Like the rowdy girls of “Sex and the City,” whose language and activities were diluted to make them suitable for reruns on TBS, the violent and profane gangsters of HBO’s “The Sopranos,” have been cleaned up for telecast on ad-supported A&E.

Can Tony Soprano and company behave well enough to make the transition from F-bombing tough guys to ready-for-basic-cable players?

Golly gee, yes.

A&E provided sample episodes of their edited versions of “The Sopranos,” which begin running in two-hour Wednesday night blocks (9-11 p.m.) on Jan. 10. We watched one of the revamped episodes – the third one from the show’s first season – then measured it against the same unexpurgated hour from the “Sopranos” DVD set.

The verdict?

If you saw and loved the unedited versions on HBO or DVD, the scrubbed-down ones will be jarring, even irritating, in spots.

But that’s not the audience at which these new, better-behaved “Sopranos” are aimed. A&E is targeting TV viewers who neither subscribe to HBO nor have plunked down about $100 a season for the DVD collections.

It’s a target audience, estimated by A&E at some 150 million, who have heard the buzz about David Chase’s “Sopranos” for the past seven years, but haven’t watched a single episode.

Since they don’t know what they’ve been missing, what’s left of “The Sopranos” is quite likely to be good enough – and, in some cases, may be even more palatable for being less risque.

After all, it’s basic cable, where slightly different standards apply.

Watching the two versions directly, it’s clear that the invectives uttered by James Galdolfini’s Tony and company, and some of the other activities, are replaced by less natural-sounding substitutes. The most glaring example in episode three is when Tony surprises a hospitalized crime boss with a Bada Bing stripper dressed – then undressed – as a staff nurse.

On HBO’s version, she treated the patient, and viewers, with topless abandon. Not on A&E, though.

And when Tony, pouncing on his Russian mistress for a quickie, is interrupted by an unwanted phone call, his scatological obscenity in the HBO version is replaced by a much less Tony-like “Nuts!!”

This is Tony Soprano we’re talking about, not Charlie Brown. Good grief.

Lots of people are called “jerks,” instead of various body parts, and the F word is changed to something that rhymes with reeking – as in, reeking of selling out. But by seeking a larger audience, “The Sopranos” isn’t selling out so much as just selling.

And the final truth is, these episodes from 1999 still retain shock value – the delightful shock of seeing Adriana and Tony’s mom alive again, and the general shock about how good “The Sopranos” – even a watered-down “Sopranos” – was from the start.