The Sopranos (TV Milestones) 0814334067, 9780814334065

Citation preview

The Sopranos

TV Milestones Series Editors Barry Keith Grant Brock University

Jeannette Sloniowski Brock University

TV Milestones is part of the Contemporary Approaches to Film and Media Series A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu General Editor Barry Keith Grant Brock University Advisory Editors Robert J. Burgoyne University of St. Andrews

Frances Gateward California State University, Northridge

Caren J. Deming University of Arizona

Tom Gunning University of Chicago

Patricia B. Erens School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Thomas Leitch University of Delaware

Peter X. Feng University of Delaware

Walter Metz Southern Illinois University

Lucy Fischer University of Pittsburgh

THE SOPRANOS

Gary R. Edgerton

TV

MILESTONES SERIES

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2013 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 17 16 15 14 13

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Edgerton, Gary R. (Gary Richard), 1952– The Sopranos / Gary R. Edgerton. p. cm. — (TV milestones series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3406-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8143-3852-0 (ebook) 1. Sopranos (Television program) I. Title. PN1992.77.S66E46 2013 791.45’72—dc23 2012029895

contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Backstory: Breaking Omertà 1 1. Game Changer: The Role of The Sopranos in the Resurgence of HBO 7 2. Cinematic Television: The Education of David Chase 23 3. Disorganized Crime: Living Large in the Suburbs 51 4. Situation Tragedy: A Midlife Crisis for the Gangster Genre 73 Conclusion: Strategic Ambiguity: The Sopranos’ Aftereffect 91 works cited 101 subject index 111 television series index 115

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acknowledgments

Let me begin by thanking editors Barry Keith Grant, Jeannette Sloniowski, and everyone at Wayne State University Press for creating the TV Milestones series, which is more inclusive in expanding the existing purview of similar book series from various publishers devoted only to significant motion pictures. TV Milestones filled a discernable gap in the scholarly literature with its inaugural entry, Jay Telotte’s Disney TV, in 2004. Thanks as well to acquisitions editor Annie Martin for her genial patience and encouragement in shepherding along this particular volume on The Sopranos. She and assistant acquisition editor Kristina Stonehill have been continually supportive, professional, and delightful to work with throughout the long gestation process and production of this book. When considering The Sopranos, there are arguably more books and articles that have appeared via the academic and popular presses on this program since its debut than on any other “TV milestone” that has been covered in this series so far. As a result, I want to express my immense debt of gratitude to the many talented scholars who have already published on The Sopranos, especially Regina Barreca, Frédéric Foubert, Glen Gabbard, Richard Greene, David Lavery, Florent Loulendo,

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Horace Newcomb, Martha Nochimson, Dana Polan, Thomas Prasch, William Siska, Robert Thompson, David Thorburn, Peter Vernezze, and Maurice Yacowar, whose volumes and essays have helped me enormously as I researched, thought through the topic, and wrote this monograph. I hope that this concise volume serves as a complement to their earlier groundbreaking work. I also want to heartily thank those colleagues who invited me to present some of the ideas found herein at various symposia. First off, “The Sopranos: A Wake,” organized and hosted by David Lavery, Douglas Howard, Paul Levinson, and Al Auster in late May 2008, was a wonderful opportunity to discuss the series with a wide range of American and European researchers and writers, along with legal and law enforcement practitioners, including Kim Akass, Glen Creeber, Jason Jacobs, Janet McCabe, Robin Nelson, Sean O’Sullivan, Steven Peacock, Jimmie Reeves, Ron Simon, and Frank Tomasulo, among others. Thanks also to John Tibbetts and Tamara Falicov for asking me to deliver the featured address at the 13th Annual University of Kansas Graduate Film and Media Symposium in Lawrence, Kansas, in mid-February 2010. I greatly benefited from the thoughtful conversations with faculty and graduate students during that two-day meeting. Likewise, I am deeply grateful to Marjolaine Boutet and Sandra Laugier for inviting me to give the keynote lecture at the opening session of the “Séries d’elite, culture populaire: le cas HBO” Conference sponsored by the Graduate School of Social Science and Humanities at Université de Picardie Jules Verne, which was held at the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po at the Cité internationale universitaire de Paris in early June 2010. It was a wonderful gathering that allowed me to learn more about French perspectives on The Sopranos and other recent American television dramas from the numerous scholars and critics who attended that symposium. Finally, I taught two courses on the gangster in film and television in 2009 and 2011 at Old Dominion University, and I

Acknowledgments

thank my undergraduate and graduate students in those classes for their spontaneous enthusiasm and sharp insights on the subject. Last but not least, I express my deepest appreciation to my wife, Nan, and daughters Katherine and Mary Ellen, who have watched and discussed many episodes of The Sopranos with me over the years. As always, I thank them for their spirited observations and the pleasure of their company. I dedicate this book to them with all my love.

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Introduction

Backstory: Breaking Omertà

The Sopranos gave the lie to the notions that you had to explain everything, that you always had to have a star in the lead, that everybody had to be ultimately likeable, that there had to be so-called closure, that there was a psychological lesson to be learned [and] a moral at the center that you should carry away from the show . . . The networks had essentially thrown in the towel on good drama. It’s like changing the direction of an ocean liner. But The Sopranos did it. Allen Coulter, director of twenty-seven Sopranos episodes (“The Family Hour” 222)

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merican TV fundamentally changed after the premiere of The Sopranos in 1999. There is certainly a “before” and an “after” to television in the United States and internationally when considering this series. The Sopranos is among the most celebrated programs in TV history, having been chosen the fifth “greatest TV show of all time” and the highest ranking drama by TV Guide in May 2002; and the top “television drama of all time” by the Guardian newspaper in January 2010 (Editors of

