The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  Tony has put his life back together, at work and at home, but he paid to do it—a lot. Now there’s just the one Tony again, though he contains multitudes.

  * * *

  1 For this season only, Jamie-Lynn Sigler was credited under her then-married name, as Jamie-Lynn DiScala.

  2 One of the talking heads in that report is author Manny Safier, played by new Sopranos writer Matthew Weiner. (The show occasionally put the writers on camera in small roles, like Terence Winter playing one of Dr. Melfi’s patients.) Weiner got a job on the show because Chase was impressed with his spec script about an advertising agency in the early ’60s—a script that would become Mad Men.

  3 Loggia was in the home stretch of a career that went back to live television dramas of the 1950s like Playhouse 90 and Studio One. He had his greatest success in the mid-to-late ’80s, most famously as the boss who dances on the giant FAO Schwarz piano with Tom Hanks in Big.

  4 A character actor best known for playing creepy thieves and murderers in films like Reservoir Dogs, Fargo, and Con Air, Buscemi was also an acclaimed indie film director (Trees Lounge) who had already been behind the Sopranos camera for season three’s “Pine Barrens” and season four’s “Everybody Hurts.” He was family before he was Family.

  5 Chase knew Santos well, having spent years writing dialogue for him as Dennis Becker, the decent cop forever doing favors for Jim Rockford on The Rockford Files.

  6 Vincent was the runner-up to play Uncle Junior, but Chase declined partly because the cast already featured too many Goodfellas veterans. Vincent had played Billy Batts, the wiseguy who kept telling Tommy to go home and get his shine box. A frequent Martin Scorsese collaborator (he also sparred with Joe Pesci in Raging Bull and Casino), he was often typecast as hot-tempered mobsters, a fact he was pragmatic about: “It’s better to be typed than not typed,” he once told the Star-Ledger’s Stephen Whitty.

  7 The little container of Tide in the gift basket, coupled with the note signed “Your Prince of Tide” (singular), is the entire Sopranos sense of verbal humor distilled to one gag: erudite and ridiculous.

  8 In a retort to the many fans who were still asking what happened to Valery, Paulie replies, “Who the fuck cares?” when Patsy wonders the same thing.

  9 He explains that he has turned Furio into a fugitive back in Italy, sentencing him to death should any of his Friends Over There get a look at him.

  10 This one is closer to home than most: We Stand Alone Together, a companion film to the 2001 HBO miniseries Band of Brothers, about the paratroopers of Easy Company. Despite Band having a huge ensemble and the usual amount of cross-pollinated casting on HBO series (see Edie Falco moving from Oz to here), only one Band actor ever turned up in Sopranos country: Frank John Hughes, who appears in the series’ last few episodes as Soprano soldier Walden Belfiore.

  11 Playboy-lush character, one of many Gleason created on Cavalcade of Stars, his first variety series, which ran 1949 to 1952 on the soon-to-be defunct DuMont Network.

  12 Hints of Junior’s dementia continue apace, with him referring to Tony B as “Tony Egg” without realizing he did it.

  13 In a sign of how slowly federal justice can move, they’re still talking to Ray about the recording he made of Tony’s lecture to the captains back in the season four premiere.

  14 In a nice touch, Carmela and the others are forced to stare at the FBI warning about piracy before they can perform deep analysis on Citizen Kane. (Ade: “So it was a sled, huh. He should’ve told somebody!”)

  15 Well, mostly haunting. The episode also features the funniest HBO crossover there never was, when Junior stumbles upon a Curb Your Enthusiasm repeat and mistakes Larry David and Jeff Garlin for himself and Bobby.

  16 As Lorraine, actress Patti D’Arbanville was styled to resemble New York Post TV critic Linda Stasi, who had loudly complained about season four’s lack of violence, and here Johnny Sack complains that Lorraine’s solution to any problem is “‘Whack this one, whack that one.’ Never enough body count for Lorraine.” It’s a meta dig that goes too far, given that an earlier scene has a terrified Lorraine offering oral sex to Phil Leotardo and his crew to keep them from killing her.

  17 Barbara once again performs her primary function on the show: to appear confused about why everyone else is mad at each other, and to look relieved that she and Tom live far away from all this nonsense.

