Quite a set of conundrums for the writing staff. Our knowledge of them gives the opening of “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office” a hint of self-awareness, as if the series is tallying up challenges in the guise of scene setting.
Luckily for the show and for us, this is the finest music montage the series has staged thus far. A late-period Frank Sinatra classic, “It Was a Very Good Year,” starts to play over the tail-end of an opening scene where a group of young people—including an Asian man impersonating Christopher Moltisanti—take a brokers’ exam, and continues for the song’s full length as director Allen Coulter moves through the world of The Sopranos in a manner reminiscent of the end of Federico Fellini’s I Vitelloni.4 The song’s narrator recounts his entire life in a series of vignettes at different ages; the lyrics complement the elliptical nature of cinema and television storytelling, as well as the more basic fact of our jump forward in time. We pass Livia in her hospital bed as she stares at us defiantly, briefly (and unexpectedly) breaking the fourth wall. Tony plays cards in the back office of the Bada Bing and then accepts a cash tribute from captain Ray Curto (George Loros), whom Tony had approached as a potential replacement for Jackie Aprile Sr., early in season one. An orange-jumpsuited Uncle Junior walks in a single-file line behind bars, a once-powerful mobster now just another prisoner. A sinuous camera move that starts behind AJ’s head reveals him staring into a mirror at a now visibly adolescent face, complete with the beginnings of a strong jawline, as Sinatra reminisces about being twenty-one. Melfi accepts patients at her motel. Paulie Walnuts mechanically fucks an unidentified woman who (judging from the block-glass backdrop, high heels, and fake breasts) might be a Bada Bing dancer. The FBI (seen only as hands arranging notecards on a corkboard) struggles to discern the true organization of the Family.5 Wannabe screenwriter Chris watches the climax of the 1948 gangster film Key Largo6 with seemingly rapt interest, until the camera, following his head, reveals no computer or notepad, just a line of cocaine.7 Silvio gets a new suit and shoes. The brief scene of Tony teaching Meadow to drive is matched by Sinatra crooning about riding in limos with well-heeled girls. The dissolve from there to Irina riding Tony (with Frank mentioning the girls’ chauffeurs) underlines the baseline sleaziness of Tony’s existence, while tricking the viewer into thinking he went straight to his mistress’s apartment after tutoring Meadow.
Then, as Sinatra winds down by discussing his autumn, the scene zeroes in on Tony and Carmela’s marriage. The unfaithful husband sneaks into the house in the middle of the night, disposing of incriminating clothing and climbing into bed beside his wife. Carmela looks at Tony, who is pretending to sleep. Tony opens his eyes, not realizing Carmela was staring at him in an accusatory way, and is surprised to see her looking back. Carmela turns and faces the other way—an unmistakable rebuke. It’s also reminiscent of Carmela’s very first exchange in the pilot, when she alludes to Tony’s unfaithfulness with a loaded remark. “I’ll get home early from work,” he says. “I’m not talking about work,” she replies.
But then, so is this episode, the first proper scene of which has the deadpan timing of a joke setup: Tony goes to get the newspaper as he has so many times before, only to find Pussy lying in wait at the end of the driveway. Tony brings him down the basement, as he did while assessing whether Jimmy Altieri was a rat. They reconnect awkwardly. Pussy insists that his back problems are real and berates Tony and his men for equating infirmity with betrayal. Tony draws Pussy into an embrace, then ruins a warm moment by getting too handsy, as if he’s trying to pat Pussy down for a wire (and he is).
The subsequent dance between Tony (and Tony’s crew) and the prodigal Pussy is unusually drawn out for a Sopranos subplot. But it’s characteristic of an episode in which the storytelling is cleaner but also more minimalistic than season one’s. The character moments are more leisurely and peculiar here than in any season one episode—Pussy’s reintegration into the old crew is built around Silvio’s Pacino-as-Corleone impressions, capped by the insinuating “Our true enemy has yet to show his face.”—and the parallels between subplots are more glancing. Livia and Pussy’s stories revolve around possibly faked health problems,8 and both characters get a chilling moment in which they stare right into the camera, as if scrutinizing the spectator’s attention—unseen in Livia’s case; Tony’s in Pussy’s case—to assess whether their performance is believable. In a very long, initially unexplained sequence, the acting capo of Junior’s crew, Philly Parisi (Dan Grimaldi), gets shot and killed by Junior defector and soon-to-be-Soprano soldier Gigi Cestone (John Fiore), as revenge for spreading stories about Tony’s mother problems. Tony then calls Melfi to tell her it’s safe to return to her practice; but despite this conversation and a subsequent encounter in a diner, Tony does not return to therapy with Melfi in this episode, and has to be content with discussing his problems with male friends and indulging in wordless domestic rituals with Carmela (like letting her heat him up some pasta).