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TV Guide, 2002, 22; Banks-Smith et al.). Stephen Holden of the New York Times famously wrote in an early review that “The Sopranos, more than any American television in memory, looks, feels, and sounds like real life . . . it just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century” (23). Three months after the telecast of the final episode, Time TV critic James Poniewozik added: “To get a sense of how The Sopranos changed TV, get a pen and make a list of the 20 best TV dramas before 1999. That list will likely include Magnum P.I.” (September 2007). Suffice it to say, The Sopranos is widely recognized in both popular and scholarly literature as an influential milestone in the history and development of TV drama. It delivered on the oldest and most high-minded aspirations of the medium, which declared that television could be at once artistic and profitable, complex and engaging, edifying and entertaining. More than a half-century after the first stirrings of prime-time drama, The Sopranos jump-started the aesthetic, narrative, and generic potential of TV to new and even greater heights. New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recently asked, “Over the past decade, how many films have approached the moral complexity of The Sopranos?” He further posited that “the traditional relationship between film and television has reversed, as American movies have become conservative and cautious, while scripted series, on both broadcast networks and cable, are often more daring, topical and willing to risk giving offense” (35). Whether one agrees with this basic assertion or not, the conventional hierarchy that always placed motion pictures above TV is no longer an assumption taken for granted in the post-Sopranos media culture. The Sopranos was created by David Chase, a journeyman writer, producer, and director of such notable prime-time series as The Rockford Files (1974–1980, NBC), Almost Grown (1988–1989, CBS), Northern Exposure (1990–1995, CBS), and I’ll Fly Away (1991–1993, NBC). At varying times, Chase even

Backstory: Breaking Omertà

functioned as the showrunner on the latter three series, which means that he was responsible for the daily management and creative directions taken on these programs. Still, nothing in his résumé hinted at the possibility that he would ever create and become the executive producer, head writer, and showrunner on a television milestone like The Sopranos, a series with an impact that would be felt across several different but interrelated contexts, including business and industry, TV aesthetics and generic transformation, and cultural reach and influence. The Sopranos burst onto the scene as HBO’s biggest hit in terms of audience numbers, instant profits by way of increased subscriptions, and widespread critical accolades. Chase’s success elevated the status of showrunners that in turn transformed cable television. Chase’s experience of realizing “his vision only by going to cable—had now become the model of how cable TV worked in the post-Sopranos era” (Weinman 49–50). David Chase hardly entertained such improbable fantasies of industrial and institutional success when he began writing a theatrical spec script entitled “The Sopranos” in 1994 in the hopes of attracting financing, a script he then adapted for television in 1995. His sponsoring production company, BrillsteinGrey, pitched the property to the broadcast networks, being “first turned down by the Fox Network, CBS and ABC” before submitting the script to HBO for consideration (Brownfield; Creeber 100). After its debut on this pay cable channel, The Sopranos emerged as the most innovative and influential drama of the late 1990s through the early to mid-2000s, often challenging mainstream TV’s conventional wisdom by spearheading an alternative narrative style “in opposition to the regular networks” where “the pacing (was slower), the storytelling (more fragmented) and the structure (organized around the lack of commercials)” (Weinman 50). Chase and his creative team first revitalized the televisual aesthetics of HBO; the rest of television followed in kind. With The Sopranos, Chase and his team incorporated a more cinematic approach to TV storytelling that

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dovetailed perfectly with the expansion of the cable-and-satellite sector of the industry and the seemingly endless progression of ever wider screens and higher definition receivers of all shapes and sizes. Moreover, The Sopranos struck a deep and resonant chord with television audiences at home and abroad at the turn of the twenty-first century. The fantasy lifestyle of Tony (James Gandolfini) and Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) captured the zeitgeist by parodying the out-of-control consumerist tendencies of contemporary Americans. This eighty-six-hour domesticgangster serial is structured around an easily relatable protagonist who has troubles at work, a formidable and no-nonsense spouse, two spoiled children, and a demanding and manipulative mother who can no longer live alone but resists any kind of assisted care. Such depictions of workplace and familial dysfunction rang true to many U.S. and international viewers. Even though Tony heads the North Jersey mob, domestic concerns always take precedence over mob business in the narrative treatment and on-screen attention devoted to family matters on The Sopranos, providing audiences with a complex and dynamic reflection of the American mind and character at the start of the new millennium. Considering The Sopranos’ many industrial, aesthetic, and cultural innovations and achievements, the series is now widely recognized as one of the most critically and commercially successful shows in television history, being the first program to come from the cable-and-satellite sector to win an Emmy for “Outstanding Drama Series” in 2004. The Sopranos won that award again in 2007 after the completion of its final season, giving it twenty-one Emmys over six seasons (second only to NBC’s ER, which garnered twenty-three Emmys during its fifteen seasons, 1994–2009). All told, The Sopranos amassed more than fifty major institutional honors, including back-to-back George Foster Peabody Awards in 2000 and 2001; the Golden Globe for “Best Drama Series” in 2000; guild prizes for distin-

Backstory: Breaking Omertà

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Family matters remained the central concern of The Sopranos through all sixplus seasons.

guished achievement in producing, directing, writing, editing, and acting; and the 2007 Television Critics Association “Heritage Award” for “lasting cultural and social impact” (McDaniel). This volume is designed to be a one-stop introduction to the multiple dimensions of this groundbreaking program, surveying and integrating the existing scholarly literature, while also going much further than any previous source in providing a comprehensive overview of the commercial importance, creative originality, and cultural relevance of this bellwether series. In this way, Chapter 1 describes and analyzes The Sopranos’ enormous business and industrial significance within the context of HBO as a network, a diversified entertainment company, and an identity brand. Chapter 2 examines the many autobiographical influences, work experiences, and narrative antecedents that informed “The Education of David Chase” and

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the creation of this landmark program. Chapter 3, “Living Large in the Suburbs,” underscores The Sopranos’ deeply evocative sense of place, honing in especially on the cultural geography of New Jersey as representative of the nation as a whole. Chapter 4 highlights how The Sopranos marks “A Midlife Crisis for the Gangster Genre” by illustrating some of the most profound generic transformations that took place over the course of this domestic-crime serial narrative. Lastly, the conclusion summarizes The Sopranos’ ongoing industrial, aesthetic, and cultural legacy in terms of TV as an institution and an art form in the United States and all around the world.