  18 Where many civilians whose lives are damaged by the Mob invite the damage in some way (like Davey Scatino or Vic the Appraiser), poor Sal just has the bad luck to be mowing a lawn while Feech is driving Tony B around and gets the brainstorm to declare the neighborhood territory for his nephew Gary. After much back and forth between Feech and Paulie, Sal ends up with a broken arm, half his original territory, and a requirement to kick up to Paulie for his “help,” as well as to mow Tony and Johnny Sack’s lawns for free. And his son has to drop out of college because Sal can’t afford the tuition on his drastically reduced income.

  19 Artie, who has moved into the house at Tony’s request, naturally takes an elbow to the eye during the fight. It’s who he is. It’s what he does.

  20 Remember how quickly Carmela absorbed and then moved on from Tony’s strong implication about Richie’s murder back in season two’s “The Knight in White Satin Armor.”

  21 With this episode, Toni Kalem, who played Angie, became the only Sopranos actor other than Michael Imperioli to also get a script credit.

  22 The title spins out of a famous line from Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  23 Strathairn is one of the show’s most recognizable guest stars with no real history in Mob movies, having first won notice as part of the repertory company of indie director John Sayles (Eight Men Out) before taking memorable roles in more mainstream films like A League of Their Own, Sneakers, L.A. Confidential, and Good Night and Good Luck, which got him an Oscar nomination for playing Edward R. Murrow.

  24 With Lewis J. Stadlen taking over the role as Max Bialystock in The Producers on Broadway around the time this episode was filmed, Fried is played here by John Pleshette.

  25 Feech briefly takes over the game, in a callback to how Tony and Jackie Aprile first made names for themselves by robbing one of Feech’s card games. Keeping with tradition, the Game has several celebrity players, including Giants Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor and ’80s rock star David Lee Roth, along with Hollywood manager Bernie Brillstein, the partner of Sopranos producer Brad Grey.

  26 The shadow of Richie hung over almost every Mob antagonist who followed him (as Chase described them, “the asshole du jour”), to the point where even the actors were conscious of it. The penultimate season introduced Lenny Venito as Christopher’s new sidekick Murmur, but on Venito’s first day of work on location, neither he nor his costars knew anything about the character beyond his name. As the cast speculated, James Gandolfini wondered if Murmur was “the new Richie Aprile, the guy we yell at for nine months.”

  27 Lorraine is murdered after taking a shower, which means she runs around her apartment naked, screaming her head off, in her final seconds of life. It’s one final humiliation for one of the series’ few female gangsters, and an instance where the series seems like an advertisement for misogyny rather than an alternately grotesque and mordantly funny study of it.

  28 Valli was the front man for the legendary—and Mob-adored—band The Four Seasons, and was a plot point in season four’s “Christopher.” As Rusty, he is very much presented as the Dick Cheney to Little Carmine’s malapropism-spouting George W. Bush, an ally of Carmine Sr. pushing the son into a war neither seems prepared for. “We’ll steamroll right over John,” he boasts, “And I predict the guys on the street in Brooklyn and Queens, they’ll welcome us as fuckin’ heroes.”

  29 Though Bogdanovich was an acclaimed director and a recurring Sopranos actor as Elliot Kupferberg, this is the only episode to put him behind the camera.

  30 C
armela’s complaint that the story is slow and “nothing really happens” echoes some of the complaints about season four, or about Carmela stories in general, just as Wegler’s defense of the book—“Outside, nothing happens. But inside, she has these extremes of boredom and exhilaration.”—could also be the show’s defense of the Carmela–Furio flirtations.

  31 Fiske calls it right not only in pointing out the unfairness of what Wegler is doing for AJ compared to what a hard-working student might get, but in dubbing AJ “Fredo Corleone,” which is probably an insult to Fredo, but close enough for our purposes.

  32 Contrast Wegler and Tony, and you’re contrasting the Meadow and Tracee storylines from “University.”

  33 Bartlett’s a longtime Sesame Street cast member as veterinarian Gina, which can make for extreme whiplash for Sopranos viewers who sat with their kids watching her hang out with Big Bird and Grover.

