'The Sopranos': Go gentle (or not) into that good night, already

You can hardly fault David Chase for overstaying his welcome. Chase is the guy who created “The Sopranos” and had the unbelievable luck to have his idea turned down by ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox before HBO finally said, eh, let's take a flyer on this.

The result, of course, was television history. Chase liberated himself big time from the conventions he'd been forced to follow during a successful career writing and directing shows like “The Rockford Files” and “I'll Fly Away.” That first season of “The Sopranos” packed such a wallop, many of us didn't know at first what had hit us.

  “The Sopranos” had it all: sex, violence, unprintable catchphrases, complicated storylines, really complicated relationships, and a cast of capital “C” characters that just went on and on. Tony Soprano was a mess of contradictions -- an avuncular psychopath, a family man with a constant need for bimbos, a proud American who hadn't met the law he couldn't flout. A figure from a dying 20th-century institution, the American Mafia, Tony was a TV character for the new century. He and his whole family, living an upper-middle-class lie, were actually fun to watch. “The Sopranos” redefined the meaning of “guilty pleasure,” and in so doing elevated TV to a level that viewers didn't know TV was capable of.

People couldn't get enough of it. In particular, the people who ran HBO. When Chase sat down to talk about ending his .357 Magnum opus after what seemed like a pretty good run -- four seasons -- HBO made him several offers he couldn't refuse. Like a large (your ethnic stereotype here) family, “The Sopranos” expanded naturally, to a fifth season, then a sixth, and then to the restructured season six we have now, with 12 episodes having aired last spring and the remaining nine (also known as “The Final Season”) starting Sunday.

  The anticipation for each new batch of shows has seemed to build on the one before, and for a good reason. It's taking longer for Chase to crank them out. To give you some idea, the first 39 episodes of “The Sopranos” were aired over two years and change, from January 1999 to May 2001. Getting the next 39 episodes on the air has taken almost six more years.

  Don't take what I'm about to say as watering down my strong “buy” recommendation for this show's final run. But I gotta say it: Maybe, just maybe, time has passed “The Sopranos” by.

I'm not saying that Chase and company aren't an endlessly inventive bunch, and that after spilling so much blood, there's not enough in reserve for this stretch run. Maybe there is. But as I watched the first two of these final nine episodes, I found myself straining to get absorbed in the drama. Two hours later, I couldn't help wondering if, when it's all over, I'm going to feel like season six was wholly unnecessary.

  But let's get you up to speed before we get to the TV critic's issues.

  Last year “The Sopranos” went out not with a bang but a whisper, namely, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) leaning over the hospital bed of Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), whose Brooklyn mob had been engaging in bloody tit-for-tat with Tony's boys. Phil's growing rage at his Jersey rival had given him a heart attack, just as Tony's rage attacks had led to frequent blackout spells and trips to the shrink (Lorraine Bracco). The parallels -- that and Tony's own recent near-death experience, when he was accidentally shot by a demented Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) -- were obvious even to the therapy-challenged Soprano patriarch.

  And so, in a remarkable scene, Tony spoke softly to Phil, reminding him that “nobody ever laid in their deathbed wishin' they'd set aside more no-show jobs,” a line as hilarious as it was touching. Then Tony went home to celebrate the holidays with his extended family and associates. Wife Carmela (Edie Falco) had jumped back into her real estate business and forgotten about poor missing Adriana; daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) had moved far away, probably for the best; and son A.J. (Robert Iler Jr.), other than holding down a construction job at a mob-controlled site, seemed more interested in starting a family with his hot Latin girlfriend than following down the old man's career path.

  It would've been a nice way to end the show. Instead, as the curtain opens on season 6.2, we find a whole new set of tensions arising up. True, Phil is out of the hospital and has taken Tony's words to heart. He's not running the Brooklyn syndicate anymore. And back in Jersey, Tony's protégé Christopher (Michael Imperioli) is off the junk and apparently broken up with Julianna (Julianna Margulies). In addition to a wife and child, he has a movie project to care for.

  But the main action of hour one will revolve around two events -- an arrest and a bloody brawl -- clearly meant to start things in motion toward what will be the culmination of “The Sopranos” in June. We'll see a lot of Bobby and his wife, Tony's sister Janice (Aida Turturro), in the episode. In the second hour, Tony's rivals will take center stage: jailed boss Johnny Sack (Vince Curatola) and sidelined Phil. And that's when hints start to drop, with loud clatters, telling us that time is not just a healer. Under the right conditions, it hastens the spread of rot.

  Like I say, I plan to watch. Still, I think the passage of eight years have not been kind to “The Sopranos.”

It started when Nancy Marchand (left) died shortly after the second season in 2000. As Tony's super-controlling mother Livia (she ordered a hit on her son when ordinary discipline didn't work), her potential was just starting to be tapped when she passed. Her loss was so great that Chase actually used unaired footage of Marchand in season three before giving in to the inevitable and writing her out of the show.

  Then there was 9/11. I'm not the first cultural critic to point out how that dark day changed the stakes for American entertainment. And while I have no proof of this, I believe the long-term appeal of “The Sopranos” was hurt by the arrival on the scene of real-life gangsters.

  Thirdly, I think the contract extensions forced Chase to promote some “Sopranos” characters and discard or relegate others, with mixed results. The oafish Bobby is a perfect target for Tony's jabs, especially being conveniently married to his annoying sister. But Bobby, Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico), Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) and others are all what-you-see-is-what-you-get types, and Chase knows we've seen enough of them. But he can't let them slip into the background, either, because fans notice that, too.

  Above all, though, “The Sopranos” stuck around long enough to witness the revolution in prime-time TV that it started. The best TV shows are now much better than the best mainstream movies, and networks like FX and Comedy Central take all kinds of chances that simply weren't taken in 1998, the year before Tony. Now there's so much loaded onto the average viewer's TiVo that you she (more likely, he) can be forgiven for waiting until “The Final Season” is at Netflix.

  Yes, “The Sopranos” has become just another quality, must-see TV show. Not a bad problem to have as it prepares to go gentle, or not, into that good night.