Chapter 1

Game Changer The Role of The Sopranos in the Resurgence of HBO

I don’t believe where the freedom lies is in the cursing and the nipples and all that stuff, or the violence. The freedom we enjoy at HBO is in the freedom to tell stories in a slowly unfolding, complicated, strange, anti-rhythmic or very rhythmic, as we choose, way of telling a story. That’s where the freedom lies. The rest of it is just window dressing. David Chase, creator of The Sopranos (NPR, 2000)

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he resurgence of Home Box Office, Inc. (HBO) in the midto late 1990s and the premiere of The Sopranos (1999–2007) were harbingers of something new and innovative that was happening to television as an industry and a technology at the dawning of TV’s Digital Era, which began roughly in 1995 and continues unabated today. HBO debuted on November 8, 1972 to a mere 365 cable subscriber households in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, barely staying solvent for three years before its president, Gerald Levin, bet the network’s future on signing a six-year $7.5 million contract that allowed the channel access

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to RCA’s newly launched communication satellite, Satcom 1, during the fall of 1975. On October 1, 1975, HBO inaugurated its cable-and-satellite service with the much-hyped “Thrilla in Manila” heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier live from overseas. In one fell swoop, HBO became a national network, thus ushering in television’s Cable Era (1976–1994) with its first full year of regularly scheduled satellite-delivered programming. Two decades later, at the start of the Digital Era, HBO was transformed into a global transmedia entertainment corporation by its executive team and the creative talent working there, heralding where the future of the cable-and-satellite sector of the TV industry was headed for the second time in a quarter century. During the early transitional years of the Digital Era up through the mid-2000s, moreover, the game changer for HBO and for television in general was the extraordinary and improbable success of The Sopranos. The Sopranos premiered at a time of unprecedented change for the television industry in the United States. Like America itself, TV has always existed in a state of transformation, being continually reshaped and occasionally reinvented by a wide assortment of technological, commercial, and social factors. U.S. television grew from a local to a regional medium during the 1940s and 1950s, finally becoming the centerpiece of national culture at the start of the 1960s. The three-network oligopoly (NBC, CBS, and ABC) that ruled the TV industry in the United States during the Network Era (1948–1975) was just starting to wane when HBO became the first service in the cable-andsatellite television sector to break away from the pack by adding satellite to cable distribution in 1975. This technical innovation was all-important in ensuring HBO’s survival and eventual success as its subscriber base skyrocketed over the next decade from a mere 287,199 to 14.6 million subscribers in early 1985 (Mair 26, 158). By the beginning of 1995, however, HBO had stalled at around 19.2 million subscriber households (Stevens). What was happening at HBO was indicative of the cable-and-

Game Changer

satellite sector in general and the changing reception patterns of American audiences. The typical television-viewing household in the United States had gone from receiving only 7.2 channels in 1972 to 10.2 in 1980, before rising dramatically to 27.2 in 1990 (Papazian 21). At this juncture, 37 percent of domestic viewers admitted that they preferred channel surfing or quickly zapping through the television dial with their remote controls to watching one specific program (Lachenbruch). Since the founding of HBO, consumers at home had grown more proactive and discriminating in their TV viewing behavior, as they had many more available channels to choose from than ever before. The cable-and-satellite sector of the television industry first responded by taking baby steps toward making its programming more attractive to consumers by supplementing its licensing of older off-network programs and Hollywood movies with the occasional original production tailor-made to the individual specifications of each channel’s target audience. HBO led the way in this regard by producing its first original series, Not Necessarily the News, and its first made-for-pay TV movie, The Terry Fox Story, in 1983, followed by its first miniseries, All the Rivers Run, in 1984. The cable-and-satellite sector had already “eclipsed broadcasting’s assets and revenue values by the late 1980s.” In its “short history,” cable television had “redefined television,” argues telecommunications researcher Sharon Strover. “It spawned a huge variety of ‘narrowcast’ programming services” (1,721). A niche market model therefore supplanted the old way of doing business throughout the entire American economy beginning in the mid-1970s. For television, in particular, made-to-order series by a new generation of creative writer-producers replaced two decades of dominance by Hollywood’s cookie-cutter mode of telefilm production. The best and most influential new shows on both the broadcast networks (such as NBC’s Hill Street Blues, 1981–1987, for example) and cable (such as Showtime’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, 1986–

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1990, which Shandling followed with The Larry Sanders Show, 1992–1998, on HBO) defied easy classification while attracting a preponderance of young, urban, professional viewers. The broader economic benefits of consumer segmentation also rendered the increasingly outdated mass-market model of the Network Era obsolete. In turn, branding became the standard way in which networks and production companies differentiated their programming from the competition. HBO had always banked on its original utility or service brand of providing Hollywood motion pictures to cable viewers in the comfort of their own homes as the network’s main attraction for growing its subscriber base. This business strategy limited HBO’s growth potential over time because its management team learned that brand loyalty could not be guaranteed by the delivery of any service that could be successfully duplicated by the competition. In HBO’s case, Viacom’s Showtime was created in 1976, four years after HBO’s startup, and began satellite transmission in 1978; Warner Amex launched The Movie Channel in 1979; Time/HBO countered by creating Cinemax in 1980; and Times-Mirror began Spotlight in 1981. Throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, the executives at HBO gradually came to the realization that restricting their activities to that of a wholesaler or intermediary between the movie studios and the nation’s growing cable companies was a dead-end arrangement. At the same time, they also recognized their own good luck. Being both between and a part of the television, motion picture, and home video industries, HBO was ideally positioned to diversify into original TV and movie production, home video, and international distribution, even as these once separate entertainment sectors were beginning to converge into one globally expanding entertainment industry by the mid- to late 1980s. Long before the term became fashionable, HBO was a brand that became indistinguishable from the notion of subscription television during the 1970s. By 1989, however, the executives at HBO felt the need to launch the corporation’s first

