77 This episode aired six years before ten states, including New Jersey, finally banned indoor smoking in all bars and restaurants. New Jersey casinos were exempt until 2008.
78 This 1978 song’s title comes from a line of dialogue in an episode of The Honeymooners, which influenced the Sopranos’s East Coast sitcom sensibility and its Ralph Kramden-like protagonist.
79 This is true not just of the whole season, but this episode particularly. Notice how the opening shot of Richie’s son and his dance partner waltzing in the new house sets up Janice’s defense of the boy’s decision to quit school, as well as Richie’s panic over the prospect of possibly having a gay son. Richie’s punch is an answer to Janice asking, “What if he was gay? What difference does it make?”
80 Bacala, after watching Junior do the mental calculations that lead him to realize he’s better off with Tony: “I’m in awe of you.”
81 Brother of Larry Boy Barese (his own nickname is Ally Boy), who was arrested as part of the same RICO case that took down Junior at the end of season one. The Barese siblings trade off appearances for much of the series, depending on Larry Boy’s legal status.
82 The scene where Furio and Chris saw up Richie in the pork store kitchen testifies to how ordinary this extraordinary event seems when you’re in this life. “It’s gonna be a while before I eat anything from Satriale’s,” Chris says.
83 “You’re putting me in a position where I feel sorry for a whore who fucks you?” Carmela yells at him. Well, sure—but that’s the sort of thing The Sopranos does to its viewers constantly. There’s no reason to care about almost any of these people, except for the fact that they’re human, too, and, as Meadow puts it in “Bust Out,” “We’re all hypocrites.”
84 Complicating matters, this episode also introduces Patsy Parisi, Philly’s identical twin brother, now a semi-reluctant member of Tony’s old crew. As writer/producer Terence Winter recalls, “When he saw how terrific Dan Grimaldi was in Episode 201, David immediately regretted having killed Philly Parisi off. Then he then said something like ‘Well, you only get to play the twin brother card once per TV series, and I’m playing it now. This guy is too good not to bring back.’”
85 Although the mural seen in “Funhouse” was painted specifically for the shoot, it’s based on the artwork on the side of a business operated by a psychic named Marie Castello who told fortunes on the Asbury Park boardwalk for sixty-five years. This is meaningless to anyone unfamiliar with southern New Jersey, but you still get the gist of what it means to the episode by looking at the art, the centerpiece of which is an all-seeing eye. Anyone who spent time in the lower half of the state between 1932, when Castello opened her business, and 1997, when she finally retired, will laugh at the rightness of this location showing up in a Jersey gangster’s dream. It was mentioned twice in Bruce Springsteen’s music, in “Fourth of July, Asbury Park (Sandy),” from the 1973 album Greetings from Asbury Park, New Jersey! (“Did you hear the cops finally busted Madam Marie for tellin’ fortunes better than they do?”), and in “Brilliant Disguise,” about his doomed first marriage, from 1987’s Tunnel of Love (“the gypsy swore our future was bright . . . maybe baby/the gypsy lied”). Castello died in 2008.
86 The actual Godfather III quote is, “Our true enemy has yet to show his face.”
87 As if to offer more proof that Tony has been paying attention in therapy even while jousting with Melfi or storming out prematurely, the episode has Melfi make essentially the same observation at the end about the relationship between Tony’s anger and sadness that Dream Melfi makes in Tony’s food-poisoned mind.
88 After a season in which Meadow’s college choice was framed as Berkeley (her preference) versus Georgetown (Carmela’s), we instead find out she’s going to Columbia, a more geographically convenient way to keep her on the show. But because it hasn’t been mentioned before—Meadow previously considered Georgetown to be “a total reach,” and Columbia’s even more competitive—it seems to come out of nowhere, especially since it’s introduced within one of Tony’s dreams.
