Entertainment makes strange bedfellows, and one of the quietly intriguing photos to emerge from HBO's post-Emmys extravaganza was that of patrician Connecticut-raised gentleman (and all-but-inevitable future Time Warner C.E.O.) Jeff Bewkes with Paulie Walnuts. Paulie is of course a fictitious and felonious character on The Sopranos, but not so very different from actor Tony Sirico, a Brooklynite with a rap sheet that's possibly longer than your arm (maybe even single-spaced--28 arrests and 20 months in stir for a felony weapons charge).

The churlish reference here would be to departed HBO head Christopher Albrecht, missing of course from the 1500-person event but very much in the news the next morning for signing on with financier Theodore J. Forstmann's IMG talent agency (beyond repping Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, they print cash by broadcasting sports across Europe) as head of its global media unit. When Albrecht was arrested in a Las Vegas parking lot after a prize fight and charged with assaulting his girlfriend, Bewkes paused a few beats before dropping the axe--around the time the Los Angeles Times revealed an earlier Albrecht assault accusation that was hushed up with a settlement.

But in corporate and even emotional terms, the photo with Paulie spelled goodbye to intimate involvement with a division Bewkes had shepherded very effectively (along with the off-in-the sunset Sopranos he oversaw hits like Sex in the City) and hello to his next challenge-- as C.E O. Richard Parson's replacement. My colleague Jeff Bercovici earlier linked to the Wall Street Journal's thoroughgoing but somehow inconclusive take on whether Bewkes will make investors happy by dumping some under-performing TW limbs (like the sometimes slipshod cable division, for starters) to concentrate on what bullying investor Carl Icahn (and gloves-off media analyst Richard Greenfield of Pali Research) most want--a slimming down of the company to be a purer "content play".

Just as the once-dominant magazine division became the conglomerate's stepchild (and suffered inertia because some analysts said, division head Ann Moore was slow to coordinate publishing's digital side), AOL, according to analyst Jessica Reif Cohen, squandered its formerly massive brand name with its slowness to cook up broadband-based strategies. (And just announced a move from Virginia to New York to claw for ad business.)

The Fortune piece Jeff also linked to describes Bewkes's style--"lean, energized, granularly focused on results, unsentimental, and slightly obsessive"--as a likely one for the company he'll inherit, while crediting him for rigging up the CW network from used parts, and "ensuring the rest of the company's vast TV and film businesses - including Warner Bros., the Turner cable networks, and HBO - steadily churned out profits."

True enough, though the filmed entertainment operation had to eat some crow in August in admitting to analysts that the second-quarter number was down 24 percent from last year, the July release of the latest Harry Potter, creeping towards a worldwide billion dollars in ticket sales alone, should be consoling, and the studio is second only to Paramount in market share for the year.

When break-up drums beat, Bewkes has in the past countered by extolling the virtues of using movie and television content to energize and brand networks like TBS and TNT, a philosophy he shares with Parsons--and with the many critics of the Viacom/CBS split engineered, to unexciting share price results for Viacom, by Sumner Redstone.

Don't look for any bold pronouncements from Bewkes before Parsons hands over the job (perhaps as soon as November, some say). A Bewkes classmate at Stanford Business School named Peter Kreisky has pointed out, "Jeff is a master at a party. He was also smart enough when he was number two at HBO to be almost invisible. Michael Fuchs was someone who wanted the limelight and wanted all of it. Jeff has been very astute."

Similarly with Parsons, who will have perhaps a year's tenure as chairman beside Bewkes and may end up making a New York mayoral run while pointing to his helmsmanship of TW, Bewkes will be smart enough not to grab for the wheel prematurely. One thing that stands out in Bewkes' track record so far is that he became a leader in crisis, and he's got more of them dead ahead. "Working at this company is like being in a war," he told a Stanford business school publication, "You start as a captain, and only two years later you're a general. Things happen that never happen in peacetime."

If war it is, Bewkes will be more than ready to go to the mattresses.