46 Tony’s impotent in his work life, too—unable to control Junior, and stuck having to absorb abuse for installing him, even though, as he points out, other members of the Family agreed it was good idea.
47 Curatola is one of several notable Sopranos regulars with minimal prior acting experience. He was a masonry contractor who decided in middle age to audit Law & Order star Michael Moriarty’s acting class, which led to a few small roles like Detective #1 in the Law & Order spin-off film Exiled. He almost missed the audition to play Johnny Sack because he wanted to have a smoke before going in; by the time he made it upstairs, the casting director was packing up for the day. “Then she looks up at me,” he says, “reconsiders, takes out the [script] and says, ‘Let’s do this.’ After I was done, she says, ‘We want you to come back next week and read for the producers.’” He just had that kind of face.
48 When Junior visits Livia at Green Grove, she recognizes Johnny Boy’s favorite cologne, Canoe, on him, and the two at times comport themselves like old lovers rather than in-laws.
49 A veteran of stage and screen perhaps best known pre-Sopranos for playing building superintendent Mr. Wicker on the sitcom Mad About You, Adler had acted in several late-period Northern Exposure episodes (when David Chase was producing it) as Joel Fleischman’s old rabbi, who occasionally appeared to him in visions.
50 If you’re a James Gandolfini completist, this line has an extra-dramatic aspect: he costarred in A Civil Action as a man who blows the whistle on the owners of a Massachusetts tannery whose illegal dumping is polluting the local water supply and causing a high incidence of leukemia among residents. The film opened wide in North America on January 8, 1999, two days before The Sopranos premiered.
51 The Animals’ “Don’t Bring Me Down,” which plays during Johnny’s thrashing of the deadbeat, is an altogether better needle drop, less familiar than “White Rabbit” and with a title that reverberates with secondary meaning. Tony is depressed in large part because he’s a mobster who routinely participates in evil. This flashback shows the roots of that part of his unhappiness, while in the present, Tony denies that his childhood was traumatic or that remembering it is unpleasant. The title could be Tony’s unexpressed demand to his therapist.
52 Richard, the character most distressed by unflattering images of Italian Americans, is played by Richard Romanus, who portrayed a loan shark in Martin Scorsese’s Mob drama Mean Streets.
53 Sinatra, who died during first-season production, is so present in season one that the producers might as well have listed him in the opening credits. His picture hangs in Satriale’s in the pilot when Chris kills Emil Kolar; a bust of the singer (with inaccurately large lips) confirms Febby’s identity in “College”; and this episode concludes with the Cake song “Frank Sinatra” as Chris steals a stack of Star-Ledgers.
54 The local FBI organized crime unit, glimpsed briefly earlier, finally gets a couple of faces in Agent Harris (Matt Servitto), who makes an effort to be polite to Tony (which Tony says makes him the worst of them all), and Agent Grasso (Frank Pando), who bristles when Tony insults him in Italian (and becomes the subject of yet another argument about Italian Americans’ self-image). Most interesting about the looming FBI search warrants is Carmela’s complicity in helping Tony hide criminal evidence—not just that she knows the money’s source, but that she helps him stash both cash and guns in Livia’s Green Grove closet.
55 The wedding hosted by captain Larry Boy Barese (Tony Darrow) for his daughter Melissa starts off resembling the kind of lavish receptions we’ve seen in other Mob films, but ends in a crueler, more Sopranos way, with Pussy taking back his present in case he needs traveling money, and all the other wiseguys and their families leaving early to do some “spring cleaning.”
56 Tony’s conversation with Christopher in the car again illustrates how isolated Tony feels about his therapy. He suspects Christopher could be suffering from depression but can’t come right out and ask him or discuss the condition in too-knowledgeable detail because he would risk exposure, and ultimately has to go along with Christopher’s mockery of people who commit suicide.