Season Three
“MR. RUGGERIO’S NEIGHBORHOOD”
SEASON 3/EPISODE 1
WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE
DIRECTED BY ALLEN COULTER
The Sausage Factory
“Ever go to tie your shoes and you notice your laces are wet?” —Paulie
“Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood” feels more like a self-contained overture than a standard season-premiere exposition dump introducing new business and characters. The title, riffing on the children’s TV classic Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, could be the name of a never-produced comic opera based on The Sopranos. The main musical cue, segueing and sometimes combining the 1983 Police hit “Every Breath You Take” and Henry Mancini’s Peter Gunn theme, makes sections play like a musical comedy, further amplified by director Allen Coulter’s obsessively exact camera movements—constantly craning, panning, and zooming to follow characters and vehicles, with car windows and “binocular” camera mattes creating frames-within-frames. “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood” is also the first episode that operates mostly in one mode, farce—although the depression and anger of Patsy Parisi, whose twin brother Philly Tony’s had killed in “Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office,” gives parts of it a painful edge.
Much of it is told from the point of view of FBI agents, including Lipari, Special Agents Harris and Grasso, and boss Frank Cubitoso as they try to improve their surveillance on Tony’s home and business operations. Although it’s all played straight, much of the FBI stuff feels like a commentary on making or watching TV. The team assigns code names to major surveillance targets that evoke the nicknames that used to be given to characters and locations in turn-of-the-century TV recaps, like at the now-defunct Television Without Pity:1 the Soprano home is “The Sausage Factory,” Tony is “Der Bingle,” Carmela is “Mrs. Bing,” AJ is “Baby Bing.” The opening scene of the agents gathered together around a long table, reviewing reports and making observations, could be a “tone” meeting of a TV show’s writing staff, or actors’ first “table read” of a new script. Surveillance experts perform a “sound check” in the basement when the family and housekeeper aren’t home, to determine whether the air conditioning’s ambient noise will prevent usable recordings. The close-ups of a replacement desk lamp being bugged, and the scene where two agents discuss whether they can move a work table one meter to the left without anyone noticing, echo the importance of scene-to-scene continuity. Some of the FBI agents try their hand at acting, with varying degrees of success: the female agent spying on Meadow in her Columbia dorm is so convincing that a male student approvingly checks her out, while Agent Harris gets “made” by Tony even when he dons a fishing hat. Different “viewers” of this real-life “show” are watching for different reasons: some are interested in money changing hands, others in the relationships between criminal associates or family members; one agent is unreasonably excited to learn that Tony’s “got the same Black & Decker as me,” and another lives to ogle Adriana and her handsy tennis instructor.2 The agents are also, like us, privy to developments the characters aren’t aware of, and argue amongst themselves about when seeds that have been planted will bear dramatic fruit. The most blatant example here is the defective boiler in the basement of the Soprano home, hereafter known as the Richie Aprile Memorial Boiler because it pays off sooner than expected.
This episode also establishes how life, like TV series production, is built around routines:3 you go here, you do this, you talk about that, and once in a while, problems arise requiring definitive answers to avoid long-term woes. Patsy is the wild card here, falling into deep gloom over the anniversary of his brother’s death and trying to avoid flying into a rage and killing Tony. Dan Grimaldi gets a grand turn in the spotlight, expressing the character’s soul-sick despair through tears, thousand-yard stares, and deadpan statements edged with simmering fury. When the armed, drunk Patsy wanders onto the Soprano property like a fi
lm shoot onlooker who slipped past the production assistant assigned to “lock it down” and ended up ruining a take, it gives the hour a momentary jolt of pain so intense that the episode can’t suppress it. Tony’s repeated, quasi-hypnotic command to Patsy to put the past behind him is likewise disturbing because of all the farcical rushing-about that precedes and follows it. In this line of work, not only do you have to accept that you or somebody you love could be killed at any minute, for any reason, by somebody you call a friend—you’ll have to look the killer in the face and call him “boss.”
