Even for Tony, a murder most foul

FORMER HBO chief Chris Albrecht reportedly had a problem with a scene in the first season of "The Sopranos" where Tony Soprano kills a guy while touring colleges in Maine with his daughter Meadow.

Albrecht worried viewers would be turned off, witnessing the show's protagonist murder a man in cold blood. But the episode is widely regarded as a turning point in the success of "The Sopranos," emblematic of the series' ongoing allure -- the Machiavellian brutality of the mob on the one hand, and the more quotidian aspects of upper-middle-class immigrant striving on the other.

That cocktail is on its last fizz: Sunday night, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) offed his nephew Christopher (Michael Imperioli), and in the nephew's dying eyes our beloved protagonist became, finally, despicable and lost, beyond empathy. If it once seemed a stretch to begin a series in which the main character commits murder, what shocked Sunday was that Tony kills and we don't sympathize.

If Tony was too dense to realize it at first, Christopher's betrayal came in handy, finally. Although this time, as Tony distanced himself from his guilt -- railing at the hypocrisies of the living and the dead -- you watched him not with vicarious pleasure but at a cold remove. Not since the death of Christopher's fiancee Adriana have we watched a character die and felt not for the doer but the victim (in this case, a killer himself, but one who spoke vulnerably in rehab, and made fitful stabs at getting out of the life and dreamed Hollywood dreams).

Tony Soprano had gotten away with murder before, but in each instance the writers left us bread crumbs back to understanding, and you followed this trail dutifully -- this guy was a mob informant (Big Pussy), that guy had it coming (Ralph Cifaretto).