Every Sunday at two o'clock my family eats at my grandmother's house. My grandmother is Veronica Barone, she's 78, and she was born in Newark to parents who came over from a town outside Avellino. She sewed coats in a factory for twenty-six years. My grandfather drove a bus. Her brother carried mail for forty years. She makes the gravy every Sunday (around here it's gravy, not sauce, and I'm not arguing about that one either), and since January, about once a month, somebody at the table brings up The Sopranos, and we have the argument.

It goes like this. I'm going to try to give her side the way she'd give it, and then mine, and then the part where I think she's right, because she is, partly.

NONNA'S SIDE

She has never watched it, and she says she doesn't have to. She's heard about it, she's read about it, and that's plenty. Her case:

• It's the same old story. For as long as she's been alive, when Hollywood wants an Italian, it wants a gangster. She grew up with those pictures in the thirties, and then The Godfather, and now this. Nobody makes a show about her brother the mailman.
• It's not fair to the numbers. She knows hundreds of Italian families. Doctors, teachers, nurses, a judge, a lot of guys who own landscaping businesses. The ones who were mixed up in that life you could count on one hand, and everybody stayed away from them.
• People believe what they see. She worries that somebody in Iowa who's never met an Italian-American is going to watch this and think that's what we are. She remembers being called names at school back in the thirties, and she doesn't want her great-grandchildren to get any of that.
• The language and the violence. She's heard it's rough, and she doesn't think anybody needs that on a Sunday night.

And she's not the only one. Some Italian-American groups have said the same things in public, and I've seen letters in the paper from people who were really hurt by it. That's real, and I don't laugh it off.

MY SIDE

• It's not really a mob show. It's a show about a guy who's falling apart, his mother, his wife, his kids, and a psychiatrist. The mob is where he works. Half the episodes, the big problem is his mother or his kids. I know a lot of families like the one at home, and I don't mean the crimes, I mean the dinners.
• It's made by us. The man who created it, David Chase, is Italian-American and grew up in New Jersey. A lot of the cast is Italian-American. They know exactly what they're doing. Nobody's getting the details wrong out of ignorance.
• Tony isn't a hero. He's not cool, he's not glamorous, and the show never pretends what he does is okay. You watch it and you see what that life costs a family. If anything, it's the opposite of an advertisement.
• The show argues about it too. In The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti, there's a dinner scene where Dr. Melfi's family has this exact argument, about Italian-Americans and the gangster image, and nobody at that table wins it either. The writers clearly heard the complaints coming, and they put both sides right in the show. I made Nonna listen to me describe the whole scene. She said that was very clever and it didn't change her mind.

WHERE SHE'S RIGHT

I'll say this here because I'd never say it at the table. When I was in seventh grade a kid asked me if my father was "connected," because of my last name. My father sells insurance. Since January, at least a few customers a month at the pharmacy read my name tag and make a joke. It's always meant friendly. It still gets old.

And she's right that there's nothing on TV to balance it out. I've never seen a show about an Italian-American pharmacist, or a mailman, or a seamstress. If there were ten of those, nobody would worry about one Sopranos. Since there aren't, I understand why it bothers her more than it bothers me.

WHERE WE ENDED UP

We agreed to disagree, which in my family means we'll have the argument again in October. She still won't watch it. I still won't stop. But after Edie Falco won the Emmy, my grandmother asked me, very casually, while she was passing the meatballs, whether the mother on the show gets what's coming to her. I told her she'd have to watch it to find out.

She said maybe at Christmas. I'm counting that as a win.

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