Leaving Tony Soprano's world

THERE HAS never been anything quite like "The Sopranos." The series that David Chase created for HBO has retrieved something of the experience newspaper readers once savored, back when great novels by Dickens, Dostoyevsky, or Balzac appeared in weekly installments. Whatever Sunday's final episode may bring, the show's legacy is already evident. It has enriched American popular culture with its rare blending of complex characters, social satire, and unsparing irony.

"The Sopranos" accompanies the lumbering, wily, conflicted Tony Soprano through the coils of two family dramas -- that of his domestic family and that of his Mafia crew. To an unsettling degree, he is like many Americans in striving to keep his home life insulated from the stresses and cruelties of the workplace. The series only carries that dilemma to near-absurd lengths.

Viewers may feel a certain unease when Tony's daughter, Meadow, trolls websites to learn about her father's true profession. And then a note of satire is sounded; one of Tony's underlings muses that this is why it's hard raising kids in the age of the Internet. Whenever the script seems to be mocking the characters, it is also mocking us, the audience.

Which may be why psychoanalysts were upset that Tony's shrink, Dr. Melfi, as well as her own analyst, violated the profession's code of ethics in the show's penultimate episode. The American Psychoanalytical Association had given awards to the series and to Lorraine Bracco, who plays Dr. Melfi, for their credible presentation of the therapeutic relationship. But analysts have been telling reporters this week that they and their patients are outraged at the way Melfi abandons Tony and are shocked at a breach of confidentiality that occurs at a dinner party among shrinks.

Like those serialized novels of another era, "The Sopranos" has held up a mirror to society -- even if it is a a funhouse mirror filled with grotesque reflections of the way some successful Americans are living today. The show became our popular literature, our vicarious, collective therapy.

Tony's abandonment by Dr. Melfi may seem so unnerving because it prefigures our abandonment by "The Sopranos," that vivid, frightening fresco of contemporary life.