Game Changer

national image advertising campaign, “Simply the Best,” which started a lengthy and expensive process of extending HBO’s identity beyond just its utility brand as TV’s premiere first-run movie service to add on a quality programming dimension as well. Throughout the early to mid-1990s, HBO’s promotional efforts touted the network as “Simply the Best” channel on television to find innovative original series and specials to go along with its usual lineup of Hollywood movies. This promotional boast was more aspirational than substantive when longtime chief financial officer (CFO) and newly installed chief executive officer (CEO), Jeffrey Bewkes, and his programming chief, Chris Albrecht, called a two-day executive retreat during the summer of 1995. Albrecht set the tone for the meeting by asking, “Do we really believe that we are who we say we are? This distinctive, high-quality, edgy, worth-paying-for service?” Bewkes and Albrecht remember that the silence in the room was deafening. The executive team at HBO then began the slow and deliberate process of “building an outstanding one-of-a-kind programming service” because being an “occasional use” cable channel was “no longer sustainable” in the survival-of-the-fittest world that was then materializing with the emergence of digital television and the sudden growth of the Internet (Carter 2002; Power). The conditions of production and the demands of reception were both changing with the onset of the Digital Era. The pivotal innovation that shifted viewer interest beyond just the TV set into cyberspace was the introduction of the first commercially available graphical browser, Netscape Navigator 1.0, on December 15, 1994, thus making Web surfing relatively easy for most Americans. A “mass digital conversion” was now placing consumers “at the very heart” of an increasingly personalized television business environment (Chernin). As a result, HBO set out to intensify its connection to its subscriber base by reinvesting in original programming like never before. Following the aforementioned corporate retreat, “the HBO

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leadership team decided to ‘jump fully off this cliff,’” recalls Bewkes, referring to his staff’s total commitment to “produce bold, really distinctive television” beginning in 1996 (LaBarre). The premium cable-and-satellite network set itself apart from the competition for the second time in its short history by aggressively increasing the proportion of its original programming from 25 to 40 percent of its entire schedule in the half-dozen years between 1996 and 2001 (BusinessWeek, 14 January 2002: 62). HBO transformed TV’s creative landscape during the first decade of the Digital Era by pursuing the unusual and atypical strategy of investing more money in program development (from $2 to $4 million per prime-time hour as opposed to $1 million for the broadcast networks), limiting output (13 episodes per series each year instead of the usual 22 to 26), and producing only the highest-quality series, miniseries, made-forpay-TV movies, and documentaries that it could. In the process, HBO became the most talked about, widely celebrated, and profitable network in all of television. The game changer for HBO was the unprecedented success of The Sopranos. Whereas Oz (1997–2003) enjoyed a promising debut of 2.6 million viewers in July 1997, and Sex and the City (1998–2004) garnered 2.75 million in June 1998, The Sopranos pulled in 7.5 million in January 1999 (“Six Feet Above”). These were robust numbers for any cable-and-satellite network at the time. For HBO, though, these audience figures were even more striking when seen within the context of a subscriber base that then totaled slightly more than 25 percent of all of the televisionviewing households in America. Moreover, HBO’s latest spike in popularity and prestige was just beginning. By the start of its third season in March 2001, The Sopranos had attracted 11.3 million viewers, while the premiere of the edgy, idiosyncratic Six Feet Under followed up three months later with 4.8 million (de Moraes, 2006; “Six Feet Above”). HBO was certifiably white-hot in September 2002 when The Sopranos opened its fourth season to an audience of

The Sopranos’ branding image for Season 4 when the series was at the height of its popularity

Game Changer

13.4 million, which not only won its time slot but placed “sixth for the entire week against all other prime-time programs, cable and broadcast,” despite HBO’s “built-in numerical disadvantage” (Castleman and Podrazik 419). Even though HBO was based on an entirely different economic model than most of the rest of the U.S. TV industry, it had beaten all of the advertisersupported networks at their own game. More significantly, it was also asserting once and for all that “the underlying assumptions that had driven television for six decades were no longer in effect” (Castleman and Podrazik 419). The momentum in the industry had shifted unmistakably and irrevocably away from the traditional broadcast networks and more toward the cableand-satellite sector of the business with The Sopranos providing HBO with the kind of breakout hit it needed to compete for viewers with any channel on television. The Sopranos had now become HBO’s most identifiable product, generating unprecedented word of mouth for the corporation, creating multiple revenue streams, and helping brand the network’s latest incarnation like no other program.

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New Measures of Success

HBO actually had begun laying the promotional groundwork to take full advantage of its renewed focus on increasing its number of original productions ever since Bewkes had allocated “$25 million a year just to advertise the HBO brand.” Executive vice president for marketing, Eric Kessler, and his team kicked off a new ad campaign on October 20, 1996, featuring one of TV history’s most effective taglines—“It’s Not TV, It’s HBO” (Stevens; Gay). Booster rhetoric aside, this branding line marked a transitional moment in the industry when cable-andsatellite channels became the first place to look for breakout series on all of television, no longer just the traditional broadcast networks. With the debut of The Sopranos in 1999, the size of HBO’s subscriber base and its ensuing revenues skyrocketed. The popularity of The Sopranos stimulated a 50 percent increase in subscriptions to 28.2 million television-viewing households by the first quarter of 2006 (Umstead). HBO’s subscribers were also more than just viewers; they were paying customers who shelled out, on average, $15 a month to obtain this service. No longer were they settling for the least objectionable programming they could find, as audiences had done in the Network Era. They were looking for something different, challenging, and more original on HBO, particularly since they were paying a monthly fee just to tune in. The onetime sacrosanct economic model for television had now splintered into several alternative choices instead of just an advertiser-supported option to include a subscription format (which had been pioneered most successfully by HBO), product placement, domestic and international syndication, DVD sales, and program downloads. Hit shows such as The Sopranos proved to be the most essential ingredients needed to allow this newly emerging multidimensional personal-usage market structure to flourish (Becker 2005; Brown). Television viewership patterns were likewise evolving. “Industry insiders often deploy the distinction among

Game Changer

zappers, casuals, and loyals,” recounts comparative media scholar Henry Jenkins. “Loyals watch series; zappers watch television,” while “casuals fall somewhere in between” (74). The Sopranos was custom made for loyal fans who searched out ways to engage with the series beyond the Sunday night at 9 p.m. time slot. Facilitating appointment TV or the practice by which viewers integrate the watching of specific programs into their daily schedules was still the primary goal of most network programmers during the first decade of the Cable Era. Despite the availability of the Internet, Americans were actually watching more television than ever before during this time frame. According to Nielsen Media Research, the typical television-viewing household in the United States had its set turned on for 7 hours and 15 minutes per day in 1995; 7 hours and 26 minutes per day in 2000; and a whopping 8 hours and 11 minutes per day by 2005 (2000 Report on Television 14; Sterling and Kittross 867; Scanlon 15). Moreover, the average number of available channels per household shot up from 43 in 1997 to 96.4 in 2005. Of that number, individual viewers spent the vast majority of their time watching just 10.3 networks of choice in 1997, increasing this total to 16.3 in 2005 (Papazian 21; “Nielsen Report”). In other words, HBO was one of those networks of choice for more than 26 percent of the 110.2 million televisionviewing households in the United States during 2005, the year The Sopranos’ popularity reached its all-time peak, making it the cable-and-satellite sector’s leading example of appointment television. In addition, the Internet boom was just taking off in the United States, with only 40 percent of the nation’s population even using the Web at least once a month when The Sopranos premiered in 1999 (Wellman and Haythornthwaite 14). Furthermore, a mere five of the sixty-four largest urban markets in the nation even exceeded a 50 percent penetration rate in Internet availability at the time (Arbitron Inc.). Some loyal fans were able to access the relatively few corporate and fan Web sites

