The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Although AJ is comfortable with the fabulous lifestyle his father affords him, the poor kid is too dumb to show it off. He screws up a trip to the Bing by confusing it with the pork store (“It’s a gay strip club?” a friend asks). He can’t find a private location to have sex with new girlfriend Devin Pillsbury (Jessica Dunphy). And his laments of the emotional burdens of being rich backfire when she takes him to her mansion, which makes the Soprano home look like a shotgun shack.

  Tony, meanwhile, responds to the Gloria news by overcompensating with good deeds: signing a living trust for Carmela, getting Cousin Brian new suits and Billy Joel tickets, taking Janice out to dinner to compliment her on choosing Bobby, and arranging a loan to finance Artie’s new Armagnac venture. Carmela and Brian have nothing but praise for Tony, but the other gestures bring him grief. Janice at first takes his comments about Bobby as an insult, which forces Tony to realize how much time he spends belittling her; she’s only defensive around him because he has conditioned her to flinch whenever he opens his mouth.

  Artie’s own mirror stint, unfortunately, finds him in gangster-wannabe mode: making like Travis Bickle to rehearse planned threats against his would-be partner Jean-Philippe (Jean-Hugues Anglade), the brother of new Vesuvio hostess Elodi Colbert (Murielle Arden), whose flirtation with Artie started this mess. For once, Charmaine’s not able to talk him out of a terrible Mob-adjacent business idea, so Artie goes to Ralphie, who’s wise enough to realize he shouldn’t shylock the boss’s oldest friend. With fear of being a toxic person looming in his mind, Tony pouts because Artie didn’t come to him first. The deal goes south, of course, and Tony gets a suicide-prevention do-over when Artie fails to collect the money he owes.28 Tony forgives Artie’s debt in return for Artie wiping his enormous Vesuvio tab, on top of the chance to more effectively collect from Jean-Philippe. But any relief Tony feels at saving Artie where he couldn’t save Gloria vanishes when Artie suggests Tony was acting from self-interest, hoping to profit from his failure.

  We know Tony well enough to know Artie’s right: he had to know, even unconsciously, how this was likely to go, just as he knew what would happen if he let Davey Scatino into the Executive Game. Even when Tony thinks he’s doing the right thing, he’s still using people, and his concluding session with Melfi suggests he’s had enough of examining this side of himself for a while. When your life is as ugly as Tony Soprano’s, looking too closely at any part of it can make it impossible to function.

  “WATCHING TOO MUCH TELEVISION”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 7

  STORY BY DAVID CHASE AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS AND TERENCE WINTER, TELEPLAY BY TERENCE WINTER AND NICK SANTORA

  DIRECTED BY JOHN PATTERSON

  All the Girls in New Jersey

  “You ever feel bad about any of this?” —Assemblyman Zellman

  When you call an episode of your series “Watching Too Much Television” and build a subplot around a character being foolish enough to take legal advice from a TV drama, you are cloaking yourself in your channel’s slogan from that era: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” There was a clear gap then in quality and audacity between The Sopranos and the rest of television. Not this time; much of the episode doesn’t work, and the failures are in areas that have nothing to do with how a traditional TV show might tell its story.

  This is a rare instance of the series’ approach of treating episodes as short stories failing. The idea of following a single scam (using a few frontmen to swindle HUD out of money for inner-city homes no one has any intention of fixing) from conception (Cousin Brian shooting the breeze with Tony and Ralphie after a Bing all-nighter) to execution (the money is secured, making Newark’s worst neighborhoods worse off than before) is interesting, and digs deeper into Tony’s business than we’re used to going. But the process of it—specifically, the focus on Assemblyman Zellman recruiting his old activist friend Maurice (Vondie Curtis-Hall) as one of the frontmen—wanders too far afield from the show’s world and characters. There’s a stand-alone version of “former ’60s radicals grapple with how badly they’ve sold out in middle age” that could be compelling, and Peter Riegert and Curtis-Hall have the dramatic chops to play it, but their conflict—particularly Maurice’s regret at harming a community he’s spent decades trying to help—feels shoehorned in. Some moments feel spliced in from a backdoor pilot29 for a Zellman–Maurice spinoff that never got made. They have little screen time, but the absence of series regulars, or of concerns directly tied to them, makes their scenes feel long, and neither are substantial enough to carry the show during its Tony-less interludes.

