Tony is the new Raymond.
If you pity a show that débuts on HBO after an episode of “The Sopranos,” because of the inevitable comparisons (though things have worked out all right for “Deadwood” in that regard), you’ve got to weep for a show that débuts after the first episode of a new season of “The Sopranos,” especially when viewers have been waiting for that new season for almost two years and know that it marks the beginning of the end of the series. That’s the situation in which “Big Love,” a series about a polygamous marriage in present-day Utah, found itself a couple of Sundays ago; HBO thought either that “Big Love” was so strong that it wouldn’t suffer when juxtaposed with What May Be the Greatest Television Show Ever—or that it was so anemic that it would need “The Sopranos” to carry it. Whatever the case, it’s hard to imagine that anyone who watched the season première of “The Sopranos,” with its devastating, mind-blowing ending, was in any shape to watch anything afterward.
