The same question could be asked of network television: Are
Italian-Americans ever allowed to evolve?

 The insulting notion that it's a miracle for an Italian-American
woman like me to attend college makes the show's premise
particularly dated, but it's in keeping with decades of television
assumptions and stereotypes. When Arthur (Fonzie) Fonzarelli
appeared on the screen in 1974, with his slicked-back hair and two
thumbs up, he set the stage for a generation of dumb but lovable
blue-collar Italian-American characters. "Happy Days" spinoffs
alone gave viewers Chachi Arcola in "Joanie Loves Chachi" and
Laverne De Fazio and Carmine Ragusa   known as the Big Ragu   in
"Laverne and Shirley."

 A year after the premiere of "Happy Days," John Travolta made his
acting breakthrough on "Welcome Back, Kotter," which was based on
Gabe Kaplan's recollections of growing up in the Bensonhurst
section of Brooklyn, once a primarily Italian- American and Jewish
enclave. Mr. Kaplan played the teacher Gabe Kotter and Mr. Travolta
starred as the student Vinnie Barbarino, one of Kotter's Sweathogs
(the nickname for the Special Guidance Remedial Academics Group).
Barbarino, who had the soft, empty gaze of a gazelle, sat at the
back of the class churning out Brooklyn witticisms like "Up your
nose with a rubba hose"   a perfect warm-up for Mr. Travolta's
breakthrough film role as Tony Manero in "Saturday Night Fever."
Mr. Kaplan's well-timed pauses, frizzy black hair and bushy
mustache made him the Groucho to Mr. Travolta's Chico.

 By the mid-80's, Tony Danza had moved on from his role as a
boxer-turned-cabdriver on "Taxi" to star in his own series, "Who's
the Boss?" Perpetually wrapped in a half-apron, he played Tony
Micelli, a former major league second baseman from Brooklyn keeping
house for a female advertising executive in Connecticut. The 90's
ushered in the hunk Joey Tribbiani (Matt LeBlanc) on "Friends,"
whose slow wit and bad taste separate him from the rest of the
ensemble. In one episode, Joey gave his privileged friend Chandler
a heavy gold bracelet, a gift the other members of the cast made
fun of, one of them labeling it fit for "a Goodfella."

 And in the new millennium, don't expect Lydia to take a college
exam unless she's chomping a wad of gum. To borrow the imprecation
of Lydia's toll-collector father (Paul Sorvino) on "That's Life,"
Marone!   southern Italian dialect for Madonna! When do we get to
evolve?

 Of course, evolution implies a gradual unfolding and development
of character to reveal subtleties and complexity, a process
anathema to sitcoms, and extraordinarily difficult to achieve in
one-hour shows like "That's Life." Instead, a facile formula has
been in place for decades: Italian-Americans are defined as such on
network television only when they are working-class. There's little
room for educated, middle- class Italian-Americans who might not
conform to the prevailing stereotypes. Such characters lose the
cultural identity implicit in the hyphen (and often the final vowel
sound in their last names), becoming assimilated, communal players
who disappear into Anglo-Saxon life.

 Since it becomes increasingly difficult to portray the ways in
which ancestral roots affect identity and shape the character of
third-, fourth- and fifth-generation hyphenated Americans,
Hollywood relegates ethnicity to working-class stories boasting
crude language and Old World gestures. "That's Life," based on the
life of the writer Diane Ruggiero, routinely includes scenes of
Lydia making the sign of the cross during a conversation or
inflicting "malocchio," the evil eye   acts familiar to our
parents, perhaps, but out of character for a third- generation
Italian-American.

 Television's strategies for signaling that characters are
Italian-American look especially clunky compared with the recent
works of the memoirists Mary Cappello and Louise DeSalvo and the
novelists Gioia Timpanelli and Adria Bernardi, who use words to
decipher their relationships to an ever more distant past and to
investigate the power of ethnicity several generations into
American life. These writers' nuanced exploration of hereditary
links can be found in the pattern of a grandfather's garden, the
pull of ancient rituals or the chant of a peasant's childhood
prayer.

 By contrast, television hammers the same themes that emerged in
the sitcoms of a quarter-century ago: Lydia DeLucca's frustrations
and class aspirations precisely mirror those of Laverne De Fazio.
Laverne tells her pal Shirley in a 1976 episode, "We work in a
brewery, we date guys from the Pizza Bowl   face it, we found our
niche." Yet she still finds the optimism to sing "High Hopes."
Today, Lydia DeLucca pours hard liquor and announces, "I want to be
self-actualized and I want to know what the hell that means."

