The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  At the same time, though, it was as hilarious as any sitcom. Its humor ranged from hifalutin (mistaking Nostradamus for Quasimodo) to scatological (“Meeting’s over!”) to sickening (Phil Leotardo at the gas station). And the show’s creator, David Chase, kept subverting our expectations. That cut to black in the finale really is a punchline to that scene, and to The Sopranos as a whole. It’s just, like Tony Soprano’s initial encounter with Dr. Melfi, or his reunion with Febby Petrulio, not the sort of punchline we expected, and we didn’t know we wanted it until Chase provided it.

  The show’s mercurial unpredictability was electrifying. Pre-Sopranos, TV was widely dismissed as a medium for programs that didn’t ask the viewer to think about anything except what was coming on next, and that preferred lovable characters who didn’t change and had no inner life. The ideal network series was filler between commercials. It was hard to make art in this kind of environment, though some creators managed. There were lots and lots of rules. There were words you couldn’t say, things you couldn’t show, stories you couldn’t tell. The number one rule: don’t upset people.

  The Sopranos wasn’t the first show to break most of these rules: All in the Family gave us a bigoted (though not irredeemable) main character; Hill Street Blues pushed drama into more serialized, morally gray territory; Miami Vice belied the notion that TV shows couldn’t look as good as movies. Nor was The Sopranos the first show to act like the rules didn’t exist; see, among others, The Prisoner, Twin Peaks, and HBO’s first original drama, Oz (featuring an actress named Edie Falco).

  But it was the first show to do that and still become a massive, enduring hit.

  Not since I Love Lucy had a show been copied as often and thoroughly, to the point where 2019 TV barely resembles the one into which Tony Soprano’s SUV rumbled back in 1999. All the aspects of the series that once startled viewers have become accepted: serialization; narrative and moral ambiguity; anti-heroes or villains as main characters; beauty for its own sake. That drama you just binged-watched on Netflix owes more to The Sopranos than to the rest of TV combined. The cell phones and references date the show to the turn of the millennium, but it still feels powerfully connected to what’s happening now. But in 1999, it all felt brazenly audacious, from the way it handed its lead role to an unknown quantity—James Gandolfini—to the way it trained its audience to expect and even demand the unexpected.

  It was a phenomenon almost from the start, and one we got to cover from the inside as the TV critics for the Star-Ledger, the hometown newspaper for both Tony Soprano and David Chase. Matt was on set when the first season was being shot and conducted one of the few interviews the famously press-shy Gandolfini ever gave. During the show’s second half, Alan walked the streets of Hoboken with Joey Pants and got an extremely reluctant Chase on the phone the morning after the finale, for the only interview he gave about it for a long time.

  We saw how much effort and attention-bordering-on-obsession to detail Chase and company put into the show. We fielded angry phone calls from Italian American anti-defamation activists who found The Sopranos a blight on their people and read delighted emails from other Italians who had never been prouder of their ethnicity or home state. We saw how the series, like Lucy, fundamentally changed both how TV was made and how the public at large felt about it. The Sopranos challenged TV to be better, and it challenged us to be better viewers. It didn’t always succeed on either front—we heard plenty from the bloodthirsty hordes who wanted less yakkin’, more whackin’—but it did more than even Chase himself could have possibly imagined when, fed up with the whole TV business, he was rooting for HBO to pass on the pilot so he could turn it into a movie.

  We had previously written critical companion books for Mad Men and Breaking Bad, dramas that wouldn’t exist without this one. The Sopranos wasn’t nearly as fresh in our memories, and because it aired before the explosion of TV recap culture, we had to write most of this book from scratch.1 Would it hold up after so many years and so many creative descendants, or would what was once shocking and bold now feel as clichéd as some of its most formulaic imitators?

  Forget holding up—it often played better now. Freed from the shackles of having to predict its next plot maneuver, and fully prepared for Chase’s love of anticlimax, we could see every aspect for what it was, rather than what we’d expected it to be. Much of the oft-maligned fourth season felt richer, more sure of itself, and other experiments, like Kevin Finnerty’s trip to Costa Mesa, provided new treasures to unearth.

