In A&E's "Growing Up Gotti," Victoria, John's daughter, struggles with the hardship of single motherhood, the burden of her legacy, and the paucity of adequate suitors. Her ex-husband, Carmine Agnello (currently serving time), is only occasionally mentioned; the deceased patriarch, John, is mentioned or evoked constantly, but rather than making him an emotional presence in the show, the references only underscore his absence, the vacuum he left both in his own family and in the Mafia myth. "Growing Up Gotti" means growing up with the cumbersome name of a man who isn't there, cannot be replaced, and cannot be lived up (or down) to. Despite the show's complete lack of intellectual ambition -- and, in a sense, because of it -- "Growing Up Gotti" completes the arc that starts with "The Godfather." The paradigm so effectively set up by Coppola's movie, and so devastatingly dismantled by "The Sopranos," becomes officially a thing of the past: The powerful father became the self-doubting father and, eventually, the vanished father.

Of course, "The Sopranos" is coming back one last time, and more Mafia movies, books or TV shows will certainly appear in the future. The success of "The Godfather Returns," the official literary sequel to Mario Puzo's novel, is a good indication of the enduring appetite for the genre. Still, "The Sopranos" was a crepuscular tale from the start, and "The Godfather Returns" is double nostalgia (not only for the '50s, when most of the story takes place, but also for the '70s, when we were first told it). The genre may continue, but an awareness of the end will color its future.

"Growing Up Gotti" is a particularly shrill death knell. The end of the Mafia is a given, a backstory. We start already on the other side, a grotesque place of showy bad taste and bratty behavior, material ambitions and raging hormones, a place most immediately defined by the complete removal of the father. Even nostalgia is beside the point; if anything, the point of the show is to take us on a tragicomic tour through the rubble of patriarchal collapse (and the soft female-empowerment fantasy that springs from it). The patriarch is a figurehead whose very history of crime and punishment is glossed over with calculated indifference; Victoria is more interested in remembering him as the first metrosexual, an apt grandfather to the self-appointed "hottie Gotti." The patriarch is a legend; the patriarch is a punch line.

"Growing Up Gotti" is consistent with a larger attitude toward fathers and father figures in films and television. From "Gilmore Girls" to "Desperate Housewives," from "Arrested Development" to "Six Feet Under," from "The Simpsons" to "The Osbournes," from "The Family Guy" to "The Bernie Mac Show," fathers stand out for their absence, ineptitude or reluctance amid a growing crowd of single mothers, widows, all-girl clans, unconventional or dysfunctional families. Father knows best? Not in a long time. Dad-glorifying shows like "The Cosby Show," "Happy Days," "The Waltons," "The Brady Bunch," "Ozzie and Harriet," "Leave It to Beaver" seem lost in ancient memory.

This media landscape points toward what might be a sort of national "father complex": the combination of a growing mass anxiety about lost, absent, failed fathers, and fathers' own struggle with the redefinition of their role after women's liberation, artificial insemination and the custody wars. Statistics about fatherlessness in America are questionable, generally coming from highly partisan sources. It is a reasonable assumption, however, that the United States is at the high end of the world spectrum in the number of single-parent households, and the single parent is overwhelmingly female. A high number of American children grow up without a father at home; a vast majority of incarcerated men come from such backgrounds. While this is not an entirely new phenomenon (and neither is the relevance of fatherless characters in American culture, from "Huck Finn" to "On the Road"), what might be new is how deep it cuts today. Rap music, the dominant language of American teenagers, portrays a world of casual fathers and baby mamas; everybody is out for themselves, and life's lessons are only learned the hard way. In movies, it's interesting to note that several of this year's Oscar contenders ("The Incredibles," "Million Dollar Baby," "Finding Neverland") deal with father re-empowerment fantasies, or father figures filling a painful void. The flip side of the father complex is a stronger longing: Signals include the reelection of a dynastic president, "strict father" political metaphors, and a draconian reaffirmation of traditional family values against the perceived threat of gay marriage.

Because fatherhood is arguably in a crisis, it is nostalgically eulogized, combatively propped up, or turned into comic/lurid fodder. What seems no longer tenable is the romantic, idealized idea of fatherhood once associated with "The Godfather," where the passionate mutual devotion of fathers and sons seemed completely of a piece with the relentless pursuit of power and destruction of the enemy. It was a notion of fatherhood and masculinity that allowed -- indeed, that relied on -- the fundamental hypocrisy of invoking family values to justify cold-blooded killing, being a caring and conservative family man who abhors vice while selling it to the next guy. The ability to mask the contradiction, to hold together domestic virtue and business ruthlessness in a seemingly coherent identity, was a father's job. Ultimately, Coppola was criticizing this notion of fatherhood while ostensibly glorifying it, and that double movement was an important part of the film's greatness.

Looking back at the "Godfather" trilogy in light of "The Sopranos," the reasons for the don's downfall come into clear, harsh focus. The general crisis of fatherhood might be the sign of times, but it was written all along in Michael Corleone's DNA. In this, he wasn't a figure of nostalgia but a harbinger of things to come.

The tragic irony of "The Godfather" is that his path not only led to scorched earth around the family but also destroyed the family itself. By demanding total clan loyalty -- "my family right or wrong" -- and meting out deadly punishment against transgression, he ended up damning the family in order to save it. His destiny reveals the weakness at the heart of a family ideal built on a code more than on love. While this ideal may remind us of Iraqi or Afghan tribes, with their honor killings and cycles of retribution -- a still more extreme version of the southern Mediterranean family ethos depicted in Mafia films -- it should also remind us of our down-home, "civilized" version. There is more in common than we care to admit: the ultimate authority of fathers, the religiously sanctioned concept of what a family is, the forceful exclusion of the "other," the double standard of responsibility.

The final season of "The Sopranos" will undoubtedly reserve its share of surprises, but the reality of the mob's near extinction, and the post-extinction quality of "Growing Up Gotti," leave little doubt as to the general direction in which HBO's greatest show must be headed. We already know there is no future for a fatherless mob: Its replenishing of ranks and transmission of power along generational lines were always the key to its strength.

The fatherless, doomed mob could be a gloomy metaphor for an increasingly fatherless America. But it could it be something more specific, and more hopeful -- a metaphor for the death of a certain kind of father, a sign that the stern, law-giving patriarch is passing from the scene (though the 2004 election suggests that we may not be there yet, and that it won't happen without a backlash). In any case, I look forward to Tony Soprano's final act for a classy epitaph to the genre, and for further clues to dad's state of mind in the face of impending doom.

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