I watched last night’s final-season opener and, like several others, was impressed. I’ll have more to say on this in the future, but what the episode really cemented (for me) was that, as much as it bills itself as being about the workings of the present-day mob, The Sopranos is a rather nasty indictment of the upper-middle class American family. Mob intrigue has always been the show’s secondary interest; what the writers are really interested in is the state of the modern suburban family (and they don’t have much love or pity for what they see).