57 A little over a year after The Sopranos debuted, CBS launched That’s Life, a likable drama about an Italian American family who lived in the same part of Jersey as Tony and Uncle Junior but had no Mob connection; it limped along for two seasons and was canceled due to low ratings. During a promotional tour months before the show debuted, its star Paul Sorvino told one of the authors of this book that he would never appear on The Sopranos because it was defamatory toward Italian Americans. His most acclaimed movie role in the ’90s was Paul “Paulie” Cicero in Goodfellas, the Mob boss who didn’t have to move for anybody.
58 Leading New York City racketeer in the 1930s, and head of the Mafia hit squad Murder Incorporated, an independent consortium of contract killers that carried out hits for other mobsters while guaranteeing no footprints back to them.
59 Ventimiglia had played a lot of cops and criminals (and sometimes both at once) prior to The Sopranos, and in interviews would joke about how he envied his costars who got to play tough guys while he was stuck playing sad sack Artie. But if it’s not a flashy role, it’s a complicated one that made him stand out more than if, say, he had been cast as Mikey Palmice. The Sopranos had a lot of mobsters, but only one Artie Bucco.
60 Junior smashing the pie into Bobbi’s face is an homage to one of the most famous moments of the classic gangster picture The Public Enemy, in which James Cagney shows his displeasure with his girlfriend by smashing a grapefruit in her face.
61 A beefy, charismatic character actor, Woodbine has often been cast as drug dealers, assassins, cops, and other tough types, in the likes of Strapped, Jason’s Lyric, Dead Presidents, and season two of FX’s Fargo. The episode’s themes of aspiration and assimilation are demonstrated in his character, a mogul in the making.
62 This is a strong Hesh episode. He’s more in his element discussing rights and contracts with Massive Genius than Tony and his hangers-on, and less inclined to compromise than when Junior demanded a retroactive tax in “Denial, Anger, Acceptance.” And yet, as he listens to the single that he took an undeserved writing credit on, and stares at photos of other acts from his old stable, you can see that Massive Genius at least temporarily forced him to think about whether his business practices were fair—even though he ultimately refuses to compensate G’s relative.
63 Racist LAPD detective who found O. J. Simpson’s bloody glove at the crime scene, but was discredited as a witness by Simpson’s defense team after he lied on the stand about not having used the N-word during the preceding ten years. He pled no contest to perjury charges, which were eventually expunged from the record, and became a true-crime writer and talk show host.
64 Though Tony always refers to Christopher as “my nephew,” Christopher here acknowledges that his actual tie to the family comes from being cousins with Carmela. An episode in a later season will clarify that the nephew thing is because Chris’s late father Dickie was like an older brother to Tony, and also that Tony and Christopher’s mother Joanne are related if you trace their ancestry back to the old country.
65 Massive Genius does seem interested in Adriana that way. Visiting Day is so plainly unremarkable that when G tells her that he could see them being filed under “Miscellaneous V” someday, it seems as if he’s feigning interest because he’d like to file Adriana there, too.
66 Boss of New York’s Gambino Crime Family until 1992, when he was sentenced to life in federal prison for numerous Mob-typical crimes, including five killings he committed himself. He died behind bars of throat cancer in 2002.
67 The most darkly potent moment of Makazian’s suicide: he badges through the traffic jam—with the unwitting uniformed cop telling everyone in earshot that a police officer is coming through—so he can kill himself that much more quickly. Anyone who has spent much time in Jersey highway traffic can relate.
68 Paulie’s often used as comic
relief, but this is an excellent episode to show the serious side Tony Sirico could bring to the character and show. In addition to his locker room threat against Pussy, the earlier scene where he offers to unburden Tony of having to directly murder their friend lends the character more gravity than all previous episodes combined.
69 One unexpected and touching bonus in this episode is the revelation of Vin’s apparently long-running affair with Debbie, the madam of the bordello (played by Karen Sillas of the great American independent film What Happened Was . . .). It illuminates Vin’s personality in a way that makes him seem like a secret doppelgänger of Tony, and this makes Vin’s earlier, fumbling attempts to be Tony’s friend, rather than merely his fixer, now seem unbearably sad. The arrest, Debbie tells him, “was the straw” that made him kill himself, but he had a lot of problems, including his debt to Pussy. He was “not happy with how he turned out,” and came to her for therapy as well as physical companionship. “Who wouldn’t want to sleep with their shrink?” she asks.
