mercilessly lampooned. Episode two prolongs the father/daughter confrontation and has fun with the reality of Tony's crew "working" on a construction site. Episode three is uncharacteristically clumsy when it addresses Italian-American stereotyping by having Native Americans threatening to disrupt a Columbus Day parade. But even that clunker cannot dilute the cumulative power of a series that resists David Lynch-like pretentiousness while proudly accepting the label "postmodern".
"All the wiseguys on The Sopranos have seen and quote from movies like Goodfellas and The Godfather," David Chase agrees, "that was always part of the concept: that they were informed by fictional mobsters. I thought it would give a level of reality too, paradoxically."
Chase was right, up to a point. Like John Gotti, today's mobsters may take some cues from The Godfather. Some may even watch The Sopranos. But the self-conscious posturing - like The Sopranos version of reality - only goes so far, according to Robert Buccino, former deputy chief of the organised crime division at the New Jersey attorney general's office.
"I think that most dramatisations of their lives might be too slow for them, a bit too subtle and cerebral," Buccino observes of his adversaries, "You've got to realise, most of them are not that smart. There's a reason why a lot of them are inside. I mean, a lot of the humour in movies like Goodfellas, it's at their expense. But the guys themselves wouldn't even get it, believe me. If they were that interesting our job wouldn't be so unpleasant most of the time."
The shocks in the next four episodes are strategically but never crudely placed - a vulgar joke about somebody's wife sparks unexpected violence, that kind of thing - and James Gandolfini hints that "as time goes by is becoming someone I like a little less. He's a little mixed up this year and a little more predatory."
The biggest shock for Soprano addicts will, of course, be the end. "After the fifth season that's it," says David Chase, "No more. I just think, Tony Soprano, guys of his ilk, they're not very reflective people. There's only so much depth you can impart to a character like that and still stay true to realism." There he and Robert Buccino agree. Television executives, however, may not surrender this mutant so easily.
The fourth series of The Sopranos begins on Network 2 on Tuesday at 10.25 p.m.