By FRANCES GRANT
The cat came back and it was business as usual when The Sopranos returned last week for a second series.
Big Pussy Bompensiero turned up after a long and mysterious absence, and while he and Tony circled each other warily in the basement, family life continued above.
"Who are you talking to in the basement?" wife Carmela yelled from the kitchen. The tension did not allow for an answer. "Well, bring up two cases of bottled water with you."
Yes, The Sopranos is back with its trademark mix of mob affairs, casual brutality, suburban family life and American therapy culture.
This show is built on the banality of suburban mob life - the backroom deals are matched by barbecues and beerguts, the brutal hits by bad backs and acupuncture.
And it's driven, of course, by Tony's "unresolved issues."
It wasn't long before rumblings began for the boss of the northern New Jersey mafia.
Evil mum Livia, victim of a well-faked stroke at the end of the last series, isn't out for the count although Tony is hoping otherwise.
"She's dead to me," he said, just a little too aggressively to convince.
Before the show had barely begun, Tony was having his attacks and those problems with anger management again.
For all the action with his mafia "family," it has always been the women - mother, therapist, wife, daughter - who seem to rule Tony's life.
Carmela (the Emmy Award-winning Edie Falco) seems set to continue as the heart of the show: equal parts decent, pragmatic wife and mother and gilded mob moll who knows just what to do when the Feds come calling.
Nephew Chris Moltisanto, a vital enlivening ingredient, also looks promising. His new job overseeing a broking firm is at alarming odds with his molotov cocktail of a personality.
It remains to be seen, however, if this new series can bring anything fresh to the mix.
The success of the first series was made by geriatric villains Livia and Uncle Junior, with their peculiar and compelling combination of pensioner malice and super-strength reading glasses, and bile which was in inverse proportion to their physical frailty.
A new character this season, Tony's sister Janice, a malingering new-ager who seems to have inherited more than her fair share of mum's unlovely nature, looks likely to inherit their evil crown.
And with Tony pleading with Dr Melfi to take him back as a patient, it seems probable that more psychotherapy will be on the way.
But while his sessions with the shrink were an integral part of the first series of the show, there's probably not a lot of mileage left in making him a case study.
The drama needs a new element from outside Tony's small world - like the wild ducks who once graced his swimming pool - to take it somewhere it hasn't already been.
* The Sopranos TV2, 9.30 pm
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