  Best of all, we got to watch this remarkable cast at work again, particularly James Gandolfini. It’s become easy since 2007 to put Gandolfini’s performance on a continuum with the people who followed him, but with all due respect to the great Bryan Cranston, Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss, et al., our rewatch cemented his work as Tony as the best in TV drama history, as remarkable when acting opposite powerhouse costars like Falco and Nancy Marchand as when alone.

  We wanted to call this book The Sopranos Sessions as a nod to Tony’s relationship with Dr. Melfi, but also because we knew we would be sitting down with Chase himself for a new series of interviews that would revisit the show’s origins, analyze nearly all of its most famous moments,2 and even take one more go at that ending. What we didn’t expect was how much like therapy our conversations began to feel—how, for instance, Chase’s recall of specific details from two decades before wasn’t always strong, but his memory of the emotions and instincts behind so many choices was, or how the conversation kept wandering down paths none of us expected—Chase included.

  Those conversation were, like everything else about The Sopranos, a revelation and a confoundment at the same time. And they weren’t even necessarily the highlight of the experience, since we got to rewatch the whole series and find new ways to write about Livia’s diabolical grin, or Tony singing along in the car to the Chi-Lites, or Paulie and Christopher shivering in the Pine Barrens.

  The Sopranos Sessions is broken into seven sections:

  1. The Foreword, written by acclaimed novelist Laura Lippman;

  2. The Introduction, providing a brief overview of our experience writing about the show when it originally aired and revisiting it now;

  3. The Recaps, consisting of critical essays on every episode that aired during each of the show’s seven seasons. These have been spoiler-proofed so that first timers can read them without fear of finding out what happens in later episodes and seasons.3 They often look back, but never ahead;

  4. The Debate, wherein our authors argue about what happened in the final scene of the final episode;

  5. The David Chase Sessions, interviewing the show’s creator. Although these try to focus on each individual season, they jump around a bit in terms of chronology and sometimes discuss foreshadowing, so you will probably want to avoid reading them until after you’ve finished watching all the episodes at least once;

  6. The Morgue, a collection of excerpts from articles we wrote about the show for the Star-Ledger;

  7. The Eulogies, covering the death and legacy of James Gandolfini, including the letter that Chase read at Gandolfini’s memorial service.

  Whether you’re watching The Sopranos for the first time in the shadow of all the shows it influenced, making this book part of your annual “Bada Binge,” or revisiting it like an old friend you haven’t talked to in years, our hope is that the recaps will give each episode new insight and context, that our conversations with Chase will illuminate what it was like to make this amazing series, and that the Star-Ledger pieces will take you back to the days when The Sopranos was both the hottest and most divisive show on television, when the only thing all its viewers could agree on was that the Columbus Day episode was bad.

  Enjoy, and don’t forget to tip your waitress.

  * * *

  1 Even the episodic pieces we separately wrote during the final two seasons, and the ones Alan wrote a few years ago about the show’s first season, had to be dismantled and rebuilt.

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sp; 2 One notable exception we made: the Russian from “Pine Barrens,” which may be The Sopranos subject Chase least enjoys talking about. Instead, we’ve included selections from a 2017 panel on the episode Matt moderated with Chase, writer Terence Winter, and director Steve Buscemi.

  3 Although HBO broke the final run of episodes into two parts that aired in 2006 and 2007, and officially referred to them as “Season Six, Part One” and “Season Six, Part Two,” Chase considers them to be separate seasons, bringing the grand total to seven. We agree, and that’s why they’re referred to that way throughout the book.

  THE RECAPS

  Season One

  “PILOT”

  SEASON 1/EPISODE 1

  WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY DAVID CHASE

  Woke Up This Morning

  “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” —Tony

  From its opening credits, through its introduction of its depressed gang-boss hero and his unflappable psychiatrist, to its unnervingly quiet closing song, “The Beast in Me,” The Sopranos entered with a swagger, upsetting expectations and telling you to brace yourself.

