EDITOR’S VIEWPOINT/ County tells hot TV show to fuhgeddaboudit

Used to be when someone said “Sopranos,” you thought “buxom women singing arias.” James Treffinger wishes that were still the case.

Treffinger, county executive for Essex County, N.J., is sick of sopranos – not the game’s not over ’til they sing kinds of sopranos, but the HBO kind that eat rigatoni and push their buddies off boats.

For those of you who have lived under a rock for the past few years, The Sopranos is a wildly popular cable TV series about a Mafia family that runs a garbage business in New Jersey. Treffinger and the county’s sheriff, Armando Fontoura, are on record as disapproving of the show because of its portrayal of Italian-Americans. Because of that, they recently denied the show’s producers a permit to film scenes on county-owned property. If we in the South had been that sensitive, there never would have been a Dukes of Hazzard. (Okay, so that would not have been a bad thing.)

In denying the permit, Treffinger blustered, “I have no intention of granting a permit for our taxpayer-owned facilities for a profit-making enterprise which depicts an ethnic group in stereotypical fashion.” The show, he insisted, is not an accurate portrayal of Essex County.

Well, duh.

Watching The Sopranos has certainly not convinced me that every Italian-American living in Essex County is a member of organized crime dabbling in waste management. But then, when I was little I used to watch Yogi Bear, and I knew even then that bears couldn’t talk and didn’t spend their days plotting the theft of the next “pickanick” basket. It’s TV, for crying out loud, and, except for the folks who watch Survivor and Temptation Island, most of us are smart enough not to take it seriously.

Interestingly, local officials from nearby Union, Middlesex and Passaic counties have no such qualms. They say that if Essex doesn’t want Tony and the gang, they’ll take ’em. And Newark’s “Virtual Visitors Bureau” maintains a site (www.gonewark.com) that touts such local attractions as the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart and locations seen on The Sopranos.

I don’t know how much money The Sopranos has pumped into Essex County, but I suspect it’s more than a little. I do know that about a zillion Web sites exist that encourage people to take any number of Sopranos tours of northern New Jersey.

No doubt Treffinger means well, and Essex County’s economy is strong enough that it can afford to be picky. Blowing off a television production for reasons of political correctness won’t leave the county’s economy sleeping with the fishes. But it just doesn’t seem wise, guys.