  34 This is one of the most impressive sight gags in the the show’s run: an example of its commenting on its characters and framing the whole episode without needing a syllable of dialogue to make the point.

  35 Pine cones all around.

  36 A television pioneer, Bergen acted opposite Robert Mitchum in the original Cape Fear and won an Emmy for playing the title role in The Helen Morgan Story, a Playhouse 90 production of the musical drama about the torch singer’s life and work. She was also an acclaimed stage actress, a regular on game shows and television dramas, and played Rhoda Henry, wife of Pug Henry, in the hit miniseries The Winds of War and War and Remembrance.

  37 After Phil—who is utterly dismissive of Tony and the New Jersey Family in general—ducks Tony’s early attempts to get his cut, we get a rarity for The Sopranos: an honest-to-goodness car chase, with Tony tearing after a fleeing Phil to talk payment terms. Like the series’ other car chases (see Big Pussy trying to tail Christopher back in season two), it ends with a crash, as Phil bangs up his ride and his neck.

  38 After being played by Laila Robins in “Down Neck” and “Fortunate Son,” young Livia here is portrayed by Laurie Williams—Chase recalls that Robins was unavailable—who expertly evokes both Robins and Nancy Marchand in her brief screen time, particularly the moment where Livia realizes that, by lying to her about Johnny Boy’s whereabouts, her son has chosen his father over her, and turns against him accordingly. The way Livia clutches her robe is like a decades-early signal that she’ll one day try to have Tony killed.

  39 In earlier years, Christopher’s writing ambitions allowed the show to have some fun at the expense of the movie business. The introduction of JT gave The Sopranos writers license to turn gleefully on their own medium. JT is presented as a hack who loves dropping the names of shows he’s worked on (Nash Bridges) and producers he’s meeting (Rene Balcer from Law & Order), and who can’t get more than fifteen dollars when he tries to pawn his Emmy to pay Christopher. (The pawnshop owner: “If you had an Oscar, maybe I could give you something. An Academy Award. But TV? What else you got?”) Among JT’s past credits: the CBS Italian American family drama That’s Life, which offers a belated opportunity to strike back at a series whose cast and crew used to brag that their characters weren’t in the Mob, and whose star went on record chastising The Sopranos for being defamatory and announcing that he would never be on it. (Christopher: “What, that fake guinea-fest with Paul Sorvino? That was totally unrealistic!”)

  40 Daly starred in Chase’s short-lived CBS drama Almost Grown, though at this point was more famous for his long stretch as one of the stars of the sitcom Wings. Like Frankie Valli, he’s a season five addition to the recurring Sopranos cast who was already established as existing in the show’s universe: in season three’s “University,” Daly himself is mentioned as a client of Noah Tannenbaum’s father.

  41 This is Imperioli’s final Sopranos script, and not coincidentally the final episode to spend much time on issues of Italian American self-esteem, as Carmela lays into Mary, telling her, “There are Italians all around with their closet self-loathing. I just never wanted to believe my mother was one of them.”

  42 Despite Tony’s newfound freedom to pursue any kind of sex he wants without being a hypocrite or having to hide his activities, Valentina has only popped up briefly in two episodes this season. With a different girlfriend, Tony might be giddy at all the time he can spend with her, but she’s clearly just a placeholder for him. A big part of Tony’s “meh” attitude is probably because his separation from Carmela has removed the thrill of the forbidden—a bigger part of the experience than he realized.

  43 In an episode overflowing with lovely background details, the funniest may be Artie asleep on a pool chaise, a towel wrapped around his head like he’s Audrey Hepburn rocking a chiffon turban in Sabrina.

  44 This was actually Joseph Gannascoli’s idea, inspired by the nonfiction book Murder Machine, which referenced a gay Gambino Family hitman. “And when he got the script,” Sopranos writer Terence Winter recalled at the start of the following season, “he called up and said, ‘I said I’d be gay, I didn’t think I’d be the guy giving [it].’ I said, ‘It doesn’t work that way, Joe.’”

  45 No meat is present for this one.

  46 The Bush/Cheney parallels continue for Little Carmine and Rusty, with the latter discussing his recent heart surgery, and the former beginning to sport Texas-style belt buckles and delivering inspirational speeches that are just word salad, like, “The fundamental question is, will I be as effective as a boss like my dad was? And I will be. Even more so. But until I am, it’s gonna be hard to verify that I think I’ll be more effective.”