70 Although Chase has said that no conscious reference was intended, there are points in season one where Livia and Tony both evoke the weird life in crime of Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the boss of the Genovese Crime Family who ordered a failed hit on Gambino crime boss John Gotti in 1986. Dubbed “The Oddfather” by New York–area media, Gigante successfully avoided prosecution for thirty years by faking mental illness, wandering Greenwich Village in his bathrobe and slippers. Where Tony evokes him visually, particularly when puttering around at home, Livia’s supposed dementia reminded some viewers of the arguments over whether the Chin was mentally incompetent or just a good actor.
71 That’s Italian actress Maria Grazia Cucinotta as Isabella, probably best known for her role in Il Postino. The year 1999 was big for her in English-language productions, between this and playing an assassin out to get James Bond in The World Is Not Enough.
72 Having Tony hallucinate Carmela seeing Isabella is some nice misdirection for anyone starting to wonder if this woman was too good to be true. Later, at Tony’s clandestine therapy session with Melfi shortly after the failed hit, Carmela gets her first look at her husband’s mysterious, attractive therapist—and does not seem pleased.
73 This episode began a Sopranos tradition of John Patterson directing the finale of every season, which continued through the the fifth season. Patterson died during the long hiatus between seasons five and six, and the last two finales would be directed by Alan Taylor and David Chase. Patterson provides lots of memorable imagery here, like the extreme close-ups on Junior as he’s being offered the plea deal; never have his eyeglasses looked larger, or sadder, than they do as he listens to evidence of his own insignificance.
74 A wonderful touch to that scene: Agent Harris looks mortified as the tapes play, not because he thinks they shouldn’t be using them, but because he feels genuinely bad for a guy whose own mother would do this to him. Also, the finale introduces Harris’s boss, Frank Cubitoso, played by Frank Pellegrino, yet another Goodfellas alum, and at the time also co-owner of New York restaurant institution Rao’s.
75 Despite his brutal function, Mikey is essentially a comic character, but his final send-off in the newscast reminds us that he was a human being whose wife loved him. “He was so happy,” she says. “He was going out to try out his new running shoes, you know. He told me that he loved me, and that he would be right back.”
76 Tony pulling the gun out of the fish to kill Chucky feels very much like the product of a wiseguy—and a TV writer—who has watched many gangster movies and considered all the different places to hide a weapon.
77 If you thought one of the shots in the scene where Tony drives across the bridge seemed familiar, it’s because it’s also used in the opening credits: the eyes in the rearview mirror.
Season Two
“GUY WALKS INTO A PSYCHIATRIST’S OFFICE”
SEASON 2/EPISODE 1
WRITTEN BY JASON CAHILL
DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER
A Very Good Year
“How many people have to die for your personal growth?” —Dr. Melfi
Throughout its first season, critics wrote about The Sopranos in terms that now seem condescending. One particularly notable piece was “From the Humble Mini-Series Comes the Magnificent Mega-Movie,” written by lead New York Times film critic Vincent Canby in October 1999, six months after the first batch of episodes aired. Canby cites Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s West German TV series Berlin Alexanderplatz, Dennis Potter’s 1986 BBC series The Singing Detective, and season one of The Sopranos as “something more than mini-series. Packed with characters and events of Dickensian dimension and color, their time and place observed with satiric exactitude, each has the kind of cohesive dramatic arc that defines a work complete unto itself. No matter what they are labeled or what they become, they are not open-ended series, or even mini-series. They are megamovies. Such attitudes never entirely disappeared, thanks partly to the vestigial self-loathing of television writers, producers, and directors who still tend to describe any season of TV they’re working on as as ‘one long movie’ and individual episodes as ‘little movies.’”
