The HBO gang’s all here, A&E; swears (mildly)

In an upcoming scene from the edited version of “The Sopranos,” the one that begins airing tonight on A&E;, mob guys Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) and Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) are chasing a wiseguy through the woods before killing him, in cold blood, pumping his chest full of bullets, repeatedly, brutally.

What you don’t get in this scene is the full effect of dark comedy -- Paulie Walnuts fretting, in colorful language, that he’s just schlepped through poison ivy. In fact it’s the poison ivy that ultimately provides the character’s motivation -- Paulie pulling the trigger because he’s freaking out about itching, while Christopher, for whom this is more personal, carries the moment’s emotional weight.

The scene, in both its unedited and edited forms, was included on a DVD of “examples of editing” that A&E; sent out to critics to illustrate how it was doing due diligence to both art and commerce in taking “The Sopranos” wide. (A&E; is said to be carried in 91 million homes to HBO’s 29 million or so, thus making this the debut of “The Sopranos” in front of mainstream America -- excluding the relatively more individual choice of watching on home video.)

The DVD arrived as an inherent disclaimer: No parts of “The Sopranos’ ” soul were harmed in the making of these reruns.

And yet, the migration of the HBO series to the more delicate climes of basic cable both reiterates the culture’s lingering hypocrisies (it’s OK to show assassinations, but the F-word is verboten and strippers must be in bikinis) and raises a simple question: What would happen if A&E; just aired “The Sopranos” as is?

Apparently, something short of bedlam would ensue -- advertisers fleeing the scene as conservative interest groups ratcheted up the “boycott A&E;” noise.

But given that the Federal Communications Commission has no jurisdiction over basic-cable content, the threat of a backlash is more an assumed one than an actual one.

While it might come as a small shock, cable networks do actually have what they refer to as “standards and practices” -- roughly defined, it tends to involve the F-word and the exposure of the male and/or female sex, perhaps the clearest demarcation these days between what you get from HBO and Showtime (Language! Frontal nudity!) and the FX network or Comedy Central (Less language! Coy partial nudity!).

It’s a morality governed almost exclusively by the marketplace. And yet the self-regulation extends beyond an R-rated show like “The Sopranos,” as witnessed during the around-the-clock coverage of the recent execution of Saddam Hussein. Imagery of the hanging, you kept hearing, would give ordinary Iraqis the visual proof they needed to exorcise the dark days of Saddam, as cable news teased the public death all day and into the night without much on-air transparency about where their own absorption met their standards and practices (in the end, CNN et al. showed the noose going around Hussein’s neck while protecting viewers from the entire raw feed, which included the moment of Hussein’s body dropping, an image that later became accessible on the Internet).

“With the cable channels that are unregulated and the Internet communication, it’s more like the FCC, by its regulation, is simply establishing a zone in which relative or a certain degree of freedom from what they identify as indecency or profanity exists,” U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Pierre Leval said recently on C-SPAN. “But there are all these other zones which are completely unregulated.”

The case before the court was Fox vs. the FCC, in which the network was appealing the FCC ruling that its 2002 live airing of the Billboard Music Awards, in which Cher and Nicole Richie uttered “fleeting expletives,” had violated the government’s indecency standards.

To watch the hearing -- the attorney for the FCC arguing that children had been exposed to gratuitous use of the F-word -- was to wonder what reality the government agency is operating under, given the pervasiveness of cable TV in the household.

The idea of federal regulation of the cable TV business might raise 1st Amendment issues, though several top executives I spoke to -- John Landgraf of FX and Bob DeBitetto of A&E; -- indicated that they see themselves as having to remain cognizant that their shows are easily available to unsuspecting eyes.

“It’s not so much about whether we see a nipple or whether we drop an F-bomb,” Landgraf said. “It’s ‘Can you get into the nitty-gritty stuff of character?’ ”

If, for the sake of argument, NBC is a PG network and Showtime is an R, FX -- with original series “Nip/Tuck,” “Rescue Me” and now “Dirt,” with its high-art/porn aesthetic-- is, I suppose, a hard PG-13, harder than TNT’s, if for no other reason than you’ll likely never see Brenda pleasure herself on “The Closer.”

It can, of course, get more muddled than this.

Bravo, whose “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” begat a host of setups rife with innuendo, might be hopelessly PG to the gay community but a horrifying R to social conservatives. Comedy Central doesn’t exactly advertise it, but the network airs unedited movies late-night weekends under the heading “Secret Stash.”

A&E; reportedly paid somewhere between $150 million and $200 million for “The Sopranos” name. It’s a high-priced gamble that the network will go from whatever A&E; means currently to the network that has “The Sopranos.”

In this, A&E; has probably come full circle from its humble roots as an arts channel that might have broadcast a foreign film containing nudity but now, with a show arguably akin to “Masterpiece Theatre,” sees itself more in the model of a broadcast network -- a corporate entity that has to be able to defend itself against charges of cultural malfeasance.

Producers of “The Sopranos” have long been planning for this eventuality, shooting coverage and having the actors dub cleaner lines. And DeBitetto says he’s proud of the painstaking process by which the most heralded series in HBO history became an A&E; one.

Not one scene from the first six seasons, DeBitetto said, had to be excised in its entirety. Indeed, the careful pruning, as he described it, seemed so careful that on some of the sample edits you forgot what had been edited out.

In others, though, something was lost. Paulie Walnuts is not Paulie Walnuts if he says “freakin’ ” poison ivy.

I asked, for the sake of asking, about that other word.

“That particular word is the word that we don’t ever use,” DeBitetto said.

If you can get past this sort of issue, not to mention commercial interruptions (a mighty caveat), “The Sopranos,” mostly, usually, won’t be all that different from the original.

Next up for a basic-cable syndication sale out of the HBO stable is “Deadwood.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s a western.

paul.brownfield@latimes.com