  The pilot episode of The Sopranos, created by TV veteran David Chase,1 aired on January 10, 1999, with little advance fanfare outside the hermetically sealed world of TV critics who’d watched the pilot and the next three episodes on VHS tapes supplied by HBO the previous summer. Despite collective bullishness, reviewers had a hard time persuading people that the show was significant.

  Skepticism was valid. Consider the cultural context: the 1990s featured numerous genre-upending series—Twin Peaks, The X-Files, ER, NYPD Blue, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, My So-Called Life, Oz—but people couldn’t believe a weekly TV series could be art, or even something other than “pretty good, for TV.” Self-contained theatrical films could be art; this had been common wisdom for forty years. TV? Not so much.

  Plus, The Sopranos was about gangsters, and there’d been no shortage of gangster stories in preceding decades. The genre helped build commercial cinema, along with Westerns, musicals, and film noir, and kept producing popular and critical successes even as postwar movie attendance diminished. 1990 alone saw the release of six notable entries: My Blue Heaven, King of New York, State of Grace, Miller’s Crossing, The Godfather Part III, and Goodfellas. That last one, a sprawling whack-fest set across Brooklyn and Long Island, was the most popular crime film yet by a master of the form, Martin Scorsese. Not only did it deal in some of the same notions as The Sopranos—mobsters posing as unremarkable suburbanites, and gangsterism as capitalism at its rawest—its style informed Chase’s show, including nasty shocks balanced with jocular humor, and an eclectic musical sensibility that mixed opera, show tunes, pop, and rock (including Muddy Waters’ “Mannish Boy,” an actual Goodfellas soundtrack cue). The Sopranos also shared cast members with Scorsese’s classic, including Michael Imperioli, Tony Sirico,2 Vincent Pastore,3 and Dr. Melfi herself, Lorraine Bracco.4 So already The Sopranos risked being dismissed as Goodfellas: The Show.

  On top of all that, Scorsese regular Robert De Niro had just starred in a comedy called Analyze This, about a gangster in therapy. It was set to open in March 1999, less than three months after the Sopranos premiere, and trailers were already in theaters. Some writers generally assumed The Sopranos was a light comedy, too. Maybe it was the lingering whiff of the misfire My Blue Heaven, starring Steve Martin as a now-suburban mafioso in witness protection who can’t give up his old ways. Maybe it was the title The Sopranos, which conjured prewar, whatsamatta-you Italians singing arias across red-checkered tablecloths.

  But these misconceptions hid unimaginably richer depths. Written and directed by Chase, the pilot is a hybrid slapstick comedy, domestic sitcom, and crime thriller, with dabs of ’70s American New Wave grit. It is high and low art, vulgar and sophisticated. It mixes disreputable spectacle (casual nudity, gory executions, drugs, profanity, and retrograde sentiments) with flourishes from postmodern novels, dialectical theater, and mid-century European art-house cinema. The series is sometimes as much about the relationship between art and its audience as it is about the world the artist depicts.

  This self-awareness gives the opening scene, where Tony stares up at the statue in Dr. Melfi’s office, another layer: this is a show that gives mass audiences the double-crosses and rubouts they expect from a Mob tale, but also psychotherapy and dream analysis, economic and social satire, commentary on toxic masculinity and patriarchal oppression, and a rich intertextuality that positions The Sopranos against the histories of cinematic and real gangsters, Italian Americans, and America.

  The opening credits display this graceful interplay. They seem straightforward enough: here is the hero, this is where he lives. But they do at least five more things that dispel expectations and prepare us for something beyond the gangster-film usual.

  Surprise #1: The man behind the wheel. If the overweight, balding, cigar-smoking driver who snatches a ticket from a toll booth is the show’s protagonist and a Mafia boss (and we quickly learn that he is), the actor looks more like a henchman—one who’d get beaten up by a much smaller hero or shot by his boss to prove his ruthlessness.