This mentality resurfaced like a particularly virulent flu strain in 2017, during which half this book was written, regarding David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return, an eighteen-part Showtime television series composed of one-hour episodes with opening and closing credits and an ongoing, serialized storyline that derived most of its power from two mythology-rich seasons and a prequel movie entirely dependent on them. Many film critics cited The Return as one of the year’s best movies in the 2017 Sight and Sound poll and on personal lists. Why? Probably because it was directed by a “real” director rooted in quasi-experimental feature films, who filled the new series with surprising, horrifying, often mysterious artistic choices that still tend to be counted as “cinematic” rather than televisual. The notion that The Sopranos was notable because it was “really” a movie persisted throughout the run of the series. As late as 2007, film historian Peter Biskind (Easy Riders, Raging Bulls) introduced a Vanity Fair oral history of The Sopranos1 by citing two long feature films, Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Novecento, as comparison points, plus Norman Mailer’s novels, before settling on “‘personal’ television writ large.”
The “TV bad, movies good” mentality has proved especially durable. It’s born of an era before Twin Peaks’s 1990 debut, which removed any lingering doubt that serialized TV made in the United States could be as innovative and revelatory as almost any feature. The reflexive dismissal of all of TV’s artistic potential was never fair or fully informed—from the earliest days of television, every program format and length were bound by rules feature films didn’t have to heed, yet still managed to amaze in ways films couldn’t envision. Sneering at television seemed justified in the pre-cable, pre-streaming era of the 1970s, when American theatrical cinema’s potential for personal expression was flowering, or at least catching up to international cinema a decade earlier, and TV was as much an appliance as an artistic medium. But it seems odd that the sneers have persisted, albeit diluted, among some cinephiles well into this century, despite the existence of The Sopranos itself, its countless would-be successors, and scripted TV’s wholesale displacement of features as the centerpiece of American pop culture.2 Despite the creative explosion in the past two decades, the medium’s products still aren’t allowed to rise or fall on their own merits, according to TV’s innate characteristics; they are still judged against the best of other media and found lacking.
If Canby had waited to write his piece until he’d had a chance to watch the first episode of season two of The Sopranos, he might’ve cooled his jets. “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office” is engrossing, occasionally sublime, but mostly awkward, and its virtues and faults stem from its obligation to be a scripted, serialized TV show, rather than a “miniseries” or “mega-movie” or whatever. To intentionally mangle the
network’s slogan, The Sopranos is not just HBO, it’s TV. As such, it has to deal with what professional TV writers call “housekeeping.” Drastic plotline-driven character changes must make the show different but preserve familiar elements viewers have grown to love; otherwise you have to figure out how to walk the character back without seeming like you’re rectifying a lapse in judgment.3 The temptation to make grand, sweeping decisions is often too seductive to resist, because the resultant scenes are thrilling to write, shoot, act, edit, and ultimately share; afterward, the writers may realize that they actually alienated core fans, or create new constraints they must solve by cutting important characters or devising flimsy reasons to keep them.
The last two episodes of The Sopranos’s first season created all these problems and more. Nobody involved with the series worried about it much because they were busy meeting daily production challenges—plus, as Chase later said, he never expected it would last more than a season. Many of the show’s distinctive elements, including its richly detailed sense of community and psychologically complex characters, would not have been possible in a movie, even a very long one. But as The Sopranos entered season two, it became obvious to the writers, and later to the audience, that the most pressing problem was how to make it work as TV.
At the end of season one, Uncle Junior, ostensible boss and Tony’s most dangerous foe, was behind bars. Livia had been exposed as the mastermind of the recent moves against her son, and Mob associates as well as blood relatives were gossiping about the murderous secret behind their enmity. Tony came to Green Grove in the finale prepared to kill his own mother, only to back out after seeing that she’d suffered (or faked) a stroke. A rat had been exposed and snuffed out within Tony’s crew, but another object of suspicion, Big Pussy, was still missing. Melfi, the hero’s main source of insight and the closest thing to an ethical major character, had been driven from her practice. Tony’s therapy was not a secret anymore, and in time could become common knowledge, a scenario that would make it harder for Tony to intimidate rivals and negotiate favorable terms. And, of course, the Family has to continue to find new ways to make money, even though, as Tony said in the pilot, they came in at the end of this thing.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 10