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devoted to the series (such as www.hbo.com/#/the-sopranos and www.Sopranoland.com), along with a handful of related message boards, newsgroups, and chat rooms. Still, The Sopranos arrived at a transitional moment when television fan culture was just beginning to migrate en masse to the Web. During the early 2000s, traditional fan practices such as “watercooler” conversations about The Sopranos were being supplemented by viewing parties in homes, bars, and restaurants around the country, with loyal fans utilizing these venues as the easiest way of sharing their enthusiasm for the show with like-minded devotees beyond just watching the actual program. HBO marketers even issued a number-one New York Times best-selling The Sopranos Family Cookbook in 2002, ostensibly “compiled by” Tony’s boyhood friend and restaurateur, Artie Bucco (John Ventimiglia), just for those loyal fans who identified with this type of cheeky humor while also dispensing inside information about the proper method of preparing homestyle Italian dishes, which viewers could integrate into their own lifestyles, thereby underscoring the importance of food within the cultural ambiance of the series (Rucker). As Internet penetration in America reached 70 percent by 2007, The Sopranos’ fan culture shifted its focus mainly to cyberspace, tending toward “more impersonal, critical discourse” about “quality” aesthetics, which echoed the agenda being set by HBO’s highly successful rebranding campaign. Online fan discourses also emphasized matters surrounding class, family, ethnicity, gender, and age, rather than “emotive personalizations,” fan fiction, or any kind of actual online exchange with the show’s producers and talent (Monaco 126). David Chase reportedly enjoyed the smart and playful mashup Seven Minute Sopranos, which recapped the series up to March 29, 2007, in just 7 minutes and 36 seconds and was posted on YouTube by two loyal fans who had just graduated from college. Within a week, this online homage had gone viral, logging more than 80,000 views and counting (Heffernan 2007). More characteristically,

Game Changer

though, Chase was old school when it came to fan culture. For example, he insisted that he had “no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what” was contained in the last episode of The Sopranos when the viewer response to “Made in America” (Episode 86 in Season 6) reached a crescendo of competing voices in real time all around the world because of the immediacy and reach of the Internet (Sepinwall). The sixth and final season of the series was divided into two parts, with the first twelve episodes premiering between March 12 and June 4, 2006, followed by the last nine episodes airing between April 8 and June 10, 2007. The initial airing of “Made in America” became a television event that was watched by 12 million viewers in the United States (de Moraes 2007). The second quarter of 2007 also marked the first time that HBO exceeded 29 million subscribers, giving it twice the number of its nearest rival, Showtime (Vernadakis; Becker 2006; Becker 2007). By the end of The Sopranos’ run, HBO had matured into much more than a movie channel; it was a full-service content provider known throughout the global television industry for its own distinctive brand of programming. High or identity branding (which is a concept that is now an assumed part of television’s popular discourse) refers to the strong relational bond that is forged between a network’s signature series, such as HBO’s The Sopranos, and its target audience. For HBO, the principal business strategy in this regard was to create “passion or touch points” for its base subscribers, which skewed male, multiracial, 18 to 54 years old, urban, and professional in the case of The Sopranos, so these viewers could extend their participation beyond simply viewing the series into an array of transmedia activities (such as visiting the HBO Web site to obtain information on the performers, producers, and writers as well as episode synopses, take part in online discussion groups, and launch relevant video clips; subscribe to series-specific mobile media content; download episodes; purchase DVD or Blu-

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The final episode, “Made in America,” became a television event in America and internationally.

ray sets packaged either by individual seasons or the series as a whole, along with the two official soundtrack CDs, a handful of Time Warner–sponsored book tie-ins, and The Sopranos: Road to Respect video game). Loyal and casual fans could also buy ancillary products (such as Sopranos apparel, calendars, posters, toys, and unique gifts). The bottom line in high or identity branding is to devise tactics that widen fan attention beyond just watching the program so that fans are encouraged to frequent other mediated platforms related to The Sopranos’ world. Once there, they then engage in some form of consumptive activity, generating multiple revenue streams for the series and other sectors of the HBO corporation. In this way, The Sopranos averaged $100 million in annual profits between 2001 and 2007. Even more striking, HBO

A Ripple Effect

HBO’s domestic influence on its fellow broadcast and cable networks was clearly evident back home. “In a now famous letter” written in the summer of 2001, “NBC chairman Robert Wright challenged his colleagues to consider what they might learn from HBO’s extraordinary success” (Haley). In response

Game Changer

posted an estimated $1.1 billion a year in profits from 2004 through 2007 for its parent conglomerate, Time Warner, up from its previous record-setting marks of $725 in 2002 and $960 million in 2003 (Umstead; Flint; Dempsey; Peterson). These dollar figures were the highest annual yields ever earned by any network in the history of television. The Sopranos’ windfall profit margins thus fueled HBO’s transformation from mainly a domestic movie channel to an international cable-and-satellite network with a wide-reaching global presence. Since The Sopranos’ first season, HBO has aggressively expanded its worldwide footprint from forty countries in 1999 to fifty in 2004 to seventy in 2007 (Kumar; Power; Clarke; McDowell). Instead of just syndicating its programming to other international television services, HBO launched one branded channel after another in Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and Japan to go along with its subscription services in eighteen different Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, the Caribbean islands, Chile, Columbia, Costa Rica, Curacao, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela), six Central European nations (Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia), as well as HBO Asia and HBO India (Clarke). By the mid-2000s, HBO was a global brand that was stamped onto an array of distinctive and generously funded series headed first and foremost by The Sopranos, which in turn reinforced and strengthened the network’s name recognition and reputation all around the world.