  47 She gets this bad news right as the black bear returns to her backyard. There are no coincidences on this show.

  48 Ralphie’s remains were disposed of at a different farm, owned by Mikey Palmice’s father.

  49 Adriana, trying to cheer him up, suggests he return to screenwriting, or perhaps consider male modeling, which leads to one of the greatest pieces of delusional thinking of the whole series, as Christopher insists, “I’ll get back to the writing someday, but from a position of great wealth. As far as male modeling, I’d probably be a success, but I wouldn’t want to be around those fuckin’ people.”

  50 Carmela also runs into Mr. Wegler, shrugging off his apology for how he acted in their last encounter and instead lying that she’s getting back together with Tony, admitting later to Rosalie that she just got mad and wanted to hurt him. (She doesn’t have Soprano genes, but she has her own version of the Soprano temper.) The scene ends with a very un-Sopranos freeze-frame of an embarrassed Carmela that fits the style of guest director Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas), who follows it with an equally un-Sopranos wipe into the next scene with the guys up at the farm.

  51 Evelyn, the most talkative woman in the anger management group, is played by future Grey’s Anatomy star Chandra Wilson.

  52 See the end of “The Knight in White Satin Armor,” when Tony falls down after leaving Livia’s house and she can’t stop herself from chortling.

  53 Right before Carmine suffered the stroke that killed him, he said he smelled burning hair. Shortly before the dream begins, Tony complains to Tony B that he can’t get rid of the burning hair smell from Valentina’s kitchen accident.

  54 That Molinaro holds such a prominent place in Tony’s unconscious mind speaks to why he gets so upset every time Uncle Junior tells him he didn’t have the makings of a varsity athlete.

  55 The whole sequence follows the classic test-anxiety dream, usually a nightmare about having to take an exam for which one hasn’t studied. Losing teeth is another common event in these dreams, and Tony loses several over the course of his journey, before the bullets fall out of his gun, tooth-like, as he prepares to kill Coach Molinaro.

  56 Possibly including Charmaine, whom, if Tony had an affair with her, Carm would see as another of his “hooers.”

  57 Surprisingly assured horsemanship here by Gandolfini, who is not an actor you’d expect to see in a saddle.

  58 Th
e Bugsy quote is prompted by a question from Gloria, playing a TV newswoman, calling on Bening by name while reporting on the Tony B–Phil incident. It would be the strangest moment in the dream, except for all the others.

  59 And being shot at by Lee Harvey Oswald, because JFK (and maybe Fran Felstein) is still lingering in Tony’s head, too.

  60 Sopranos didn’t reference Springsteen often, even with his guitar player at Tony’s side for all those years, but Michael Imperioli gets to quote one of the most famous Bruce lyrics of them all (from “Born to Run”) when Chris explains he was late for a meeting because the “Highway was jammed with broken heroes on a last-chance power drive.” (To the show’s credit, it is not followed with a winking close-up of Steve Van Zandt; he’s shot from a distance, his expression impassive.)

  61 Terence Winter’s script also won an Emmy, and surely contributed heavily to the series finally winning its first Outstanding Drama Series Emmy.

  62 For the most part, it’s hard to blame the FBI agents for the various murders that seem to happen right under their noses. If there’s a weakness to “Long Term Parking,” though, it’s that it seems very dubious that Sanseverino would allow Adriana to be alone and unmonitored for so long, given the risk of . . . well, of exactly what happens. Even if Ade wouldn’t wear a wire, would it have hurt to have a few cars stationed near the apartment to see who goes where?

  63 Tony B and Gloria Trillo would have a lot to talk about. Both are fully realized, real individuals who also exist somewhere on the edge of metaphor, and seem to have materialized within the fiction of the show as manifestations of Tony Soprano’s psychological issues. Gloria is an embodiment of Tony S’s wish to both please and destroy his mother, while Tony B reflects Tony’s easily bruised ego, his tendency to remain charming even as he bullies weaker people, his insatiable hunger for more, his inability to walk the straight and narrow, and the impulse control problems that impact everyone else in his life.