LIVIA The woman who wore her husband down -- in the words of her own son -- ''to a nub,'' Livia is an ultimate form of female force: nurturing one minute, withholding the next; carrying the power to inflict guilt even unto death (is there a classical tragedy that included a mother putting a hit on her son?). A shrewder power player than her husband, her offspring, or her brother-in-law (the wily Uncle Junior), Livia is in only one sense a victim: God made her a woman, and therefore subject to the Mob sexism that prevented her from her destiny -- a female don, a Machiavellian Madonna who knows, as Madonna does, what it feels like for a woman.
DR. MELFI Those wondering why, after all she's been through, Dr. Melfi continues to treat Tony need only look at her background: daughter of Italian middle-class parents who pulled herself up in the world -- B.A. from Rutgers, M.D. from Tufts. As such, she knows beyond mere book learning what Tony Soprano has had to endure: ethnic and class prejudice, uncomprehending parents, a difficult marriage. Fortysomething, divorced with a distant son, rarely dating, and occasionally prone to drink heavily, Melfi is professionally serene and emotionally a mess, and thus a perfect practitioner for a Soprano.
Looking closely at the central players, however, also demands a step back -- a consideration of the bigger Sopranos picture. For this, we prefer to defer to a couple of the people who brought these characters to life. Let us seize upon a recent remark made by star James Gandolfini and run with it as the guiding context for the guide that follows. ''Tony's appeal is just like [The Honeymooners'] Ralph Kramden's appeal,'' Gandolfini told a gathering of TV critics earlier this summer. ''It's like this moron is trying to do the best he can and he just keeps screwing up.'' This is good: Gandolfini identifying with Jackie Gleason -- oversize yet graceful actors portraying men seething with thwarted ambition and rage, married to women who love them yet also take no you-know-what from them. Meadow and AJ are the ungrateful children the Kramdens were lucky never to have had (Ralph, a bus driver, could never have afforded the tuition or the bail anyway), and Tony's gang of mobbed-up knuckleheads all coalesce into one figure: a frightening version of Art Carney's Norton (picture a sewer rat with a gun).
The comparison just becomes more apt when you add Chase's own analysis of the upcoming season: ''This year focuses on Tony and Carmela as a couple, on their marriage.'' Exxx-cellent, as a certain cartoon's Mr. Burns would say. After all the wiretaps, talking Pussy-fish, and bearish Russians lost in the woods of previous seasons, it sounds like a great idea to bring the series back to its essence: a man, his small-f family, and maybe the return of a few ducks to his backyard pool. After all, you know Chase and company aren't about to leave out the guns, the strippers, the psychopaths, or the psychoanalysts -- it's just delightful to think that they'll all be used in the service of deepening our understanding of the central Soprano, a profoundly complicated, powerful man of simple tastes, thoughts, and emotions. This is the kind of character around whom classic works -- great comedies and great tragedies -- are written.
In other words, there's no limit to where ''The Sopranos'' can go.
Or, paraphrasing a great man: To the moon, Tony.
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