THE SOPRANOS airs the fourth, or maybe the fifth, episode of its television season this Sunday. Or is it the sixth? It's very hard to keep track. In any case, the show is still sailing along on an updraft of favorable publicity that is extraordinary even by the standards of television, where hallucinatory embellishment and repetition are basic communication strategies. The coverage and critical notices that swarmed over the show's season premiere, when it debuted on the cable channel HBO four or five or six weeks ago, read more like advertising than journalism. And there's no sign of a trailing off.

The Sopranos is a certified cultural phenomenon, according to the public prints. Last week alone came a cover story in Newsweek, yet another feature in USA Today, a gushy valentine in GQ, and a lengthy chin-puller in the New Yorker, all of them written in tones of undying appreciation. I don't know about you, but I think that unanimity on this scale, especially among the skeptical, fiercely independent minds that enliven our nation's major newspapers and glossy magazines, should make everyone else suspicious. Aren't there any people out there who don't like The Sopranos?

As a matter of fact, there are such people, tons of them, and their existence is now one of the great unreported stories of American journalism. And I'm not just referring to people who've seen The Sopranos and didn't think it was particularly worth watching, though I'm sure such viewers exist. I'm referring to people who don't like The Sopranos -- and who, for that matter, don't dislike it, either -- because they've never seen it.

Even as I write that sentence I can imagine hundreds of heads snapping upright in dozens of newsrooms, eyes blinking furiously, faces glancing at one another with looks of panic or disbelief or incomprehension, as though the floor had suddenly lurched upward. There are . . . people . . . who have never . . . seen The Sopranos?

Yes, yes, yes! Tons of them, as I say. Now, there's a pretty good reason for this, and it has nothing to do, at least directly, with the chronic unhipness of the American people, or with the unconscionable influence of money in our political system, or even with the hidden machinations of the religious right. It's much simpler: The Sopranos is on HBO, one of the many premium subscription channels offered by cable companies, and there are people who don't pay the premium to subscribe to HBO. I did some checking. There are about 103 million American households that contain, for better or worse, a functioning television set. About two-thirds of those households get cable service, and about half of those cable-wired households -- 35 million or so -- pay the extra money to receive access to HBO in a package with other premium channels. That's a lot of people, of course, and the programmers and marketers at HBO should be very happy with their success. I'm very happy for them, too.