  Surprise #2: The music; “Woke Up This Morning,” by Alabama 3, aka A3. Now universally recognized as the Sopranos theme, it was an unknown quantity in 1999. The song’s rumbling bass line, warbling synthesizer effects, Leonard Cohen–esque vocals, and repetitive harmonica lament signal that this isn’t the gangster story you’re used to seeing. Notwithstanding oddball outliers like King of New York, post-1970 gangster pictures were usually scored with sweeping orchestral compositions (The Godfather, State of Grace, Miller’s Crossing); playlists of postwar pop, blues, and rock (see any modern-day crime film by Scorsese), or some combination (Donnie Brasco). The pilot will use plenty of the second kind of music, but the present-tense newness of the A3 still throws the viewer off-balance.

  Surprise #3: The filmmaking. Shot by series cinematographer Alik Sakharov with a handheld 35mm camera, on a route roughed out on videotape by series locations manager Jason Minter, the sequence is an assemblage of “caught” footage, taken in New Jersey locations without permits and edited in a jagged, unpredictable way. Eschewing the uninteresting technique of always cutting on the beat, the sequence holds images for unpredictable durations. It also avoids the cliché of showing cast pictures next to their names, instead going for a cinematic style that prizes journalistic detail and atmosphere.

  Surprise #4: Immediately after the HBO logo is a shaky shot of converging perspective lines—actually a low-angle view of the ceiling of the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting New York City to New Jersey. If you know the Lincoln Tunnel and gangster movies, you’ll be surprised when the light at the end of that tunnel coalesces to reveal Jersey instead of New York—not what’s supposed to happen. East Coast movie gangsters only go to Jersey when going on the lam or dumping a corpse. Numerous classic gangster films are set in Manhattan and/or the surrounding boroughs of New York, because Manhattan is just more glamorous; it’s where real people and movie characters go when they’ve Made It. East Coast gangster stories might move to Brooklyn, where the mid-level crooks live in duplexes with their aging mothers, or farther east to Long Island, where the bosses of bosses (and Jay Gatsby) buy palatial estates, but in Big Apple Mob films that’s usually it. If the story travels farther, it’ll probably beeline west to Chicago (historically the second most popular location for gangster movies), Las Vegas, Reno, or Los Angeles. Aside from some outliers (like the rare films set in small towns where gangsters hide out, or get entangled in film noir scenarios), the unspoken rule is to set the drama “anywhere but New Jersey”—except to depict the characters as losers.

  So by entering New Jersey rather than leaving it, The Sopranos declares it intends to explore the characters’ state as well as their state of mind, how each informs the other. The Cape Cods of East Orange immedia
tely outside of Newark at least have some blocky, post–World War II anti-charm, but we fly past those, winding uphill through woods before parking in the driveway of a pale-brick house with no architectural personality.5 It’s the kind of place a man of no imagination whose regional auto-parts chain was just acquired by Pep Boys would buy for his wife.

  Surprise #5: The mythic resonance of Tony’s drive.

  The American assimilation story has one component if you’re a native-born WASP, two if you’re an immigrant.

  The first component is the migration from East to West, as prophesied by Horace Greeley (“Go West, young man!”) and enshrined in Tony Soprano’s beloved Westerns—films about rugged individualism and steely machismo. They depict the tension between civilization and the frontier, but also the reinvention of the self, American style. You go West to leave your old self (and sins) behind and become someone new. The first time we meet him, Tony is heading (roughly) West.

  The second component is the movement from the big, bad city—where first-generation immigrants replicated rough versions of their home countries in neighborhoods prefaced with “Little”—to the boroughs or first ring of suburbs around the core city. The houses were small, but they at least had lawns. Second-generation immigrant families could live in places like the ones shown in The Sopranos credits and feel as if their family made it—or at least made it out. Their kids can play sandlot baseball, join civic organizations in Fourth of July parades down Main Street, and eat Chicken à la King, hot dogs, and apple pie in addition to spaghetti, lo mein, or lox. It’s the kind of place where Giuseppe and Angelina or Murray and Tovah can raise kids named Ryan and Jane.

  This abbreviated migration, in which ordinary car trips become reenacted journeys toward becoming “real” Americans, continues into the third generation, as the grandchildren of immigrants move still farther out, settling into remote housing developments carved out of fields and forests—communities without community, where deer snack on rosebushes, and you have to put chains on your car tires to get downhill when it snows.