As is typical in TV-drama season openers, important new characters get introduced. Chris becomes the boss of two low-level Soprano associates, Sean Gismonte (Chris Tardio) and Matt Bevilaqua (Lillo Brancato Jr.9), hapless meatheads who worship Tony and act as over-the-top enforcers in a boiler room operation selling worthless stock to gullible seniors. Tony’s sister Barbara (Nicole Burdette), previously mentioned but not seen, shows up for a backyard party, along with Carmela’s parents Hugh and Mary DeAngelis (Tom Aldredge and Suzanne Shepherd), who hate Livia and wouldn’t be there if she weren’t incapacitated, unavailable, and banned from the premises by Tony.
The most important new character by far is Janice—like Barbara, only talked about (and glimpsed briefly as a child in season one’s “Down Neck”). As played by Aida Turturro,10 she skips into the Sopranos’s world and proceeds to dominate her kid brother. The script isn’t shy about stating what’s happening here psychologically. Janice, who had left Tony behind to care for their mother, is now consciously replacing her: claiming her unused car and house, waltzing into the Soprano home that Livia herself can no longer enter, and sticking up for Livia in talks with Tony and Barbara. Sometimes Livia even seems to be speaking through Janice. “Some family reunion,” she tells Barbara at the barbecue. “The woman who birthed them all is barred from the premises.”
“I’m still a little fat kid to her!” Tony rages. Maybe, but she’s also an emotional infant whose presence further infantilizes Tony. “You look like a teenager,” Tony says. “My therapist says I’m regressing,” Janice replies unironically. The character’s blend of hippie-dippie mysticism (she’s calling herself Parvati), secondhand spirituality, and instinctive con artistry makes her the equal of the established characters, and gives Turturro—Gandolfini’s physical and vocal match—a role so fingernails-on-a-chalkboard real that when adult Janice first appeared, the water cooler debate the following morning revolved around how much viewers could endure of her, how quickly she might be killed off, and by whom, and how painfully. No similar discussions ever happened about Tony, an actual murderer.
Janice’s introduction gives The Sopranos a much-needed, perfectly timed jolt of energy. It also rectifies a storytelling problem: Livia is so far removed from the main action at this point that she can’t sink her talons into Tony as easily anymore.
More pointedly than other episodes, “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office” fixates on generational changeover. At the party, Barbara and Janice agree that Tony reminds them of their father. Professionally, Tony is already the new Junior, and everyone but the FBI knows it. Christopher is becoming a low-level authority figure, even as he rejects Adriana’s sincere concern and behaves irresponsibly while Sean and Matt carry on like his brainless overgrown sons. Janice could become a version of Livia eventually, but despite her powerful entrance, her mother’s presence looms over family discussions and arguments—banished, but not forgotten. Tony talks about her as often as he did when they were still on speaking terms. “She’s dead to me,” he says twi
ce in this episode, as if wishing could make a thing be true. Tony and Carmela visit Livia’s house and find it vandalized, probably by teenagers from the nearby high school. “Fucking jackals,” Tony says. Jackals feed on the dead and dying. Another wish.
“DO NOT RESUSCITATE”
SEASON 2/EPISODE 2
WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS AND FRANK RENZULLI
DIRECTED BY MARTIN BRUESTLE
Pot Meets Kettle
“You don’t know what goes through this mind of mine.” —Livia
Viewed apart from “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office,” “Do Not Resuscitate” feels very minor—a borderline placeholder.11 But if you watch it back to back with the premiere, it feels like the second half of a two-parter. We learn that Pussy’s back problems are real, and also that he’s an FBI informant who flipped after getting caught trafficking heroin to pay for his son’s college (his handler, Skip Lipari,12 reveals that he’s “been on our tit since ’98”). Uncle Junior is allowed to leave jail for health reasons and wait for his upcoming racketeering trial under house arrest. And Livia draws Janice—her younger, shadow self—into her clutches through a combination of cutting negativity and quasi-therapeutic conversation, then hooks her deep by suggesting that her beloved Johnny hid money in their house.
