Peter McKay

The whole problem started a few weeks ago, as so many problems do — admit it— because there was nothing good on TV. My wife and I were flipping through the hundreds of movies available to rent on our cable system and found that we'd already seen just about everything they had to offer, some of them twice. Those things we hadn't seen we hadn't seen because we didn't want to. Finally, about to give up, I started looking through old shows available to watch again, and I found they were showing the first few episodes of the HBO show "The Sopranos."

Now we didn't watch this show the first time it came around, back in 1999, but only because so many people told us it was so good and we had to watch it. It's kind of a code I follow: Any time everybody tells me something is great, that I just have to try it, I avoid it at all costs, because I'm convinced I'll be disappointed. It's why I've never seen "Lost," never had an appletini and never eaten Tiramisu. It's why I never really started a 401K.

But now, 10 years down the road, I thought I'd give it a shot. We hit "Play" and watched an episode. And we liked it. When that was done, we turned to each other, shrugged and watched another. And then one more. We were too tired to watch another one, so we went to bed — and watched the fourth before we even got out of our pajamas in the morning.

Within a couple days, watching every night and sometimes on a Saturday, we had gone through all the episodes available on our cable system. We waited, breathlessly, for new episodes to come out. When they didn't arrive soon enough, we turned to the Internet, watching episodes on my laptop. When we ran out of those, a friend who had collected most of the seasons on DVD offered to loan them to us. It was the mother lode.

Before long, I realized we were becoming obsessed with Tony Soprano and his mob buddies.

We were watching so many episodes in a row that I began to feel bad I wasn't a made guy. The cashier at the supermarket would take too long, and I'd want to get in her face. I'd glance in the rear view mirror as I drove to work, worried that the feds were tailing me. My wife woke up in a cold sweat one night, fresh from a nightmare in which a hit had been called in on her and she was in danger of being "whacked."

A big part of the attraction, in fact, was that we'd never watched a show where so many characters got knocked off so often. It's hard to turn the channel when any minute somebody you know might end up all over the windshield.

And I'm constantly having to ward off friends who were smart enough to watch the first time around and wanted to talk about it. Conversations usually start with "Hey, did you get to the part where they kill off ... ?" (I don't hear the rest because I've got my fingers in my ears.) We upped our intake to keep ahead of the spoilers.

Concerned that we might be getting in over our heads, I started to look up "signs of addiction" on the Internet. The top sign, according to one expert, was the use of something as a way to forget problems or to relax. This was bad sign. That was exactly why were doing this. Other signs, such as "loss of interest in activities that used to be important," "spending a lot of time figuring out how to get more of it" and "failed attempts to stop the activity" weren't much more helpful. I stopped looking at this point because it was time to watch another episode.

At 86 episodes total, at this rate, it will take us another two months to get through the entire six seasons. Till then, you see me swaggering around trying to look like a tough guy, I'm warning you — stay clear.

You try and tell me what's gonna happen, I'm gonna slappa you face!

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