HBO released the episode descriptions for the first four episodes of season 6b today.
"Ep 1: Soprano Home Movies" - After a close call at home, Tony and Carmela head to the Adirondacks for a weekend with Bobby and Janice.

"Ep 2: Stage 5" - Tony finds art imitating life at the Cleaver premiere; in prison Johnny Sack copes with more bad news.

"Ep 3: Remember When" - With the heat turned up in Jersey, Tony and Paulie head south to cool off. Meanwhile, Junior rekindles some of his old fire in a poker game.

"Ep 4: Chasing It" - Tony hits an unlucky stretch; AJ makes a life-changing decision; Vito's widow Marie turns to Tony for help with her troubled son.

It looks like theres a lot of action to start off the new season. I for one can't wait to see how it all plays out.

Hmm. I wonder if Ep 3 will be end of Paulie?

I hope not...I know how everyone is adamant that we won't be seeing/hearing from Valery the Russian from Pine Barrens anymore, but maybe the reason Tony and Paulie head south is because Valery resurfaced (corpse or not) and certain people are not happy about it. This would be in keeping with the episode title, as in "Remember When" we lost that Russian in the woods 6 years ago.

Don't count on too many lose ends being tied up. On another note, I've been reading a lot of possible spoilers on the message boards. Some of them are quite interesting. Who knows if any of them will actually be true though.

Well where are Christopher and Silvio gonna be? Not good for Paulie! The whole Valery thing has to be let go, it was six years ago! Apparently that situation was going to resurface in season four but Tony Sirico had back problems was absent for the first few episodes, so Chase scrapped it.

By heading south, they might mean Florida. They shot some scenes in Miami in December.

How about this: there is no real new season. There will only be one episode which is a fast-forward. Tony is old, Carmela is long gone after finding out that Tony had Christopher killed, AJ is dead from a drug overdose, and Meadow is in California completely estranged from Tony after she finds out all the people he's killed. Most of his crew is dead or in prison. Dr. Melfi visits Tony once in awhile. Janice owns the house.

That's good Olivant, but can we really expect Tony to not be in prison as an old man ? Unless he just got out, hmmm...

Janice sticking with Tony would kind of parallel Connie returning to the Corleone fold.

I think that, to some extent, Tony has an angel looking out for him. So, he escapes prison. But his comeuppance is his abandonment by his family - that's his hell.

All these rumours are whetting my appetite something rotten

Any trailers circulating around yet??

There have been some previews that consist of clips from the first six seasons, I think Chase will not allow any footage to be shown.

Looks like we will have to wait until Easter Sunday to see what happens.