The Sopranos: Analyse this

He has people killed. He cheats on his wife. The family - and do we mean 'family' - business is 'waste management'. So should we feel sorry for this guy? FRANCES GRANT explains.

The day that the family of wild ducks deserted his swimming pool was the day Tony Soprano was overwhelmed by panic.

It had been business as usual for the devoted dad, dutiful son and Mafia boss of northern New Jersey until the ducks' departure did his head in.

Carmela, his wife, was disgruntled and the kids were cranky. One of those Johnny-come-lately Eastern European mobs was trying to muscle in on his "waste management" business and there was the small matter of giving Chris, his hothead nephew, a lesson in effective debt collection.

Uncle Junior's plans to whack a guy in the restaurant owned by Tony's old school friend Artie were a problem, but nothing like the nightmare of visiting his elderly, carping mother.

The Godfather? Fuhgeddaboudit. Tony Soprano, a modern capo in steadily reducing circumstances, is a man badly in need of a shrink.

The mafia drama has finally come out of the cinemas and on to the small screen in The Sopranos. About to launch here on TV2, the brutal yet strangely sympathetic series about good fellas, wise guys, made men and their women has been stunning audiences and critics in the United States, where it is in its second season.

The show rubbed out the competition at the Golden Globe awards last month, winning best drama series and top acting honours for its two leads, James Gandolfini (Tony) and Edie Falco (Carmela).

It garnered 16 Emmy nominations last year - Falco won best actress, and creator and producer David Chase won a writing award - but the series missed out on best drama and much else. One New York newspaper summed up the feeling about the overlooked nominees: "They wuz robbed."

The Sopranos missed out on the sweep it deserved, many thought, because it was not made by the major networks but by HBO, the pay-TV cable channel which appears willing to take risks others won't. Before you get a bad case of what Tony would call "agita" about how long we've had to wait to see it here, remember folks had to pay to watch it in America.

"I took it to the big networks years ago and they all turned me down," Chase told the British TV Times. "I knew they would, because it contains a lot of sex and violence and because it wasn't made for idiots."

Perhaps Chase should have made that "stugots" (Italian-American slang for idiot and the name of Tony Soprano's pleasure boat). Because Soprano, felled by an anxiety attack and facing his psychiatrist, Dr Jennifer Melfi in the opening scenes of the show, is feeling rather like one.

The strength of the show lies in the complexity of its leading characters and the ironies of the Soprano family's crumbling world.

"It's really a show about people who have made a pact with the devil," as Chase told American showbiz magazine Entertainment Weekly. "Tony is sort of a romantic guy who thinks a little too much for someone in his position. There's some knowledge that things are out of whack, but he doesn't know what yet."

Make no mistake: Soprano is a thug, machiavellian and murderous. And the show doesn't shy away from portraying his world of macho brutality. TV2, which will screen the show at 9.30 pm, says it won't be cutting any scenes but it will bleep out the thrice-used "c-word".

Yet the mobster, struggling to outwit his rivals and control his crew, still grabs sympathy. Looming over all his other problems is one mean mother.

Chase, who freely admits basing the character on his own mom, had this to say about Ma Livia: "You know how we've heard that other life forms on Earth won't be oxygen-based, that they'll breathe methane? That's sort of what she is."

No wonder Soprano needs his head read. No wonder he's having weird Freudian dreams about his manhood and a bunch of wild ducks. Analyze that.


What: The Sopranos

Where: TV2

When: Thursday, March 9, 9.30 pm