Last night, Gregory and I excitedly settled down for a long winter’s viewing of the much-anticipated return of Tony Soprano and the boys. As expected, it fucking rocked — no surprises with the quality of the writing or acting; it remains, hands down, the greatest television show of all time. What I did find shocking, however, was the positively shameless and non-stop Product Placement present in just this first episode alone.

Starting with the huge and slow-moving Nestle’s Qwik logo on the side of Bobby’s model train, to AJ’s morning box of Special K cereal strategically turned so as to afford the best camera angle, to the close-up shot of Tony’s Cingular cell phone alerting us that it was Janice calling (when just fucking answering it and saying, “Hey, Janice…” certainly would have sufficed in letting us know just who the hell it was), to the quartet of high-end David Yurman diamond watches given to Tony by one of his foot-soldiers who was trying to buy his freedom from the family bidness, to Carmela going on and on and on, in scene after scene, about her new Porsche Cayenne. It was, quite literally, almost more than I could bear.

And as proof that it’s not just happening on The Sopranos, in the brand new HBO show about polygamous marriage, “Big Love,” whose premiere immediately followed Tony and crew, there was a line that had absolutely nothing to do with the forward thrust of the scene, in which Wife #2 (Chloe Sevigny) emerged from the pantry of Wife #1 (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and with a nearly empty peanut butter jar in hand, inquired, “You don’t mind if I finish off your Skippy, do you?”, when “You don’t mind if I finish off your peanut butter, do you?” would have gotten the point across just fine.

Look, I understand that it’s a Brave New World in television advertising and all, what with the fast-forward through commercials capability of TiVo, et al, but as a writer, everytime I witness these sort of hucksterish hi-jinks, it makes my flesh crawl…as I can just imagine those writers cringing at the specific sponsor directive to find some way – no matter how obnoxious or cheesy or pointless – to work their product into the storyline.

I’ll get used to this, as we all eventually will, I am sure — to the point where the practice is so ubiquitous that we won’t even notice it anymore…but it’s just gonna take some Timex.