Tuesday, April 11, 2000

'Sopranos' ends second season on a high, windy note

The Puss was a rat, so he sleeps widda fishes. And so ends the second season of "The Sopranos," TV's biggest, loudest, meanest, finest drama series.
   Sunday night's finale of the HBO mob show was a spectacular blowout in more ways than one. The episode, written by creator/executive producer David Chase and producer Todd Kessler, had Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) suffering from a rather noisy case of food poisoning. (The sound effects crew must be "South Park" fans.)
   In his fever-induced haze, Tony, now a veteran of two years of psychotherapy with poker-faced Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), finally tuned into his troubled subconscious. In a brilliant dream sequence, Tony met a talking fish that had the lisping voice of his childhood bud and business partner Salvatore (Big Puss) Bompensiero (Vincent Pastore). Puss flipped to the feds a year ago and had been turning over tapes of Soprano family business, which Tony had suspected but was afraid to admit. In the dream, the fish cleared up any doubts about what Tony had to do to protect himself.
   "See these guys?" the Puss-fish said, nodding to seafood lying on ice. "They're sleeping."
   The sleeps-with-the-fishes imagery may have been a bit obvious, but it did set up nicely Tony's reluctant decision to ice his pal and dump his body in the briny deep.
   After all, a rat is a rat, even if he is your best friend.
   The finale also allowed Tony to act on his sexual feelings toward Dr. Melfi, who admitted her lustful yearnings for her patient to her own shrink this season. That they did it in a dream (Tony's) instead of for real keeps the show honest. Tony's confession of the details of his fantasy insures that there'll be little chance of actual doctor-patient canoodling in the future.
   There was no major cliffhanger on Sunday's "Sopranos," but there were plenty of new storylines set up for the show's return next March (HBO is giving Chase three extra months for third season production). Ailing Mama Livia was snagged at the airport using Tony's stolen airline tickets. That set Tony up for arrest on federal racketeering charges. And it gave him a chance to admit to Melfi that if only he'd had a little more patience with his whiny, manipulative mother, he wouldn't have forced the tickets on her in the first place. Good to know some of that therapy is sinking into the big guy.
   Next year there's bound to be backlash from the Bompensiero whacking. And who knows what will happen on Carmela's trip to Rome. And how will Tony Jr., feel when big sister Meadow heads off to Columbia her freshman year?
   With its rich characters and tasty surprises, "The Sopranos" is sinfully deep-dish where the rest of TV is frozen Lean Cuisine.
   Repeats of the season-ending episode turn up at 10 p.m. today, 8 p.m. Wednesday and 11 p.m. Saturday on HBO.
   By the numbers
   HBO doesn't measure viewer numbers the way broadcasters do, but Jeff Bewkes, chairman of the subscription channel, estimates that between one and two million new homes picked up HBO last year because of "The Sopranos."
   Ratings for the drama this season were 60 percent higher than in its first year on HBO, climbing from an 8.3 rating (about 4.4 million viewers among cable-watchers with HBO) to this season's 13.6 rating (about 6.5 million viewers). Those numbers represent only the ratings for the Sunday night episodes. An estimated 7 million more HBO subscribers catch the show on one of its repeats during the week.
   HBO has committed to 26 more episodes of "The Sopranos" over the next two years. Production on the third season begins in August.
   The success of "The Sopranos" may be responsible for the failure of CBS' pale imitation miniseries "Falcone," which concludes at 9 p.m. Wednesday.
   The 10-night run was supposed to launch the show into a regular series. But ratings dropped nightly, with the showing finishing second or third in its timeslot behind competition like NBC's "Dateline" and "Law & Order."
   Last Saturday's "Falcone" drew 9.5 million viewers, coming in second to ABC's movie "First Knight."
   Media Critic Elaine Liner can be reached at 886-3688 or by email at linere@caller.com.
  
  
  

 
Index of Elaine's columns | Arts & Entertainment | Restaurant Reviews | Best Bets: Today - The Week | Columns | Home Page

---

  © 2000 Corpus Christi Caller Times, a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.