  The season three premiere “Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood” probably has the smallest percentage of Tony screen time of any episode, but it works because the FBI’s actions are all about him. This episode, on the other hand, is about the collateral damage unleashed by Tony’s crimes—and, other than the junkie who gets shot by the gang kids, it’s comparatively minor. It’s almost enough to make one agree with AJ, of all people, who—while rejecting the same nostalgic lesson about his great-grandfather that Meadow ate up in the series pilot—asks, “Who gives a shit about Newark?”

  The parts of the hour that succeed do so as you’d expect of the show: by advancing subplots, deepening arcs, and exploiting our familiarity with established characters. The Adriana story that gives the hour its title does take a few cheap shots at network TV by having her push Christopher to get married after learning of spousal privilege from an episode of Murder One,30 only to have a friend offer conflicting advice courtesy of Murder, She Wrote. But those jokes aside, “Watching Too Much Television” amplifies poor Ade’s season-long nightmare, first with Christopher’s enraged response to her fertility issues (“You knew you were damaged goods and you never fucking told me?”), then with the wedding shower that Carmela insists on throwing, wherein the Mob wives load her down with kitchen gear, consigning her to a retrograde domestic lifestyle she hated long before the FBI showed up. Adriana’s a miniskirts, stiletto-heels, black-leather-couches sort of gal, somebody who needs to be able to stumble in at 3 A.M. and cook an omelette without worrying she’s going to wake people up. She’s being hemmed in from at least three directions here, and it’s killing her.

  Despite his many superfluous scenes, Zellman figures prominently in the highlight of the hour, a scene that ties him directly to Tony. At first the mobster seems okay with the crooked politician dating his ex-mistress, then realizes just how not okay he is with it. While driving at night, Tony hears “Oh Girl” by The Chi-Lites—a song played earlier in the episode, and discussed by Tony and Maurice right after Zellman breaks the Irina news to him—and begins to sing along as he often does with his favorite tunes. Within moments, though, the joy of recognition is replaced by a wave of tearful regret, vulnerability, and anger. Is it about Irina, whom Tony used and discarded? Is the song bringing him back to a younger, much happier time when he first heard it? Does it simply make him feel weak, and in desperate need of appearing strong? Or is he transferring his grief and guilt over Gloria onto Irina, who has “moved on” in a different way? Whatever the explanation, Tony barrels into Zellman’s home, breezes past Irina, and belt-whips Zellman, channeling Rick from Casablanca as he sneers, “All the girls in New Jersey, you had to fuck this one?”

  Tony’s mood swing in the car is an extraordinary piece of acting from Gandolfini and an all-time Sopranos moment. It also offers further evidence that the easiest way for The Sopranos to prove its superiority to the rest of television wasn’t to belittle it, nor even to experiment with its format and focus. All it had to do was simply be The Sopranos. As a whole, “Watching Too Much Television” isn’t The Sopranos at its best, but its last five minutes sure are.

  “MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 8

  STORY BY DAVID CHASE AND ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS AND TERENCE WINTER

  TELEPLAY BY LAWRENCE KONNER

  DIRECTED BY DANIEL ATTIAS

  The Boss’s Wifer />
  “For one thing, I already took his horse.” —Tony

  “Mergers and Acquisitions” is primarily a sequel to “Pie-O-My,” reviving both the Tony–Ralphie rivalry and Carmela’s quest for financial independence, then throwing in Furio’s growing desire for Carmela and another subplot about Paulie’s mother Nucci living at Green Grove, for an hour of takeovers—some stealthy, some amicable, some hostile. The stories all advance incrementally (the Nucci material is the only part largely confined to this episode, and it’s comic relief31), but it all feels like we’ve been here before.

