"We heard tings!" Like Season Six will be great!"The Sopranos" returns Sunday at 8 p.m. Central on HBO.  And according to recent review in the New York Times, the series and the season opener are well worth the nearly two year wait:

 Brutality and Betrayal, Back With a Vengeance

. . . Again, after all this time, "The Sopranos" returns to the basic elements that have kept the series so compelling. Big psychological themes are seamlessly woven into banal details that are comic until they suddenly turn and explode into brutish acts of violence. (The usual rule is that somebody gets brushed out after every meal.)

The best series on television are those in which two opposite things are true at the same time, and "The Sopranos" is a perfect example: it has exhausted the material and remains amazingly fresh. It's very funny, except that it is also dead serious. This season is a lot like the others, except that it's different, and may be the most creative and richly imagined one yet: it begins by going over old ground and yet something new and totally surprising happens.

The first episode opens with strange, foreboding music, but on the surface, things are looking pretty good for the Sopranos. Last season ended on a dark note, with the killing of Adriana (Drea de Matteo), Johnny Sack's arrest and Tony running in the snow like a lumbering bear to escape the F.B.I. sweep.

I am convinced the David Chase of "The Sopranos" and David Milch of "Deadwood" are two of the greatest writers of our time.  Instead of writing novels or poetry, they write screenplays.  And thank goodness (and badness) they do.