I Like to Watch

March 19, 2006 | Everything has an expiration date. Cheese, hairstyles, lovers, cars, sweaters, pet hamsters. No matter how dearly you embrace anything -- you cherish your favorite sweater, you worship your honey pie, you adore Chumpy the hamster --- you'll inevitably wake up one day and find it gone, Daddy, gone. Because eventually, your sweater will unravel, your cheese will get moldy, your car will break down, your sugar muffin will start sleeping with your best friend, and Chumpy will amble off into the walls of your house and get eaten alive by a 2-foot-long river rat.

The real mind-frack of TV is that it lasts so damn long, longer than cheese or hairstyles or pet hamsters or even most lovers. Unlike a two-hour movie or a three-hour play or a 10-hour book, TV shows take 23 hours or more to digest, and that's just one season. Once "Six Feet Under" bit the dust, I'd watched the show with three different boyfriends, while living at four different addresses, and that's not to mention the 50 or 60 blocks of cheese I consumed during that time. When the show went off the air, I'd spent 63 hours in the presence of those characters. No wonder Nate got on my nerves!

Expiry furnace

But that leads us to the question of what a show's natural expiration date should be. When you consider how most shows come into being -- the creators pull together a pilot, a one-hour-long show, and pitch it to a bunch of executives along with some loose notions about the first season's narrative arc -- it's shocking that several years' worth of material could ever arise from such paltry beginnings.

Which shows can really hold our interest for more than a few seasons? When you look at most competitive reality shows (Immunity is back up for grabs again? Really?) and the newest trend of single-scenario dramas ("Lost," "Invasion," "Prison Break"), you have to wonder how the aliens are going to stay just out of reach for another three seasons, or how the hot guy is going to try to break out of prison for the next five years, or how those crash survivors are going to manage a sustainable ecosystem to support their offspring. What will they eat? River rats?

When you take a hard look at most shows, you have to ask yourself: Was this show really meant to drag on this long, or am I just clinging to the past? Am I still interested in where these writers are leading me, or am I so fond of these characters that I can't let them out of my sight? Look closely, and you'll see a TV lineup filled with moldy cheeses, cheating honey pies, and graying Chumpy the hamsters that should've wandered off to die decades ago.

Shotgun shy

I wondered last week if the endless wait for this last season of "The Sopranos" (9 p.m. Sundays on HBO) was really worth it. (If you missed the premiere last week, you obviously shouldn't read this section.) I love Tony (James Gandolfini) and Carmela (Edie Falco) and the rest of those jerks as much as the next guy, but where was the fallout from Adriana's (Drea de Matteo) death? Why isn't Christopher (Michael Imperioli), one of my favorite characters, showing any lingering signs of either missing her, or not missing her -- something to let us know where he stands with the whole thing? Maybe he's just that shallow, but if that's the case, I'd like to be reminded of it, somehow.

Were we offered any insight into what exactly is making Tony and Carmela get along so well these days? It's cute that they're eating sushi all the time, but do you recall any really memorable exchange between them? Instead, Tony buys Carm a big gift (the Porsche Cayenne, in case you missed what appeared to be a rather obnoxious and repeated bit of product placement, but apparently wasn't), just like he always has, and she's thrilled but slightly distant, just like she's always been. After all she's been through, she's still back in the same spot, trying to strike out on her own with a real-estate project, but realizing that she needs Tony's help to see it through. It ends up feeling like a retread.

Unlike previous seasons, though, where we seemed to be joining up with the family while they were in the middle of a bunch of big changes, this season has so far given off a stagnant feel. Maybe the big point of the premiere was to demonstrate the status quo, which would soon be blown apart by Uncle Junior's little accident with his gun. It's not exactly a stretch to give David Chase the benefit of the doubt, suspend our disbelief, and look at the season as a whole after it's done. Still, my skeptical attitude gives me a rare opportunity to lash out at some of my "Sopranos" pet peeves. I'm not one to look for weaknesses in such a great show, but if I can't air a few gripes at the start of the show's very last season, when will I ever have the chance? Certainly not after the whole shebang-a-bing is lost and gone forever, and all of the characters have achieved sainthood à la Nate and the gang from "Six Feet Under." (Sniff. Man, I miss them!)

First of all, somebody, take Dr. Melfi, please.

Next page: Tony, Carm and the others go their stale, stale ways