In the current New Yorker David Remnick is doing a pretty fair imitation of Cathy Kaveny.

[T]he mobsters and their families in The Sopranos are a recognizablereflection of all of us. The epic is peopled with every variety oftwenty-first-century character imaginable: mobsters, yes, but alsoshadow communities of smug and equally troubled psychiatrists,disillusioned F.B.I. agents and cops, neurotic priests, immigrantcaregivers, screen-addled teen-agers, earnestly self-indulgentColumbia students. It is an Essex County of Italians, Irish, blacks,and Jews, but also of new immigrants: Koreans, Russians, Ukrainians,and Arabs. Other television series have guests, character types whomake a purposeful one-night stand and are then replaced with new typesin new situations. In The Sopranos, characters arrive and take fullhuman shape; children grow into adultsand sometimes, withoutexplanation, like a Russian mobster fleeing through the snowy woods ofthe Pine Barrens, they inexplicably disappear and frustrate ourTV-shaped need for lessons and resolution. It doesnt matter that wecome to like Adriana La Cerva. Chase has no use for our sentiment. Hekills it off with a .38.

The Sopranos, like its predecessor, Martin ScorsesesGoodfellas, is about the ruthlessness of petty lying crooks, but thebeat-downs, strangulations, and shootings are the least of theviolence. Chase is merciless with his exposure of the ordinarydisappointments and tragedies. He has immersed us for years in anexamination of addiction, twelve-step recoveries, teen-age depression,modern pharmacology, suicides, sexual indulgence, family betrayals,financial manipulation, accidents, heart attacks, strokes, death anddyingand always, afterward, the inability to summon a language toequal the emotion. Whaddya gonna do? is the shrugging motif. A young,healthy thug dies reading a magazine on the toilet. An S.U.V. flipsover on a rain-slick road. Whaddya gonna do?

But we at dotCom know our Cathy was there first.