The Balding Soprano

Photo by Anthony Neste

The lives and adventures of Italian-American career criminals have occupied the national dramatic imagination at least since Little Caesar, 'til every 20th-century boy and girl not growing up in cultish isolation can define Cosa Nostra and "made man" and is acquainted somewhat with the real or imagined professional accomplishments of Al Capone, John Gotti and Don Corleone. (That I know such things when I can no longer do my algebra nor remember how a bill becomes law fills me sometimes right up with wonder.) Television has, of course, done its part in this grand educational project, from the Kefauver hearings and The Untouchables to Wiseguy and Bella Mafia -- a crooked line that leads us now to The Sopranos, a 13-week series from HBO, set in the suburban ménage of a north New Jersey mob underboss and created by David Chase, whose path-less-taken executive-production credits include I'll Fly Away and a couple of seasons of Northern Exposure. In broad terms, it's something of a companion piece to HBO's other hourly dramatic series, the prison-set Oz (baby of another TV maverick, Homicide's Tom Fontana), with which it shares actress Edie Falco and the ability to make one care about characters one should rather wish ill. And like Oz, it does this by making them complicated -- symbolic of nothing, full of contradiction, capable of tenderness, and as inscrutable as your own real friends and neighbors.

The show pricks the bubble of glamour in which flashy big-screen filmmakers like Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese have englobed the Mafia lifestyle, even as it plays upon it -- these are mobsters who know Godfathers 1to 3 chapter and verse and who discourse upon "how Francis framed the shot." (The younger, less traditional, less reliable generation watches Cops.) As "waste management consultant" and household head Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini -- thickly built, with a receded hairline and a pleasant but strictly ordinary mug -- is sex-symbolically no Al Pacino; but that is all to the dramatic good, for notwithstanding the guns, beatings and trunkloads of hijacked DVD players, this is the story of a regular guy, or a guy who sees himself as a regular guy, with regular-guy problems and regular-guy questions. He wants to know where the good's gone, why he's working more and liking it less, why his mother (Nancy Marchand, bravely disheveled) is impossible to please. And like every TV dad that ever was, he wants everyone to stop shouting and, for God's sake, turn that music down.

By scaling his tale to a domestic milieu, Chase brings new life to a genre that seemed ready to be hauled off and dumped in the Meadowlands. Coppola's medieval architecture of family loyalty and codes of honor here gives way to a general fractiousness not unalloyed with love: Besides mother Marchand, there's a resentful uncle, a mildly rebellious daughter, a sullen son, a wife (Falco) who cares enough to be unhappy about Tony's infidelities, a nephew whose ambitions don't tally with his own abilities; this way and that they go, against a background of barbecues, Nintendo, volleyball, school choir concerts -- and the office of the psychiatrist Tony begins seeing after he starts blacking out from anxiety. (It's GoodFellas' Lorraine Bracco behind those bookish spectacles.) This may or may not be the first gangster picture to prescribe its protagonist Prozac -- say that three times fast! -- but it's likely the first to make therapy its central issue.

Performances all around are what I'd call EMMY CALIBER! if I wanted to see my name in print in The Hollywood Reporter. (But they really are.) Not even slightly embarrassing is quondam E-Street Bandman Little Miami Steven Van Zandt, who trades his well-known Gypsy headgear for a fine head of shiny black hair and a role as a . . . henchman, I guess you'd call him. (It may take a village to raise a child, but apparently it takes less than half a dozen middle-aged men to administer the criminal business of north Jersey.) Sly humor abounds. Points deducted for semi-gratuitous T&A (one of the creative pitfalls of the premium-cable environment: What can be shown will be shown); points added for the recurring presence of Jerry Adler (Rob Morrow's hallucinated rabbi on Northern Exposure) as the Jewish guy, use of Elvis Costello's "Complicated Shadows," and Gandolfini's kitchen rendition of "A Whiter Shade of Pale."

Filmed on location in Africa and set in 1931, Heat of the Sun, cranking up on Mystery!, has the modestly splendid look common to British television period pieces and is from first minute to last -- three adventures spread over five weeks -- as tasty as marzipan. Police Superintendent Albert Tyburn, played by Trevor Eve (The Politician's Wife), is more of a he-man than British detectives usually are: ruggedly appointed, physically courageous, good with his fists, at home on a horse, handy with a gun -- he even likes women. Devoted to the law but keener still on justice, he's been sent down to colonial Kenya and its community of indolent aristocrats, roving sharpers and assorted small minds for having put a bullet through an upper-crust child-murderer. Naturally above prejudice himself, he takes every man or woman at their actual worth, his own sterling character highlighted in time-honored crime-fictional fashion by the stupidity of his immediate superior, an officious old wheezy windbag. (Tyburn's various sidekicks are, significantly, African, Indian, Jewish, public-school British and female -- an indomitable aviatrix, played by the mmm-good Susannah Harker.) The mysteries themselves (murder, murder, murder) are satisfyingly full of misdirection and sensational event, realistically played but deliciously packed with pulp, and righteous on matters of race, class and gender.