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NBC produced Kingpin, a tepid clone of The Sopranos set within an international drug cartel à la Traffic (2000), which lasted for just six episodes as a midseason replacement in February 2003. At about the same time, The Sopranos was recovering all of its production costs for the first three seasons from DVD revenues alone. By early 2006, HBO had collected an additional “$190 million or a record $2.5 million an episode for The Sopranos” from A&E (Moss 2006). When The Sopranos debuted in 1999, the conventional wisdom was that the series had limited syndication potential because of all the swearing, nude dancers, and occasional scenes of blood and gore. When the series finally debuted on A&E in January 2007, however, it “drew 4.3 million total viewers, making it the most watched off-network series premiere in cable history and prompting a sigh of relief from A&E executives who dropped a record $2.55 million an episode for it in January 2005” (Becker 2005). Over the last decade, The Sopranos’ aftereffect has been so widespread and pervasive on a wide variety of other pay TV, cable-and-satellite, and broadcast channels that in a sense the program paved the way for its own syndication. A&E executive vice president and general manager Bob DeBitetto admits that “there was little need to edit” The Sopranos given the increasingly explicit nature of today’s sexual and violent portrayals on TV (“A&E Treads Lightly on Sopranos Violence”). Tony Soprano, too, has provided a new sort of role model for the many flawed anti-heroes that now populate the small screen, beginning with the often heavy-handed police detective Vic Mackey of FX’s The Shield (2002–2008) to the caustic though compelling Dr. Gregory House of Fox’s House M.D. (2004–12) and the surprisingly sympathetic serial killer Dexter Morgan of Showtime’s Dexter (2006–present) to the talented albeit deeply troubled advertising executive Don Draper on AMC’s Mad Men (2007–present). The Sopranos “prodded broadcast and cable networks alike to be more daring and creative with their scripted dramas.” The show also helped attract some

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Tony Soprano emerged as a modern-day Mephistopheles whose dark, dangerous charisma provided a template for subsequent flawed protagonists on TV.

of Hollywood’s most distinguished talents to HBO because it raised the unspoken “bar of quality” for what was now creatively possible on television (Moss 2007). Before its 1999 premiere, for example, there would have been “no way Al Pacino and Meryl Streep would have considered doing a movie there,” explains co-executive producer Cary Brokaw of Angels in America, “but their consistently good shows like The Sopranos made it possible” (Horn). According to TV Guide critic Matt Roush, “The Sopranos took TV to a new level,” affirming that “this is one

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of the cultural benchmarks for dramatic television, much like Hill Street Blues helped TV grow back in the 80s” (Moss 2007). Similarly, The Sopranos emerged as the prevailing standard by which the rest of TV would be judged by the professional community, critics, and audiences during the late 1990s up through the early to mid-2000s.

Chapter 2

Cinematic Television The Education of David Chase

I’ve never really wanted to be in television. I always wanted to be in the movies and I never could make that break. Feature films are what I love. David Chase (NPR, 2000)

D

avid Chase’s attitude toward television has always been ambivalent. He was a loyal fan of The Untouchables (1959– 1963, ABC), which was an early interest he could share with his father, and he later faithfully watched The Fugitive (1963–1967, ABC). By the time of his June 1963 graduation from West Essex High School in North Caldwell, New Jersey (which is also the town in which The Sopranos’ fictional home is set), he had “fallen out of love with TV,” becoming far more interested in rock and roll (as a drummer in a local band) and attending movies (Rucker, The Sopranos: A Family History 129). Authorship in television is always a group endeavor, and the interplay among the assembled above-the-line talents during any production process varies according to the specifics of the organizational structure and the behind-the-scenes dynamics of the particular program. Outside constraints such as time, cost, and

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network interventions also wield significant influence in shaping what eventually finds its way onto the screen. Even though The Sopranos is deeply rooted in the traditions of series TV and the conventions of numerous genres including the gangster, soap opera, therapeutic talk show, and sitcom, David Chase’s imprint is probably more recognizable throughout the aesthetic, narrative, and ideological trajectory of this program than is typically the case with most television shows, especially prior to the twenty-first century. He even argues that The Sopranos “is very idiosyncratic, and it’s very much what some people like to call a ‘personal vision’” (Longworth 23). “Network dramas have not been personal,” Chase continues. “I don’t know very many writers who have been cops, doctors, judges, presidents, or any of that . . . [and] even though it’s a mob show, The Sopranos is based on members of my family. It’s about as personal as you can get” (Biskind 280–281). Early Influences

David Chase was born on August 22, 1945, in Mount Vernon, New York. He was the only child of a second-generation ItalianAmerican couple, Henry and Norma Chase. (The surname had been anglicized from De Cesare by his paternal grandparents at the turn of the twentieth century.) Henry originally had been a printing press designer but later purchased and ran a hardware store, while Norma was a telephone-book proofreader. According to David, his parents were difficult to live with and often psychologically abusive to him and each other. His father was personally unhappy and professionally unfulfilled. He “was a very angry guy,” acknowledges Chase. “If he had a problem with me, I got the silent treatment. He wouldn’t speak to me for a week, two weeks” (Biskind 281). More than Henry, though, Norma Chase was “kind of morbid, very much like Livia [Soprano, who is played by Nancy Marchand], focused on the negative, and in the thrall of her own fears and paranoia” (NPR,