  This is admittedly the point of the episode. Much of it revolves around Ralphie’s new girlfriend, Valentina La Paz (Leslie Bega32), and Tony’s struggle between his attraction to her and his revulsion at sleeping with a woman who’s possibly done it with Ralphie Cifaretto. Valentina is Tony’s type: brunette, professional (she boasts of working in an art gallery, but really it’s a framing store with delusions of grandeur), and feisty (they spark after he watches her prank Ralphie into stepping in horse manure). She’s not exactly the new Gloria Trillo—she’s tackier and less emotionally damaged—but she’s what might result if you photocopied Gloria enough times. The scene where they mess around with each other after their first time in bed evokes two of Tony’s indelible Gloria encounters: a threat of food being thrown, and Tony using his tremendous strength to hurl a tiny woman through the air—but playfully. His attraction to Gloria ran deeper, but so did the pain of being with her. Valentina seems like she could be lower-maintenance, provided Tony can get over the Ralphie issue. This turns out to be simple, once Valentina, then Janice, then Dr. Melfi (doing an armchair diagnosis based on what Tony feeds her from the other two) tells him about Ralphie’s sexual proclivities, which we glimpsed briefly with Janice. Valentina says Ralphie “likes to bottom from the top.” Once Tony feels satisfied there was no “penisary contact with her vulva,” he’s free to begin their affair.

  But before he can even get started, one of Valentina’s fake fingernails ends up in one of his shirts, and Carmela finds it. A few scenes earlier, Carmela had insisted to Rosalie that she’d made peace with Tony having goomars, but that painted talon drives her to break into the duck feed and steal cash to buy stocks in her own name.33

  It’s easier for Carmela to focus on money issues and Tony’s adultery with Furio in Italy, dealing with his dying father. Although she fantasizes about him while watching ponytailed TV chef Mario Batali, her attention is fixed on domestic matters. But the distance only clarifies Furio’s feelings for Carmela—as well as his awareness of how dangerous they are. Tony can take anything he wants from Ralphie—his horse, his mistress, a picture of the two of them standing next to Pie-O-My—without repercussions, because he’s the boss. But if Furio wants the boss’s wife, his only option is to follow his uncle’s advice and kill the boss.

  There’s potential for great conflict here between Tony and his wife, his bodyguard, and his most hated underling, but it’s all lingering below the surface, which is why the themes repeated from “Pie-O-My” make this episode fall a bit flat. Tony has so much time to obsess over matters of the penis and vulva because his lawyer has once again encouraged him to step back from day-to-day Family business, leaving Christopher to handle the big decisions largely offscreen. As we saw the last time Tony tried this (in season two’s “House Arrest”), he doesn’t do well being idle. Nor, at times, does The Sopranos itself.

  “WHOEVER DID THIS”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 9

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Straight Arrow

  “She was a beautiful, innocent creature! What’d she ever do to you?” —Tony

  Off with his head.

  And his wig.

  More than a full season of The Sopranos (and more than a year and a half of our time) elapsed between Tony trying to beat Ralphie to death in “University” and actually succeeding in the instant classic “Whoever Did This.” Both the delay and the resolution are vintage David Chase: deny the audience what they expect, and badly want, withholding and withholding while it appears that Tony and Ralphie’s relationship has stabilized, then have them come to fatal blows during a slow mid-season stretch, over a dispute that seems unrelated to the heart of their feud.

  What’s more, “Whoever Did This” spends much of its first half—other than a subplot about Junior faking dementia in the hopes of a mistrial, only to start displaying symptoms of the real thing34—on humanizing Ralphie, to the extent that such a thing is possible.

  We start with the Ralphie we know and loathe, but occasionally laugh at, as he puts two and two together about Paulie being the one who blabbed about the Ginny Sack joke, and prank-calls a dismayed Nucci (posing as “Detective Mike Hunt, Beaver Falls Police Department”) with a story of Paulie being arrested for indecent acts. It’s all fun and games as usual until—in a bit of a narrative cheat, since it involves a character we’ve never met before—Ralphie’s son Justin is wounded while shooting arrows with a friend.

