‘Sopranos,’ the HBO First Family

Think you have problems? Try being New Jersey’s preeminent specialist in “waste management.”

Yes, you know who--bravo!--is bada-binging back.

Brutal but ever conflicted, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) returns to HBO Sunday with fresh challenges after three seething seasons of mingling popular entertainment and high art. So high, in fact, that the University of Calgary in Canada now offers a course on gangster films fittingly celebrating “The Sopranos” beside such classics as “The Public Enemy,” “GoodFellas” and the “Godfather” trilogy.

Are things going smoothly for Tony when “The Sopranos” resumes? Carmela and the kids all cozy and blissful? No cares on the crime front?

Whadda you, crazy?

And the Corleones thought they had it tough.

Aging Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), whom Tony made figurehead boss in Season 1 to divert the feds from himself, is being tried on racketeering charges and demands a bigger split to pay his legal bills. Now a “made man” with responsibility, Tony’s hothead nephew, Christopher (Michael Imperioli), still secretly shoots up and is unaware through the haze that the tough cookie so chummy with his girlfriend, Adriana (Drea de Matteo), is an undercover fed.

Just as Tony is too preoccupied to notice that Carmela (Edie Falco), while no longer attracted to feckless Father Phil (Paul Schulze), now gets all fluttery in the presence of her husband’s ponytailed macho driver, Furio (Federico Castelluccio). And, uh-oh, the sparks appear to be mutual.

It doesn’t end here. Doubts linger about the loyalty of Tony’s once-trusted top lieutenant, Paulie (Tony Sirico), now on the phone regularly with rival underboss Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) while in jail on a gun charge. Tony’s other trusted underling, Silvio (Steven Van Zandt), may have his own private agenda, by the way. And Tony’s twisted sister, Janet (Aida Turturro)--who gunned down her last mob boyfriend--is secretly carrying on with lewd sociopath Ralphie Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano), a good bet to reside with the fishes by season’s end.

Returning to the home front, it still takes Tony less time to pad down the driveway in his white terry robe for the New York Times each morning than it does teenage Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler) to read a sentence in a book.

And Michael Corleone never faced anyone as daunting as the Sopranos’ pampered, sullen daughter, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler), a Mafia American Princess spending the summer aimlessly at home on her cell phone while planning to drop out of Columbia and tour Europe.

When Carmela has had it up to here with Meadow’s idleness, the ungrateful kid snaps at her mother: “12 credits, two semesters in a row, and I’m not entitled to a summer?”

Other returnees naturally include Tony’s neurotic shrink, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), again unloading on her own therapist, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg (director Peter Bogdanovich). Assemblyman Zellman (Peter Riegert) is as corrupt as ever. And what would “The Sopranos” be without a home base featuring flesh? So back, as well, is the family’s Bada Bing strip club, where Tony and his boys hang out and tally the pluses and minuses of crime.

Although even the best series ultimately falter from natural wear and attrition, no aging brown spots or crows’ feet are visible on “The Sopranos” in its fourth season.

These early episodes stand head and holsters above everything else this fall, their hybrid of incongruous tones and emotions never more alluring than in coming hours when some prominent underworld characters display unexpected tenderness and devotion in their marriages. They include Johnny Sack, of all people, embracing his oversized wife with sympathy and loving sweetness, defining her as “beautiful, Rubenesque” after savagely beating a man he believes laughed at a crude joke about her obesity.

Creator David Chase’s densely written characters continue to walk a perilous high wire between violence and humor. In a sly nod to charges that his series stereotypes Italian Americans as criminals, Episode 3 has Carmela and other Mafia wives in a huff when a Catholic parish speaker urges U.S. women of Italian origin to combat media stereotyping as mob molls.

Meanwhile, Tony’s crime family is outraged when Native Americans protest Newark’s annual Columbus Day Parade. “I tell you what it is,” snarls Silvio, wanting to bust heads, “anti-Italian discrimination.” It gets especially funny when they launch an anti-African American PR campaign and enlist the help of a “chief” who had a “racial awakening” only when opening a casino.

As always, its connection to ordinary lives is one thing setting this series apart. So, naturally, “The Sopranos” is not immune to the cosmic Sept. 11 calamity that U-turned Americans everywhere. “Mom really went down after the World Trade Center,” says Uncle Junior’s hulking sidekick, Bobby Bacala (Steven Schirripa).

Above all, though, even on “The Sopranos,” it’s the economy, stupid.

Fearing for her family’s future should Tony die, Carmela urges him to invest the fortune he’s secretly stashed and at the very least do some “simple estate planning.” He’ll have none of it. “The money stays where it is, with what’s goin’ on in d’world,” barks Tony. Later, we see him furtively burying paper sacks full of bills beneath a tile floor and in a bag of duck seed, then angrily lecturing his top guys nose to nose about using the nation’s hard times as an excuse for not turning a bigger profit.

“What two businesses have been recession-proof since time immemorial?” Tony asks. Silvio delivers on cue: “Certain aspects of show business, and our thing.”

From stogie to extravagant lies and volcanic temper, Tony remains as big and unpredictable as he is complex. Subtleties, shadings and half-twists are what make him a stunning anomaly, though, and a fascinating gangster study.

“There’s two endings for a guy like me, a high-profile guy,” he tells Melfi. “Dead or in d’can.”

HBO terminally without Tony? It’s TV, after all. And as Carmela reminds him Sunday, “Everything comes to an end.”

“The Sopranos” will be shown Sunday nights at 9 p.m. on HBO. The network has rated it TV-MA (adult content, graphic language, nudity, graphic violence; may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard .rosenberg@ latimes.com.