OK, maybe Chase did let Tony off too easy. But at the same time, Tony's all-too-familiar psychological baggage made him a more fascinating character, and a more human one. "The Sopranos" doesn't have a traditional good guy/bad guy dynamic. Tony is both the good guy and the bad guy. He's riddled with guilt over losing patience with his demanding, manipulative mother. He's able to shoot an enemy in cold blood. He's emotionally ragged from compartmentalizing his two lives. And the first season got its exhilarating momentum from the tug of war between those two lives; we rooted for the depressed Tony to confront his Livia problem and be whole again -- even if being whole meant being a better, more heartless mobster.

With Dr. Melfi's prodding, Tony began to realize that his panic attacks were rooted in his unstable childhood -- Livia had been an unhappy mother incapable of providing love or security. For her part, the now aged, but still bitter, Livia couldn't understand why her son was "abandoning" her to a nursing home. Longtime viewers will remember how the term "family business" took on ironic meaning when Livia goaded her brother-in-law Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), nominally the head of the Soprano family, into putting out a hit on Tony. In the first season's finale, Tony discovered his mother's duplicity and went rushing off, enraged, intending to kill her. He arrived too late -- she had suffered a stroke and was being taken away in an ambulance.

From a storytelling perspective, it would have made more sense for Chase to kill off Livia right there, but the character had become so popular, and the chemistry between Marchand and Gandolfini was so explosive, that she stayed on for the second season.

Unfortunately, Marchand's health declined, and her participation was limited. Livia and Tony barely had any scenes together; Tony pretended she was dead, and the show's energy deflated without the mother-son tension and without Livia's operatic melancholy. Since Tony was determined not to confront his mother issues, he stayed away from Dr. Melfi for several episodes, and she became more and more superfluous as the season went on. At the same time, Tony and Carmela were emotionally cut off from each other; he continued to see his mistress, and she was almost drawn into an affair of her own.

All of this meant that Chase was keeping Tony apart from the most important, and the strongest, women in his life. And that was a mistake, because the first season's cunning plot architecture rested on the clash between Tony's patriarchal mob world and his matriarchal family world. At work, Tony was a virile thug; with women, he was soft. His mother pushed his buttons, Carmela nagged him to be a modern, sensitive father and Melfi forced him to get in touch with his freakin' feelings.

In one of the more promising developments of the new season, Carmela -- the relative moral compass of the show -- is supposed to accompany Tony to his sessions with Melfi. If they end up undergoing marital therapy, we might finally be able to gauge the depth of Carmela's unhappiness.

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