As I mentioned last week, I recently experienced a stint of faux-bachelorhood, as my significant other went off to work in another town for a couple weeks. I'm happier when he's here, but there are upsides to such temporary separations: falling asleep to music Jake doesn't like (hello, Neil Young and Wu-Tang Clan!), leaving weird messes around the house and/or embarking on ambitious absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder cleaning projects, and the basic pleasures of once again missing someone you've suckered into living with you.

But during this recent stint of non-coupledom, my most extravagant indulgence was a weird, shipped-from-China-and-probably-bootleg-although-I-didn't-understand-that-when-I-was-ordering-it DVD box set of all six seasons of The Sopranos, which enabled me to fulfill my dream of watching the entire series in not-edited-for-TV format in chronological order.

For the record, Jake is not anti-Sopranos, just nowhere near the Sopranos fan I am. He's watched dozens of episodes on A&E, offering such feedback as "Guns are loud" and "Those people don't seem very happy"—true and true. Over the past decade I've also watched dozens of Sopranos episodes on A&E and DVD and in HBO-rigged hotel rooms, accepting whatever episode was thrown at me and cumulatively encountering most of the major plot points, but never experiencing the story chronologically, thus never able to directly connect cause and effect between misdeeds and retribution for misdeeds, and most importantly, never knowing exactly when a character was lying—which, as we're dealing with organized crime, is a lot of the time.

It's been—duh—amazing. I will not bother reiterating why The Sopranos is both one of the greatest television shows ever made and one of the greatest Mafia-themed entertainments ever made, because everyone who cares already knows. But my chronological, unedited-for-TV viewing has been a 36-hours-and-counting dream. (Seriously, watching Sopranos on A&E, where episodes are edited for both time and content, is practically worthless, with the commercials and cut footage proving far more disruptive than the cussing overdubs; switching "motherfucker" to "bloodsucker" doesn't cause a fraction of the damage that busting up the show's cinematic flow does.) Things I must applaud specifically:

*Nancy Marchand, who as Livia Soprano created a villain as monolitically evil as Darth Vader, without getting up from her chair. One of the spookiest performances I've ever seen (though that posthumously patched-together "final scene" in Season 3 is total crap.)

*Aida Turturro, who as Janice Soprano does everything in her power to create the most unctuous and repulsive comic villain since that creep who played Mr. Collins in the BBC's Pride & Prejudice. (You have your comic-villain standard bearers, I have mine.)

*Steve Schirripa, who as Bobby Baccalieri creates my underdog-favorite Sopranos character, and the one that's most consistently surprising, with his mix of functional toughness and fully open emotionality unprecedented in mob cinema, by my watch.

As of now, I'm at the start of season 4, but as I said, I know the majority of major plot twists from years of sporadic viewing, so spoiler alerts aren't really an issue. (Stay out of the toy store, Bobby! And smoke that cock, Vito!)