 If a show does venture into the life of a middle-class
Italian-American, like Ray Barone (Ray Romano) in "Everybody Loves
Raymond," ethnic identity is virtually eliminated, and the emphasis
is placed instead on idiosyncratic characters or the universal
theme of loving but intrusive parents or in- laws. In this season's
premiere, in which the characters traveled to Italy for a birthday
celebration, Ray's ethnic sensitivities were summed up in one line:
"I'm not really interested in other cultures." Although Ray
eventually embraces Italy, the connection between his own
Italian-American background and his reaction to the mother country
goes unexamined.

 The show's executive producer, Phil Rosenthal, said in a telephone
interview that Ray Romano's Italian-American ancestry was not an
important factor in the concept of the sitcom, which is based on
Mr. Romano's stand-up comedy. "I think we consciously avoided
trying to pigeonhole it into any type of ethnicity," Mr. Rosenthal
said. "In fact, CBS, when we first started, said they wanted to
populate the cast with what they called `nonethnic ethnics.' They
didn't want to scare away Middle America." Mr. Rosenthal
interpreted the term "nonethnic ethnic" to mean "someone who is
obviously from New York, but doesn't look too Jewish or Italian."

 One-dimensional Italian-American characters were not limited to
sitcoms like "Laverne and Shirley." Police shows of the period
often featured a maverick Italian- American cop who bucked the
system and lined up enemies in a solo performance: "Toma,"
"Baretta," "Delvecchio" and even the quirky "Columbo" are examples
of the genre. And if a show highlighted the character's volatility
on the street, it also implied that there would be amorous
explosions in the bedroom. After a hard day of dodging bullets and
putting "cockroach" criminals "in one bowl," Robert Blake as
Baretta wanted to feel the "Italian blood" coursing through his
veins and "boom boom bah."

 If not for Captain Francis Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti) of Hill
Street Station in the 1980's, the Italian-American cop might still
be years away from breaking type. Smart, quiet yet forceful, a man
respected by colleagues and gang leaders alike, Furillo was
prime-time television's first thoughtful Italian-American. Far from
the Latin lover of fable, he agonized over his failed marriage yet
still won the beautiful public defender played by Veronica Hamel.
When Furillo uttered "Marone!" during a "Hill Street Blues"
episode, for once a viewer could cheer   not slink from   her
Italian-American ancestry.

 Paradoxically, the dark drama that deals most thoughtfully today
with the thorny issues of being a hyphenated American   the sting
of class disparities and the uneasy road to assimilation   also
raises the ugly red flag of the Mafia. With "The Sopranos," Mafia
stories, previously left to film, are delivered directly into the
homes of Italian- Americans who have for years resented the popular
culture's easy identification of organized crime with Italian
ethnicity. David Chase, the creator and executive producer of "The
Sopranos," said the historic absence of Mafia shows from television
was less about issues of taste than of money.

 "Television only likes to deal with what they consider heroes and
good people," Mr. Chase said. "Advertisers don't want to have their
brands associated with wrongdoers and social outcasts."

 Part of the critical success of the HBO series can be attributed
to its willingness to journey through emotional and cultural
terrain rarely seen on television. Tony Soprano's conflicted
relationships with Jennifer Melfi, his Italian-American
psychiatrist, and Bruce Cusamano, the doctor who is his neighbor;
the brutal reality of his mother's desires; his nephew
Christopher's uneasy association with African-American gangsta
rappers   all capture the struggles within Italian-American culture
and subvert its prevailing images.

 At the same time, even a mention of "The Sopranos" in some
Italian-American circles provokes a sigh of despair at the
persistence of the Mafia stereotype. With all of the show's
sensitivity to class tension and its perceptive radar for equally
dangerous, equally false positive stereotypes, could "The Sopranos"
have maintained both its masterly look at Italian-American culture
and its extraordinary success without the plot device of the Mafia?
For instance, what if Tony Soprano's sanitation business were
legitimate? He's nouveau riche, living next to Italian-American
professionals and embarrassed by his working-class roots. He sees a
shrink and had a nightmare of a mother, not the loving,
pasta-stirring one embedded in the American imagination.

 "Well, it's hard for me to even think of it in that way," Mr.
Chase said. "The show was conceived as a gangster story, and that's
what I wanted to do. The family elements are there probably to a
greater extent than we've seen in other gangster stories. This
particular show is not just about class, or living next door to
people; it's also about very important choices of good and evil
choices that deal with the devil   which are much more readily
found in a gangster story."

 From the sitcom to the drama, Italian- Americans still struggle to
escape roles cast long ago for the olive-skinned, or to emerge as
characters more fully drawn than the "nonethnic ethnic."

 While "The Sopranos" poignantly depicts complicated identity
issues in contemporary Italian-American culture, thousands of young
men eagerly crowded the show's open casting call with their
ready-made versions of violent thugs. Which leaves plenty of room
for evolution.