  From this point until his final confrontation with Tony, “Whoever Did This” introduces us to a very different Ralphie: chastened, introspective, and profoundly regretful. Even the shape of his face looks different35 in the moment when Ralphie shrugs off Tony’s confession that he’s now sleeping with Valentina—a move so self-serving and cruel in its timing (in the aftermath of Justin’s injury, when he knows Ralphie will be too grief-stricken to raise a stink) that the show’s sympathies briefly flip from Tony to Ralphie.

  This will not last, of course. Yes, Ralphie is thunderstruck by the near-fatal accident and Justin’s long road to recovery. Yes, he can seek Father Phil’s counsel, despite living perhaps the most sinful life of any major character. Yes, he can finally relate to Rosalie’s own grief, which drove him away from her earlier in the season. But at his core, he is still the bitter, selfish lout who abused and murdered Tracee without a second thought, and who cheated on Roe and then cast her aside when her sadness bored him. His misogyny still comes roaring out of him when his ex-wife blames him for the accident, and after he proposes marriage as proof of how he’s changed, Roe is sensible enough to decline.

  Still, this is a more fully-formed and complex Ralphie than the one heretofore presented as the latest thorn in Tony’s side. Even the decision to spend much of the episode in Ralphie’s home—when we’re used to seeing him at the Aprile crew’s social club, or crashing with a girlfriend—feels deliberate, a means of illustrating that Ralphie had a life beyond his conflicts with Tony and the other wiseguys.

  Tony has previously put up with Ralphie because he’s the Family’s best earner, and because it would violate Mob tradition to whack him over the death of an unaffiliated stripper. He had to find subtler means of revenge, like stealing his mistress and his horse. Telling Ralphie about Valentina shortly after Justin’s injury not only avoids a fight, but also feels like Tony getting back at Ralphie for making him feel sympathetic in the first place. Tony Soprano never wants to be in a position where he has to feel sorry for Ralphie Cifaretto. This tragedy makes it impossible.

  Then comes the fire.

  Did Ralphie mastermind it? The episode never quite says so. Ralphie certainly has the motive—he even complains to Tony about the cost of caring for a declining horse—and the ruthlessness. But he’s also adamant in his denials.

  It really doesn’t matter, though, because Tony believes he did it. Which makes the most important question about it this: to which “beautiful, innocent creature” is Tony referring as he smashes Ralphie’s head against the kitchen tile and chokes the life out of him—Pie-O-My, or Tracee?

  We have seen Tony swallow his rage before at people he hates, such as Uncle Junior and Livia. But they were family. Ralphie is not. Ralphie is just this obnoxious, repulsive thing who is at best perpetually annoying to Tony, even when they’re making large sums of money together. Ralphie beat a young woman—one in need of help, whom Tony had repea
tedly rebuffed, and who reminded him of his own daughter—to death, just because he could. But Tony hated him long before that. Plus, a lot of innocent people get hurt or killed in his line of work, and Tracee hasn’t come up in a long time, whereas Tony’s affection for Pie-O-My was recent, palpable, and untainted by guilt.36 The horse was a beautiful, innocent creature that Tony loved, nursed through sickness, celebrated in victory. He felt more purely and deeply for Pie-O-My than for most of the humans in his life.

  Earlier in the episode, Tony cautions an enraged Paulie against seeking vengeance for the prank call, because it would be bad for business and against the rules. Even in less criminal trades, we have to work with people we can’t stand. But the rules of both polite society and the Mafia have never much applied to Tony Soprano, especially where his passions inflame his work. With Ralph a likely arson suspect, and definitely Tracee’s murderer (a crime in which Tony feels complicit), the famous Soprano temper bursts out—leading to one of the ugliest and most intense fights of the entire series, despite the vast difference in size and strength.37

  And there lies the body of Tony’s most productive, if hated, employee.

  The kitchen brawl happens so abruptly—after a long conversation about Pie-O-My and Ralphie’s secret ingredient for eggs38—and with so little obvious foreshadowing that it lacks the cathartic power it would have summoned had it ended “University,” or appeared later in season three. But it also shows how Tony, like his mother, never forgets perceived sins against him. Ralphie’s life was over in the Bing parking lot, because it was inevitable that he would do something else to draw the boss’s ire, just as it was inevitable that Tony would eventually succumb to his desire to put hand to throat and start squeezing.