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2000). “She passed a lot of that on to me,” confesses David. “I was messed up as a teenager. It was just the three of us, and the dynamic of it, being very much involved in each other’s lives, wasn’t always healthy” (Longworth 28). When David was still in kindergarten, his family moved to a small garden apartment in Clifton, New Jersey, following a domestic dispute in which his mother forced his father to “forego a business opportunity in California to build some printing presses,” not unlike Livia Soprano’s refusal to let Tony’s dad, Giovanni “Johnny Boy” Soprano (Joseph Siravo) move the family to Reno, Nevada, to manage a supper club in “Down Neck” (Episode 7 in Season 1) (Rucker, The Sopranos: A Family History 134). Norma had grown up in the First Ward of Newark, which was a close-knit, Italian-American, working class neighborhood, and she simply was reluctant to travel far away from her extended family and her familiar surroundings. When David turned thirteen, his family moved again to “this leafier suburb” with “a WASP dream house in North Caldwell,” approximating the identical journey taken by Tony Soprano during the ninety-five second title sequence that opens all eighty-six episodes of the series. After Tony leaves Manhattan by way of the Lincoln Tunnel onto the New Jersey Turnpike, his commute home takes him through the mean urban streets of his Down Neck childhood in Newark with their modest working class houses and past a series of progressively plusher neighborhoods with their more respectable middle class homes. Finally he reaches a more secluded, forested road that leads upward to the driveway of his outsized brick McMansion complete with a backyard pool. David Thorburn aptly points out that The Sopranos’ opening sequence brilliantly encapsulates Tony’s rise in class and property and provides “a social history of Italians in America” (2,135). So it was with the Chases (née De Cesares). David’s maternal grandfather had been a blue collar socialist with little use for religion, so his family stopped attending the Catholic Church when Norma was a

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Livia Soprano was based on David Chase’s mother, Norma.

child. By young adulthood, “she found her way to this largely Italian Protestant church in Newark,” where she met and married Henry. They were Northern Baptists who later attended the Waldensian Evangelical Church, which had a congregation

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comprised chiefly of Italian-Americans. David, in turn, applied to Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which then was affiliated with the Southern Baptist Church, and majored in English between 1963 and 1965, a time when he also struggled mightily with panic attacks and severe depression. “I just found the South to be at the time stodgy, strange, and bigoted,” he explains. “I was from New Jersey. I grew up twenty-five miles from New York and I missed that” (Longworth 25). During his sophomore year at Wake Forest, Chase saw Fellini’s 8½ (1963), which made a huge impression on him as he began to think seriously about motion pictures for the first time. “I didn’t totally understand it but I liked it,” he recalls. “I saw my family in there. I saw those Italians. I saw those faces looking into the lens. I saw those operatic men and women and I thought, ‘I’m home. This is where I came from’” (Rucker, The Sopranos: A Family History 135–136). By his junior year, Chase transferred to New York University, just forty miles southeast of his home in North Caldwell. He was still majoring in English but also exploring his newfound interest in foreign films. Much to his parents’ chagrin, he married his high school sweetheart, Denise Kelly, soon after graduating from NYU in 1968 and decided to apply to film school. Norma “used to say, ‘My worst nightmare is that you’re going to marry an Irish Catholic girl, move to California, and I’ll never see you again,” which is close to what happened (Biskind 281). He needed to break away from his family, and his wife of now more than forty years provided him with the emotional support and stability to build a new life with her on the other side of the country (Oxfeld). Chase graduated from Stanford’s School of Film with a master’s degree in 1971. His thesis film was a gangster short entitled The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos (1971). The couple moved to Los Angeles, where Denise eventually convinced him to go into therapy when they were able to afford the expense. More importantly in terms of The Sopranos, she kept telling him “to

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write about your mother. Your stories about her have people on the floor at her outrageous behavior” (Longworth 29). So after a short stint as a soft-core porn production assistant and writing B-movie horror fare such as Grave of the Vampire (1972), which was the only film work he could find at first, Chase landed a position as a staff writer and story consultant on the short-lived cult favorite TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–1975, ABC), thus earning entrée into the ambit of broadcast television where he remained securely ensconced for the next twenty years while also completing the occasional spec script on the side (Daly 2000, 23). He established his reputation as a talented up-and-coming staff writer and supervising producer on The Rockford Files (1974–1980, NBC), which won the Emmy for “Outstanding Drama Series” in 1977–1978. He further cemented his reputation by producing two of his own feature-length screenplays as made-for-television movies for Universal TV. His first telefilm was the Emmy award-winning Off the Minnesota Strip (1980, ABC), while his second was a crime melodrama titled Moonlight (1982, CBS) with an ItalianAmerican protagonist. He also directed for the first time on Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985–1987, NBC) before co-creating, with friend and television veteran Lawrence Konner, his first original drama series, Almost Grown (1988–1989, CBS). This program proved to be a critical success but a ratings failure since it was scheduled against the ABC evergreen Monday Night Football (1970–2005). Almost Grown was also autobiographical for Chase as it involved a young couple who relocated to California in the late 1960s but still stayed connected to their extended New Jersey family through flashbacks triggered by a Scorsese-like rock-and-roll soundtrack. From that point until the scripting and piloting of The Sopranos during the mid- to late 1990s, he made a comfortable living as a staff writer, producer, director, and showrunner working for other executive producers, most notably Joshua Brand and John Falsey on I’ll Fly Away (1991–1993, NBC), a period Civil Rights drama

A Family Affair

David Chase subsequently cast and directed The Sopranos’ pilot in 1997, which HBO funded at the generous (at that time)

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informed by Chase’s teenaged experiences in North Carolina, and Northern Exposure (1990–1995, CBS), where he essentially oversaw the entire production between 1993 and 1995. In hindsight, David Chase admits, “I did it for the money. I’ve always wanted to be working in movies and I never could make that jump” (Heffernan 2004). By the time his talent management and production company, Brillstein-Grey, began submitting his Sopranos script to the broadcast networks in 1995, Chase was well known throughout the mainstream television community as talented, capable, and dependable but “too dark” and “complicated.” Lawrence Konner, who later wrote three episodes of The Sopranos during 2001 and 2002, reveals that “David’s reputation inside the TV industry was ‘Good writer, good manager, but what’s going on in his brain we don’t want to be part of . . . He’s not a happy-go-lucky guy. He’s a troubled guy” (Biskind 239, 280). Chase concedes that he is sometimes “depressed” and somewhat “out of step” with the ideological and aesthetic imperatives of the broadcast networks. Within the broadcasting sector of the industry, Fox showed the most interest in developing The Sopranos. Executive producer Brad Grey confirms that he first “steered the script to the networks” because of the windfall potential in broadcast TV, but ironically “it wasn’t violent enough” for Fox. “I was foolish and greedy,” adds Grey. “It was basically a waste of time, really bad judgment on my part, because even if they had taken it, it wouldn’t have been The Sopranos” (Biskind 281). Grey next looked to HBO because he had placed The Larry Sanders Show there in the early 1990s. The timing was perfect since HBO’s executive team was newly committed to substantially increasing the amount of original programming they were financing and scheduling.

