Sundays used to be the worst day of the week. Well, second to Monday.

This was mostly due to the deplorable condition of Sunday night television. With the notable exception of The Simpsons, Sunday evenings were reserved for a mad dash to the endless amounts of work we had been putting off the entire weekend.

Then, HBO went to work.

About six years ago, HBO set forth with a new series-based agenda and produced some of the most innovative shows ever to ever hit the small screen.

For most people, watching TV is a major aspect of life. It is an expected American tradition, like proms or birthdays. We watch TV mostly because we're bored, and we keep watching because we find something in the boob tube that we identify with, while at the same time fulfilling our fantasies. Through its beautifully complex dramas and gut-wrenchingly funny comedies, HBO has mastered the art of letting us see and know ourselves in ways that we cannot do on our own.

As I sat down Sunday to watch the final episode of Sex and the City, I couldn't help but wonder if getting wrapped up in these weekly fantasies was merely an escape from a dreary life; or did it mean something more? Can we take the fabulous fantasy of Carrie Bradshaw's New York City, or the New Jersey mobster life of Tony Soprano, and see ourselves -- faults and all?

Perhaps we can. Shows like Sex and the City, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos are just versions of our lives and psyches that we'd like to see magnified. These shows take the most complex issues of our lives -- sex, violence, death and our inner ego -- and take them to an extreme.

Even though Sex and the City said its final goodbye, the legacy of the show's candid approach to sex will live on. Sex columnist Carrie, the show's leading lady, gave six years worth of advice, asking such questions as, "Can you make a mistake and miss your fate?" Carrie gave viewers a chance to see those questions acted out.

Although SATC seemed to live a life far from reality, with its fabulous, rent-controlled apartments and $40,000 worth of shoes, its examination of life's situations was real. As Carrie says in the final voiceover, the most important relationship of all is the one you have with yourself.

From questions of love to questions of social boundaries, Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld and the central curmudgeon of Curb Your Enthusiasm, is the antithesis of Carrie Bradshaw. Larry spends most of the half-hour show embarrassing himself through his outrageous social interactions. When Larry feels like he's been mistreated in the slightest way (a late phone call could be enough), he sets off on a bombastic social crusade to bring about justice.

We all think like Larry at our most basic level. We all want to fulfill the fantasy of social retribution. But at the end of every episode, Larry suffers more than anyone. Do Larry's escapades have a point? Certainly. If we learned to take things a little less seriously, we help make the world a little nicer for everyone.

Six Feet Under is HBO's brilliant look at death through the eyes of a family living in a funeral home. Every episode begins with a death and follows the funeral through the eyes of the Fisher family. As human viewers of this show, we know death exists; yet, we spend so much time denying its inevitability. What Six Feet Under does best is to make us see life in the face of death. When the characters find out something about themselves and learn to accept the difficulties that come with living in this world, we have courage that we can find that, too.

The above shows serve to subvert our realties, but at the same time they continue to exist within these programs. We can see our hopes, our dreams and our fears inside these characters; we identify with that because we can see the line between fantasy and reality.

That line, however, becomes so much more complex with The Sopranos. It's one thing to say we identify with caretakers and social misfits, but it's another to say we identify with one of TV's scariest mob bosses.

Or is it?

Perhaps the reason The Sopranos is so successful is the fact that the show engages the darker side of our personality. When we see Tony Soprano, part of us wants his power but knows we'd run in the other direction if we saw a real Tony on the street. Because we see Tony at a psychiatrist, we can see the way the show represents the "id" in all of us. Tony, like most of us, is just trying to do the best by his rules.

His life, while certainly illegal, is grounded in daily routines, family life and morning walks to get the newspaper. Those details show us that Tony Sopranos live in our world -- though the TV-version is just a bit more violent and has a better theme song.

Ultimately, TV is not reality. HBO has a team of writers and hundreds of cast and crewmembers to make each Sunday night a reality. We can't have that team creating clever lines and beautiful moments in our lives.

But, we can hope to find a little clarity about what it means to be who we are -- TV fanatic or not.