The Livia–Janice/Tony–Junior duets are suffused with dark humor and intimate psychological manipulations. There’s no love between Junior and Tony at this point: the nephew tells his uncle’s caretaker Bobby Baccalieri (Steven Schirripa13), aka “the last man standing,” that he’s cutting Junior’s income to “subsistence level.” But Tony has enough of a shared, familial instinct for self-protection to order the disappearance of Green Grove’s toupéed boss for daring to reveal that Tony nearly smothered Livia—information he wouldn’t have had without Junior. His uncle is a treacherous, thin-skinned old man, but he’s also his father’s only brother, and the image of Tony carrying Junior out of his own home like a child (after his bathtub fall) has a primordial charge.14 So does Junior’s plea to “make things right with your mother,” a request motivated by his desire to get the whole family united before Junior’s trial, but also by a sincere wish to give Tony and Livia the “Mother and Child Reunion” that Janice sings of during her weed-scented ride home from Green Grove.
Janice and Livia’s scenes are fascinating for their mix of lies, confessions, and genuine vulnerability. Livia idolizes her late husband in ways that don’t match the man Tony described to Melfi. But there are moments when Livia seems to acknowledge a grimmer reality that scarred her, to the extent that an ice-blooded manipulator with a borderline personality can be scarred. It’s partly about raising three children she couldn’t really love or connect with, but also about having a volatile gangster husband. “You think it was easy for me?” Livia asks Janice. “You don’t know the kind of man your father was. Nobody knows. Nobody knows what I went through.” But of course she eventually turns things back to her feelings of abandonment by Tony: “One thing I could tell you: it would kill him to see me now.”
Janice is almost touching in her scenes with Livia. She really does crave a mother and child reunion, even though, by the end, she’s hallucinating Livia’s face on a stairwell sign in a matricide scenario sparked by Livia’s citation of Kiss of Death.15 But, like every other character, she can’t see herself or others clearly enough to understand why such a scenario isn’t possible. The Sopranos is a non-stop parade of egocentric oddballs who think they’re the only person that sees the world and themselves clearly. “She’s a complete narcissist, you know?” Janice, slags her mother. “Me, me, me.” Pot meets kettle again in the scene where Tony rips into Bobby about his weight.16 “Fat fuck,” Bobby says, after Tony is out of earshot. “You should look in the mirror sometime, you insensitive cocksucker.” Livia tells Carmela that she thinks she did “a pretty good job” raising two out of three of her children. Carmela replies: “They are all. Unhappy.”
The script further fleshes out ideas of generational succession through a construction subplot that connects the Soprano Family more intimately with the northern New Jersey unions, introducing two African American community activists, the Reverends Herman James Junior (Gregalan Williams17) and Senior (Bill Cobbs18). The scenes involving the Jameses also build out the show’s complicated, unstable take on the relationship between Italian Americans and African Americans. The mobsters whose relatives hail from the Boot are often shown complaining about how mainstream society demonizes them while appropriating their culture, using victim language to gain sympathy. Yet they say racist things without fear of censure; subcontract felonies, including hits, to black criminals, while impugning their competence; and blame them for ills they had little to do with. This could be described as a symbiotic relationship if the two groups had comparable economic and social power, but they don’t. The European immigrant experience is different from that of slaves’ descendants for a lot of reasons, starting with the inconvenient fact that the Italian Americans (as well as Mob-affiliated Jews like Hesh, and recent emigrants from the former USSR like Irina) can label themselves as white to gain advantage in America, and blacks generally can’t (see also “A Hit Is a Hit” on reparations).
