They Pull You Back In

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Passed on by broadcast networks before landing at HBO, The Sopranos is a show so good it gives TV a bad image, funnier than most sitcoms ("It'd be like What Ever Happened to Baby Janice? over there," Tony says when Pavarti/Janice offers to care for Livia) and far deeper and more complex than most "quality" dramas. And yet its greatest indictment of TV may be that there is nothing unique about the people who make the show. Chase, 50, is no wunderkind; he kicked around TV for decades, doing fine but hardly epochal work on The Rockford Files, I'll Fly Away and Northern Exposure. His writers include TV pros who have slaved on noodles-and-catsup fare like Providence. If it's sad to think The Sopranos is an anomaly, it's sadder to think there could be a dozen writers ready to create the next one, if only the market would let them.

Just don't expect David Chase to produce it. He wants to make films, and he suspects this will be his last series. Yeah, sure. Isn't the old soldier who can't escape the Business the oldest story around? Maybe not, if Chase learned something from all those analyst sessions. "Michael Corleone had always been a reluctant gangster. 'I try to get out, and they pull me back in.' Well, why do you let them?" Chase says with a chuckle. "Why don't you go to a psychiatrist? Why don't you get some therapy?"