Word: carmela
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...Chase puts it, "Paulie Walnuts"--one of the show's Mob captains--"gets abducted by aliens." There may be another warning sign: merchandising. This fall The Sopranos Family Cookbook, offering Italian recipes and anecdotes from the show's characters, hits bookstores. You can buy plans of Tony and Carmela's New Jersey rococo house and build one for yourself. And coming soon to your grocer: Sopranos gourmet foods, from pizza to marinara sauce (call it the it's-not-TV dinner). Can Sex and the City spermicidal foam be far behind...
...life, the issues that the show deals with could just as easily be played out by characters who work at IBM, AT&T or K Mart. Jealousy, sibling rivalry, greed and infidelity are familiar to everyone. This is the key to The Sopranos' success: viewers relate to characters like Carmela, Paulie Walnuts and Uncle Junior because they have their own disobedient, ungrateful children, nagging spouses or demanding mothers...
SCORNED WIFE Long-suffering bottle-blond Carmela Soprano turns a blind eye to her husband's faults, mostly for material gain...
...nifty device too, because it reminds you of the show's discomfiting ambiguity. You're rooting for a murderer as Feds try to nail him. (Don't leave the house, you idiots! Goddamnit, Carmela, drive faster! Catch them in the act!) And then you remember just who and what it is you're cheering for. In the second episode (airing back-to-back with the first), Tony finds Meadow in the living room watching a video (the mob movie "Public Enemy") for homework with Noah Tannenbaum, a half-black, half-Jewish guy from her dorm; Tony pulls Noah aside...
...Afterward, Carmela finds Tony passed out on the floor (he's had another of his panic-attack blackouts) and he tells her the story. The way Chase handles the scene shows how this series is in a league above anything else on TV. On a network show - even in the heyday of "All in the Family" -Tony's wife would have to be a sympathetic counterbalance, the tolerant peacemaker. But Chase and Falco don't let Carm off the hook: She subtly betrays that she's not entirely comfortable with her daughter dating a black man either...