Mob-related entertainment has been controversial ever since The Public Enemy (1931) and Scarface (1932), which carried disclaimers that their studios did not intend to glamorize violence, helped establish the gangster story as popular entertainment. However, even though the appeal of The Sopranos stems as much from superlative storytelling as from its deft reinvention of an enduring genre, a few onlookers remain disgruntled by the HBO smash hit's depiction of Italian-Americans.

In a recent news release, for example, the Washington, DC-based Order of the Sons of Italy in America, which bills itself as the largest and oldest national organization for people of Italian descent in the US, felt compelled to note that the characters in the 1970s TV show The Waltons "have Italian roots and are a more typical Italian-American family than the one presented on The Sopranos."

And now former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci has rejoined the chorus of disapproval. Turns out that Cianci, who was forced from office in 1984 after assaulting his estranged wife's lover, and then again earlier this month after being sentenced on one count of racketeering conspiracy, is not too keen on The Sopranos. Like other critics, Cianci, who's working as a WPRO-AM radio-talk-show political analyst during the 90-day stay of his sentence, grouses that a weekly show depicting Jews, blacks, or Polish-Americans in a negative light would never make it to production. His criticism misses the point, however, that The Sopranos is concerned with broader human themes; few fans would attribute the violent tendencies of characters like Tony Soprano to all Italian-Americans. In any case, Cianci isn't really in a position to judge the show, since, as he told talk-show host Steve Kass on Monday, September 16, "I've never watched The Sopranos."

The HBO drama couldn't provide so must grist for the cultural mill if it offered a prejudiced account of this successful, widely imitated, highly assimilated group of Americans. Consider the way a piece in Sunday's New York Times Book Review poked fun at campus psychobabble -- not Italian-Americans, mind you -- while examining five new Sopranos-related academic books, including The Psychology of The Sopranos: Love, Death, Desire, and Betrayal in America's Favorite Gangster Family, and A Sitdown with The Sopranos: Watching Italian American Culture on TV's Most Talked-About Series.

For fans like me, the return of the show this past Sunday couldn't come soon enough. As author Terry Teachout wrote in the Times' Week in Review, "Four days after a jumpy nation spent the first anniversary of September 11 on orange alert, Tony and Carmela Soprano are back -- and unlikely as it may sound, there is something weirdly comforting about the prospect of spending a quiet Sunday at home with America's most spectacularly dysfunctional family."

The bubbling cauldron of subplots -- as Tony Soprano's dual families are beset by drug abuse, money woes, and health problems, and Tony himself faces a comely FBI undercover agent and the perpetual threat of prison or death -- probably won't do anything to diminish misplaced complaints of anti-Italian-American bias. They will, however, keep me watching.

Ian Donnis can be reached at idonnis[a]phx.com.

Issue Date: September 20 - 26, 2002