Al Gore mightn’t thank us for pointing it out, but the global warming pandemic has resulted in the birth of an anomaly: the Irish summer. Consequently, TV bigwigs have been forced to pull out all the stops in an effort to keep us indoors on a non-World Cup year.

Undoubtedly the flagship of any network’s schedule is the (sob) Sopranos swansong, the seventh and final season, nine episodes to rule them all etc. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade, you’ll know that The Sopranos has become almost unanimously regarded among punters and pundits as the greatest television drama of all time, a mobster epic on a Shakespearian scale, garnished with a touch of Twin Peaks-ian weirdness and Goodfellas black comedy and brutalism.
Longtime fans have greeted the upcoming finale season with a mixture of relief that HBO hasn’t milked its cash-cow into a state of terminal decline, and commensurate dread at the prospect of a gaping Sopranos-shaped void in the universe.
And now the end is near, the end of nine delirious years of priceless dialogue, cinematic production values, fiendishly clever plotting and a level of psychological depth unprecedented in a television series; the end of a show that single-handedly turned TV snobs into goggle-eyed addicts. No more lingering side profile shots of an exasperated Carmela. No more Silvio quoting Godfather III. No more Doctor Melfi and the way she might look at you. No more scenes of almost slapstick ultraviolence soundtracked by the Stones and Johnny Thunders.
But, like Mister Mailer (who recently dubbed The Sopranos the closest thing to the Great American Novel in today’s culture) the lion in winter can apparently still roar. The final season premiered in the US two months ago, with Tony Soprano recovering from the shooting that laid him low last year.
“I’m old, Carm,” he tells his long-suffering wife. “My body has suffered a trauma it will probably never recover from.” Tony’s only 47, but is beset by a melancholic fatalism. It’s the twilight of the empire, the cops are closing in, business is bad, Johnny Sack is still in prison, and Christopher is using Tony’s money to subsidise a gangster-slasher film called Cleaver. Few among us will sit down to the final installment without an apple-sized lump in our throats. All together now: “Is that all there is?/’Cos if that’s all there is/Then let’s keep dancing…”
Meanwhile, substitute the Rhode Island Murphia for the New Jersey Mafia and you get The Sopranos’ would be successor Brotherhood. An unholy cross between The Godfather, The Departed, and Phil Joanou’s much overlooked 1990 Irish gangster drama State Of Grace, the series, which premiered in the US on Showtime last summer, tells the story of the Caffey clan, an Irish-American family from ‘The Hill’ region of Providence. The story arc follows two brothers on opposite sides of the law who negotiate a form of ‘moral cooperation’ in order to get by: Michael, a mobster returned from time on the lam (Jason Isaacs), and Tommy, a local politician (Jason Clarke). The homegrown thespian contingent are represented by Fionnula Flanagan, the Irish acting legend last seen on TV in these parts in a Lost cameo and on the big screen playing Felicity Huffman’s mother in TransAmerica, and also Brian F O’Byrne, who plays a Caffey cousin fresh off the boat. The Cavan born O’Byrne is no slouch himself, having won a Tony for his part in the Broadway hit Frozen in 2004, as well as screen credits in Law & Order and The Blackwater Lightship.
Speaking of Lost, longtime fans of the series breathed a collective sigh last week when ABC announced that the end is in sight. The network confirmed that the show is set to conclude in 2010 after three more seasons, thus guaranteeing dignified closure on the castaway saga. Ratings for the series slipped this season in the US due to shifting broadcast times, meandering plots and ever more convoluted back-story. Diehards have voiced relief that the show’s creators haven’t capitulated under network pressures to bleed it dry. After the current season the remainder of the series will play out in three 16-episode stretches.
Watch out also for the BBC premiere of the The Tudors, the sumptuous ten-part costume drama starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as Henry VIII, (still covered in Golden Globes glory from his Elvis role in the CBS series): veteran Sam Neill as Cardinal Wolsey (last spotted attempting to abscond with HP scribe Ed Power’s pizza at Electric Picnic last year) and Maria Doyle Kennedy as Catherine Of Aragon (whose third album Mutter is released this month). Shot in Dublin last year, the big budget series generated record viewership figures and rave reviews when it premiered on Showtime in the US, a performance impressive enough to generate talk of Emmy nominations and ensure that a second season got the green light just last month.
“We are thrilled with the success of our dramatic series, The Tudors, and we’re happy to tell the next – even more compelling – chapter,” said Showtime President of Entertainment Robert Greenblatt. “Writer/creator Michael Hirst has done a masterful job turning history into relevant and entertaining drama; this cast is incredibly talented; and the production value is feature-film quality. Long live the king, albeit a trimmer, sexier incarnation than we’ve seen before.”