“PROSHAI, LIVUSHSKA”
SEASON 3/EPISODE 2
WRITTEN BY DAVID CHASE
DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN
Miles to Go
“What are you gonna do?” —Tony
“Proshai, Livushska” feels more like a traditional season opener than the hour that preceded it,4 and not just because it deals with the offscreen death of series costar Nancy Marchand by officially giving Livia, pushed to the margins in season two, a proper send-off. The episode brings Janice back into the fold to stir up more trouble; casually reveals that aging Family captain Ray Curto (George Loros) is yet another FBI informant; and introduces important new supporting characters: Meadow’s boyfriend Noah Tannenbaum (Patrick Tully) and not-quite-captain Ralphie Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano5). The latter walks right into Tony’s house and gives him a tearful hug as if he’s been on the show from the start. We learn that he’s taken over Richie Aprile’s crew, and he comes on like Replacement Richie, down to his insistence on dominating a certain garbage route and his insubordination when Tony orders him to knock it off. We also spend more time with Livia’s Russian housekeeper Svetlana Kirilenko (Alla Kliouka Schaffer), who clashes with Janice over possession of Livia’s old record collection as well as the house that Janice still wants to claim (along with the fabled cash stash Livia told her about).
At first, there’s no indication that this episode will write Livia out. Things kick off with an explosive act of garbage-related terrorism, then we cut to a shot of Tony lying on the floor surrounded by broken glass and what we might assume is his own blood, perhaps spilled by whoever detonated that bomb; it’s actually the remains of a glass of tomato juice that Tony dropped after stuffing his face with capicola and fainting mere moments after driving his daughter’s half-Jewish, half-African American boyfriend from the house in a racist snit. (This is another instance where Tony’s bigotry, assumed most of the time, bubbles into view, with Tony using several Italian racial slurs in front of him, in addition to calling him a “charcoal briquette.”) In one of the most brazen bits of formal playfulness yet seen on the series—right on the heels of the music-driven Keystone Kops absurdity of “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood”—the episode “rewinds” to the events leading up to Tony’s collapse, in the manner of an old-fashioned VHS cassette; the “rewinding” noise continues on the soundtrack right up to the instant that Tony speaks with Meadow, who’s sitting on the living room couch after screening the 1931 gangster picture The Public Enemy, the film that made James Cagney a star.
The film proves important not because of its hallowed spot in early film history, but because its emotional backbone is the loving relationship between the hero and his adoring mother (Beryl Mercer)—a bond Tony can only fantasize about. The episode cuts to The Public Enemy four times, and builds its final scene around Tony watching the horrifying finale where Ma Powers preps her son’s bedroom for his return from the hospital, not knowing that he’s been kidnapped and killed and that it’s his corpse that’s being brought home. What brings Tony to tears isn’t the tragedy of Tom’s death, but the simple image of a mother expressing joy that her son is coming back. It’s never clear whether Tony is obsessively rewatching the entire film while dealing with his mother’s death, or if it just takes him forever to get through it. Either way, it gains a talismanic power as this hour unreels, until by the end it transcends its plot function, illustrating a truth about how movies can explain us to ourselves even when we weren’t looking for insight.
Much has been written about the questionable judgment behind bringing Livia back via then-state-of-the-art CGI, at considerable expense, and having Gandolfini and Schaffer act against a stand-in plus recordings of Livia’s “dialogue”—a Frankenstein patchwork of phrases harvested from earlier episodes. Chase felt strongly that the show needed to have Tony and Livia speak face to face, rather than over the phone, or have Tony be informed of his mother’s death after it happened and then deal with the relevant information in that scene (Livia possibly testifying against Tony over the stolen plane tickets) in some other context (maybe in therapy, where Tony deals with the legal and emotional implications anyway). The end product is distracting because the technology wasn’t able to do exactly what Chase wanted. He was inspired by Ridley Scott’s Gladiator, which similarly completed Oliver Reed’s scenes after he died during production. But Scott had a much larger budget and could hedge his bets with high contrast lighting, smoke, mist, and other concealing devices, versus the Tony–Livia scene here, presented in a simple, brightly lit room that underscored distracting continuity problems like mismatched light sources and hairstyles varying between sampled shots.
