JOIN THE MOB; 'SOPRANOS' STILL OFFERING TELEVISION'S FINEST HOUR.

Byline: David Kronke Television Critic

Maybe it's a romantic notion that if we all sat down and DISCUSSED things, we could understand or at least appreciate the concerns of those least like us. Would we find a common ground? Would it all come down to: How did our mothers treat us? Did they smother us with love? Did they expect too much of us? Or did they try to have us whacked?

Tony Soprano is a ``waste management consultant,'' who propitiously neglects to mention that it's the detritus of humanity that he manages - and rather violently at that. Yet even he, in an uncharacteristic pique, tried to become self-reflective and answer that eternal question - what am I doing here? - in between felonies.

``The Sopranos,'' which returns for its second season at 9 tonight on HBO, is virtually everything that makes for good television. It's a cracking good action yarn with breath-snatching moments of brutal, remorseless, even cathartic mayhem. It's a workplace comedy, with the usual assortment of colorful colleagues, that reveals to us to the inner workings of a profession few of us could otherwise relate to.

It's a scintillating character study, exposing us to wounded souls who, having made terrible compromises somewhere in their lives, are wondering how seemingly thoughtless decisions have landed them in the morass in which they now wade, or refuse to reflect at all for fear of what they might discover about themselves.

And it's a flat-out funny, dysfunctional suburban family sitcom, with an eccentrically pig-headed matriarch, a murderously wacky uncle, a dad who sees a shrink and hangs out with his crass buddies at a strip club, a mom who flirts with the family priest and kids who are hellions. Yet, there's genuine love in the air.

Any TV critic with a functioning sense of aesthetics declared the show the best TV of 1999. ``The Sopranos'' creator David Chase has taken something pop-culture fans have nearly overdosed on - the mob saga - and reimagined it. It wasn't as if we had been lacking for good mob tales - try ``Public Enemy'' or ``Godfather'' or ``GoodFellas'' - but in Chase's hands, it's something we had never seen before. And if the characters in those other films were too aggressively or ruthlessly tough - really, the best relationship we have toward those made men is icy admiration - Chase made us love Tony Soprano (the wryly sleepy-eyed, smarter-than-he-lets-on James Gandolfini), even as he tightened a wire around the gasping throat of a stoolie.

We also grew to adore Tony's wife, Carmella (Emmy winner Edie Falco), who sees through his lies and infidelities but can't dismiss the fact that he has provided for her very handsomely, which is why she married him. Tony's kids, banally named Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler) and, of all things, Meadow (Jamie Lynn Sigler), are good kids rebelling against the dawning realization of their father's amorality - what are rules to a crook?

As for Tony's mother - boy oh boy, does he have the mother of all mothers. Livia (Nancy Marchand) is the eternally beset mother who makes her suffering an occasion for exponentially worse suffering on the behalf of her progeny. As Tony observes this season, ``She's too miserable to die.'' When Tony had her placed in a nursing home - sorry, retirement community - against her will, she only convinced his uncle to put a contract on his head.

Chase has also dropped an insight simultaneously brilliantly simple and sublimely ironic: Crime is just like any other job, with its perks and its disadvantages. Even the mob is plagued by upstarts strutting with the same attitudes informing the new generation of endorsement-crazy athletes or film directors weaned on music videos. Generation X gangsters are self-absorbed, too seduced by the easy money, incapable of appreciating their forebears' history of sacrifice and work ethic and loyalty. They're not nearly dedicated enough to putting in the time and effort to keep the mob running smoothly. Thanks to their laziness, indictments are flying everywhere in Jersey. It's Chase's take on America's general spiritual malaise, and who's to say he's wrong?

Chase metes out adult entertainment in the best sense of the word - this is for live-and-let-live adults who aren't easily scandalized or shocked or offended. The pneumatic ``atmosphere'' (to use the current Hollywood vernacular, which seems to be getting ever more impersonal, for extras) at the Bada Bing! strip joint includes naked bimbos who aren't presented for purposes of titillation - they're too obviously enhanced and too clinically photographed for that.

The colorfully crude language is simple verisimilitude. The characters' misogyny and racism is offhandedly depicted - not as a heavy-handed character flaw but as just a fact of life.

Throughout it all - the oral sex discussions, the shockingly casual murders, the withering pop-culture references, the generously proportioned babes, the frequent ``Godfather III'' disses - Chase is repeatedly telling us, ``You can take this without sniggering or protesting political incorrectness. We're all adults here.'' That's how the audience feels most jazzed - this show isn't kowtowing to them, it's treating them as equals - and how often does that happen? There are precious few entertainments that at some point make fewer artistic concessions to their narratives than Chase's ``Sopranos.''

The new shows have unprecedented quality to live up to. Tonight's season premiere has the twin burdens of outrageous expectations and providing some requisite character exposition, bringing us up to date on the characters and, after the first season rolled much of the story up into a tidy ball of exquisite yarns, unraveling said ball and beginning anew. Hence, there's no real driving story mechanism. One of Tony's crew, thought to have turned state's evidence against his colleagues and therefore disappearing after being placed on a hit list, returns; a brief explanation and apparently all is forgiven.

We meet Tony's sister, a New-Age scam artist - she's collecting disability for unnamed and apparently non-existent injuries - named Janice (Aida Turturro), or, as she prefers to be addressed these days, Parvotti. Carmella's parents ask, skeptically, ``What, she's a cheese these days?'' (in fact, it's a Hindu god). Janice has designs on Livia in some fashion - she usurps use of her car and plans to move into her home; it's clear she's after bigger fish, but no one knows what. But here's how wretched to the core Janice is - she has the exquisitely insidious Livia worried.

Episode two is centered around another of those casual glimpses that the show takes at racism, turning on the utter cynicism of ethnic leaders as Tony puts muscle on a construction site to squeeze out more money, ostensibly for the union. Episode three pits Tony and Carmella against Meadow, yet another imposing foe - a willful teen-ager - who uses Livia's empty house for a raucous party; the best they can do is mete out an impotent punishment. Tony sighs, ``If she finds out, we're powerless.''

Meanwhile, Tony's former shrink, Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) tries to figure out why she's so obsessed with Tony, even after one too many threatening outbursts have forced her to drop him as a patient (filmmaker Peter Bogdonavich plays HER shrink, one even more stupefyingly pedantic than she).

Yes, it's as good as you've heard. So what more encouragement do you need?

THE FACTS

--The show: ``The Sopranos.''

--What: Return of the hit series about a mobster/family man/psychiatric patient.

--The stars: James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Nancy Marchand, Dominic Chianese, Michael Imperioli, Lorraine Bracco, Aida Turturro, Tony Sirico, Steven Van Zandt, Jamie Lynn Sigler and Robert Ile.

--Where: HBO.

--When: 9 tonight; also Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays.

--Our rating: Four stars

CAPTION(S):

photo, box

Photo: James Gandolfini, front, Michael Imperioli and Tony Sirico, rear, aremembers of a New Jersey crime family on ``The Sopranos,'' which begins its second season tonight on HBO.

Box: THE FACTS (see text)