It's only TV stoopid! How the Sopranos took on a new lease of life

Whaddya you – crazy? You think the Sopranos are for real? It's TV stoopid. It's fiction.

Fiction or not, the Sopranos – that intriguing family of "waste management" consultants from New Jersey – return to US television screens tomorrow evening, as brutal, confused and compelling as ever.

According to reviews this new series of The Sopranos will not disappoint those fans who have come to love the savage but troubled "King Midas" mafia boss Tony ("Everything I touch turns to shit") and his differing relationships with his wife and neurotic therapist.

As up-to-date as ever, the first episode immediately addresses the events of 11 September, with the mafia footsoldier Bobby Bacala telling Tony Soprano: "Ma really went downhill after the World Trade Centre. Quasimodo predicted all this." The mob boss, father and husband, played by James Gandolfini, snaps back in typical fashion: "Nostradamus. Quasimodo's the hunchback of Notre Dame."

With the launch of the fourth series, the Sopranos are steadily becoming so entrenched in popular culture in America that at times people struggle to remember what is real life and what is not. Not perhaps since Larry Hagman's character was shot in Dallas, prompting fans around the world to wear T-shirts bearing the teasing question, "Who shot JR?", has a television series so disturbingly blurred that line.

Those who doubt such a proposition should consider this: not only can aficionados now take a university course in Sopranos studies, they can also buy pasta sauces "created" by Artie Bucco, the fictional owner-chef of the Nuovo Ristorante.

There is also the chance to try the favourite dishes of Tony and his wife, Carmela, in The Soprano Family Cookbook (Warner Books, $29.95), and you can even buy copies of the genuine architectural plans for the real-life New Jersey house that doubles as the exterior of the not-real-life New Jersey house lived in by the equally-not-real-life Soprano family. By comparison, the T–shirts, baseball caps and ashtrays that are available from the programme's official website seem terribly dull.

The Sopranos enter the world of academia at the University of Calgary, Canada, where the film studies professor, Maurice Yacowar, offers a course on gangster sagas that covers in some depth the influence, significance and symbolism of the HBO channel series. "[The Sopranos] is a canvas of human life that is bigger than anything Shakespeare had access to," said Professor Yacowar, whose course also studies the films Goodfellas and the Godfather trilogy. "It's as rich a text as the best novels of this century and the best plays ever."

The professor said that while Shakespeare had a limited number of acts in which to tell his story, the densely written Sopranos, by contrast, has already had 39 episodes to explore humanity's passions, power and poisonous flaws.

There is little doubt that the Sopranos, who first appeared in January 1999 with an episode in which Tony collapsed with an anxiety attack and ended up in the psychiatrist's office, cleverly manages to combine entertainment and humour with a splash of reflection and art. But what lessons can really be learnt from the likes of Tony, his therapist, Dr Melfi, Big Pussy, Carmela, Paulie and Junior, people for whom – as one reviewer noted – whacking a rat is a typical day in the office? Professor Yacowar told one reporter: "It's a story of its time, yet it explores the widest concerns of human life – ambition, emotional commitment, family, responsibility, integrity. Each 60-minute episode has its well-developed characters going through interesting situations [in which] we can all find something to identify with."