But this defect proves minor, because the show understands its characters so well, and the episode’s observations about grief and mourning ring so true.6 From the moment that Tony reenters the kitchen after readjusting the backyard sprinkler (the water droplets on his face and shirt standing in for the tears he can’t cry yet), “Proshai, Livushska” captures the awkwardness of publicly processing the death of a loved one you wanted to die.7 Tony lashes out so ferociously in therapy that he calls his own mother the C-word. “I’m glad she’s dead,” he tells Melfi. “Not just glad—I wished she died. Wished.”
Livia’s awfulness—or defectiveness, if you’re feeling sympathetic—radiates outward even after her death. As Carmela says later, she knew who she was and deliberately requested no funeral because she thought nobody would come, but her children “ignored her wishes.” Janice largely drives that decision, enabled by the funeral home owner Cozzarelli (Ralph Lucarelli, channeling the Godfather films something fierce8) and by Tony, feeling bad over not feeling worse and numbing his guilt with cash like always.
Without the viewing, burial, and reception, though, we would’ve missed moments like Junior laying into Tony in the back of the funeral parlor (“This economy’s so robust, you get credit for shit you had nothin’ to do with”); Svetlana telling Janice, “She was much work, but in end, she defeated me”; Janice hijacking the reception with what Tony terms “California bullshit”; Hesh being hassled to say something, and offering, “Between brain and mouth, there was no interlocutor”; the anonymous guest coming down the stairs in the background behind Tony, getting a quick read on the room, and going back up; Chris, coked and stoned, spinning his theory that everyone has a double (“Mrs. Soprano may have passed, but who’s to say there isn’t another Mrs. Soprano just like her?”); and Janice informing Tony that he was the only one of the children whose memorabilia Livia preserved, a revelation that he doesn’t know how to take because it contradicts the idea that his mother was a harpy who couldn’t express love and sought to have him killed.
This is also another episode that, like “Isabella” and “Funhouse,” hints that undefined theological or cosmological forces are at work in the Sopranos universe. There’s a brief reflection of Pussy, murdered in “Funhouse,” in a hallway mirror that no one else in the shot could have witnessed, and a long scene in which AJ struggles over a “close read” of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” a poem by “asshole Robert Frost” that’s frequently used in eulogies. Meadow tries to help AJ figure out what “miles to go before I sleep” means, but without doing all the heavy lifting for him. “Just gimme the fuckin’ answer so I can write this!” he whines.
Not only does Meadow ultimately refuse; her impromptu lesson in poetry explication raises more questions than it answers (it t
urns out that both white and black can symbolize death). “He’s talking about his own death,” Meadow says of the poem’s narrator, “which has yet to come, but will come.”
That doesn’t help AJ at all. The silent moments after his sister leaves briefly nudge The Sopranos in the direction of a horror film, with the boy hearing floor-boards creak and calling out, “Grandma?” Was Livia’s spirit visiting him, or was AJ’s imagination playing tricks? Rather than provide answers, the show lets us sit in the quiet of the woods, snowy, dark, and deep.
“FORTUNATE SON”
SEASON 3/EPISODE 3
WRITTEN BY TODD A. KESSLER
DIRECTED BY HENRY J. BRONCHTEIN
The Hair Apparent
“Yeah, but what’s wrong with the kid? When’s he gonna grow up?” —Tony
The legacy fathers hand down to sons, often without consulting them, binds a seemingly disparate collection of plotlines. There are four potential title characters in “Fortunate Son”: Christopher, AJ, Jackie Aprile Jr., and Tony himself, whose childhood we return to as Dr. Melfi finally figures out what’s causing his panic attacks.
The solution to that mystery comes with remarkable swiftness, relative to Tony having been her patient for two-plus seasons now: with Livia gone but the attacks continuing, Tony declares that Melfi needs to put up or shut up in this area, and she almost immediately does. Realizing that meat is usually present9 when Tony collapses, Melfi probes his past until he conjures the story of how Johnny Boy wrested control of the pork store from old man Satriale, a degenerate gambler (like Davey Scatino) who had to pay debts not only with his business, but with the pinkie finger Johnny chopped off while eleven-year-old Tony watched.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 17