The episode’s racial tension is woven into a larger story about parents and children and the giving and taking of power. The elder James’s “Never underestimate a man’s determination to be free” is a Bible reference that resonates politically and racially. Both Cobbs’s insinuating delivery and Gandolfini’s conflicted but respectful reaction make it land hard enough to be remembered near the end, when the younger James talks to Tony about his recently departed dad and they bond over angst about the future. That the younger James is corrupt—playing both ends against the middle, as Agent Lipari claims Pussy is doing—gives the scene an edge of lament. Like nearly everyone else, these two men are in thrall to money. If he and Tony typify the next generation of power, the future will be as dire as the present.
“TOODLE-FUCKING-OO”
SEASON 2/EPISODE 3
WRITTEN BY FRANK RENZULLI
DIRECTED BY LEE TAMAHORI
Old School
“There has to be consequences.” —Carmela
“Toodle-Fucking-Oo” is the first genuinely scary episode of season two, thanks to the introduction of Richie Aprile (David Proval19), brother of the DiMeo Family’s acting boss, the late Jackie Aprile Jr. Once a capo, he’s now an entitled monster who’s trying to get things going again with his old flame, Janice,20 a “Vishnu-come-lately” (Tony’s words) who’s been away for a while herself. But the whole hour, including Richie-free scenes, has an undertone of dread, thanks to the pervasive feeling that order is fragile and chaos could engulf this world at any moment. “Let’s not overplay our hand, because if she finds out we’re powerless, we’re fucked,” Tony advises Carmela, commiserating over Meadow, who presided over the desecration of her grandmother’s house. “See, that’s what this is about: ego and control,” Janice tells Tony and Carmela, addressing Meadow’s situation but also summing up the hour.
While not a great Sopranos episode, it’s a quintessential one. It draws connections between characters who anchor three very different, adjacent subplots (Meadow, Melfi, and Richie) without reducing them to case studies or turning this into a neatly labeled “theme episode.” All the major players here want to save face. Authority figures like Tony—and Carmela, where their daughter is concerned—don’t want to have to exercise it in ways that could make them seem unlikable. Comparatively powerless characters, like Richie and Meadow, try to grab as many indulgences as they can. But the episode doesn’t oversimplify. There are points of overlap and contradiction, and places where the script seems to be of two minds on a moment or character. This is vastly more compelling than pinning every character to a designated psychological or philosophical spot, like the FBI’s notecard-covered corkboards.
The title comes from “Toodle-oo,” the phrase Melfi blurts out after running into T
ony at a restaurant with his crew, and that she later describes to her own therapist, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg (Peter Bogdanovich21), as characteristic of “young girls [who] are not accountable for their behavior . . . ‘Toodle-oo’ was the action of a ditsy young girl, and I regressed into the girl thing to escape responsibility for abandoning a patient.” Meadow evades responsibility in her own way, sloughing off blame for the house party disaster onto her buddy Hunter, playing on her parents’ sympathies by reminding them how hard she’s studying, and flattering them by describing how much worse things might have been if she hadn’t exercised the restraint they taught her.22 “I could’ve taken ecstasy, but I didn’t!” Meadow yells.
It’s hard to tell exactly how much power Meadow had to defuse the party. She sounds sincere when insisting things just got out of hand. But after her father busts her, she starts behaving like a classic older teen, testing limits, seeing how well she can game the system by making Tony and Carmela think they’ve punished her when they’ve done no such thing. (The smirk on Meadow’s face as she leaves the kitchen after convincing her parents to take away her Discover card has a touch of Livia to it.) Jamie-Lynn Sigler’s portrayal of Meadow is one of the most believable, unsentimental portraits of suburban teenage girlhood—a performance that captures the character’s oblivious sweetness and her scathing disapproval (she has a magnificent eye-roll, and an even better “give me a break” eye-pop). This might be her best showcase yet, with her personal high point the scene where she and Hunter make grilled cheese sandwiches and hot chocolate, singing along with TLC’s “No Scrubs” and turning the kitchen into a disaster area. This scene makes it easy to picture Meadow failing to notice Livia’s house getting trashed. Among other things, The Sopranos is about consumption and waste, and failing (or refusing) to notice when you’ve made a mess of things. “When are they gonna realize that we’re practically adults, responsible for ourselves?” Meadow whines to Hunter, as she pours hot milk into two mugs, spilling half of it.
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