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sum of $3 million. With a projected budget of $2.5 to $2.7 million per episode, the premium network took almost six months to make the final decision on picking up the first season of the series, suggesting alternative titles such as Family Man, The Tony Files, Made in New Jersey, and New Jersey Blood, since HBO’s programmers thought The Sopranos would evoke singers and confuse the audience concerning what type of program it was. Chase nevertheless held firm on the title, basing it on a local family name he remembered from his high school days. More importantly, though, HBO needed to commit over $30 million to bankroll the first season, which would make it the most expensive drama per episode ever produced up to that point for what was admittedly an unconventional gangster series with a prominent therapeutic angle, centering mainly on an overweight if charismatic lead character with a receding hairline. “If it didn’t work,” recounts CEO Jeffrey Bewkes about HBO’s uncertainty, “we were completely wiped out” (Biskind 282). For his part, David Chase “was hoping against hope that it wouldn’t get bought and that I could talk HBO into spending another $500,000 to make it into a feature and we could take it to Cannes” (Nochimson 2007, 246; Peyser 2006). HBO eventually took a leap of faith as scripting for the series began in the spring of 1998 and production commenced in late summer. Despite the fact that he was back on television, albeit with the greater creative freedom and financial support available at HBO, Chase decided to make “the kind of stuff I’ve always loved to see. I didn’t want it to be a TV show. I wanted to make a little movie every week” (Biskind 281). Now in his early fifties, David Chase was ready to take his career in a completely different direction. “I don’t know if you can tell it by looking at The Sopranos, but I had just had it up to here with all the niceties of network television. I couldn’t take it anymore,” he maintains. “And I don’t mean language and violence. I just mean storytelling, inventiveness, something that could really entertain and surprise people” (Longworth

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David Chase’s professional reputation was as a talented and highly productive writer-producer who also could be complicated and downbeat.

34). Chase remembers that William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) made a deep and lasting impression on him when he was only nine, watching it repeatedly one week on WOR Channel 9’s Million Dollar Movie, which played the same film Monday through Friday. Jimmy Cagney plays Irish mobster Tom Powers, who is both charming and dangerous as he climbs the ladder of unlawful success from juvenile delinquent to monstrous prohibition-era gangster. Predictably he receives his just

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desserts in the last scene at the hands of a rival gang that leaves him bandaged and bound in a blanket and rope on his mother’s doorstep. The Public Enemy ends with Tom tumbling mummylike through the front door to the utter horror of his straitlaced brother, Mike, while his sweet, little old Irish mother prepares the back bedroom for his imminent arrival home as the lighthearted Tin Pan Alley ditty “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” plays on the Victrola. “This was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen,” recalls Chase. “I was scared about this for a month. I could not get that out of my mind . . . those people’s expectations in the house. They were so happy that he was coming home and he was dead in such a horrible way and how he wasted his life” (NPR, 2000). Along with Little Caesar (1931) and Scarface (1932), The Public Enemy is among the most important foundational texts of the gangster movie genre. Of this trio, it is also the one with the highest profile mother figure—the long-suffering, nonjudgmental Ma Powers who loves her “baby . . . Tommy boy” unconditionally while asking almost nothing of him in return. Not coincidentally, The Public Enemy is referenced intermittently in The Sopranos, especially in “Proshai, Livushka” (Episode 28 in Season 3), the episode in which Livia dies of a massive stroke in her bed. Three different characters watch The Public Enemy on Tony’s state-of-the-art home theater over five scenes that together serve as the spine of the episode. The first one involves his daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and her new Jewish African-American boyfriend, Noah Tannenbaum (Patrick Tully), who have just watched the film on assignment for one of their classes at Columbia University. Noah is in the bathroom when Tony lumbers downstairs clad in only his underwear and an untied white terrycloth bathrobe and finds Meadow alone on the couch rewinding the videotape. He momentarily glances at the screen, noting in approval, “Public Enemy, a great movie,” as Noah returns to the family room, telling Tony in his clumsy attempt at small talk that “Cagney is modernity” and the course

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he and Meadow are taking is about “images of hyper-Capitalist self-advancement in the era of the studio system.” Once Meadow leaves the room, Tony calls Noah “a ditsoon [Italian for burnt]. A charcoal briquette. A mulignan [eggplant]” and informs him in no uncertain terms to stay away from his daughter. Noah is understandably offended by Tony’s overt bigotry and immediately leaves through the front door. When Meadow later notices a change in her boyfriend’s behavior toward her, she concludes that her father must have said something to Noah—although she is unable to get either boyfriend or father to give her a straight answer as to what might have transpired between them. Where family dynamics serve as the backdrop to criminal activity in The Public Enemy, domestic matters are front and center in The Sopranos. In both cases, however, the family drama is filtered through a masculine lens. Gangster narratives are replete with suppressed feelings, hidden motives, and displaced anger expressed through seemingly abrupt and unexpected bursts of violence. According to Martha Nochimson, the “gangster protagonist is in the most profound way a family man who gives the audience a means of obliquely exploring family life, free from the stigma attached to emotions and ‘women’s entertainment’” (Nochimson 2002–2003, 4). Tony may be temporarily estranged from Meadow over what took place between him and Noah, but his biggest concern is whether or not Livia will testify against him for giving his mother two stolen plane tickets that resulted in Livia being detained by security along with her sister Quintina at the Newark Airport in “Funhouse” (Episode 26 in Season 2). In what turns out to be their last conversation together, mother and son argue acrimoniously over her intentions, with Livia refusing to give Tony a clear indication as what she plans to tell prosecutors, if anything. The FBI have been building a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization) case against Tony ever since the beginning of the series. In the scene following his quarrel with Livia, Tony retreats to

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his den to watch The Public Enemy. As the film’s opening disclaimer scrolls up, the screen announcing that “Tom Powers” is “a problem that sooner or later we, the public, must solve,” Tony giggles and sips his scotch. A couple of scenes later Tony is met by Carmela, Meadow, and Anthony, Jr. (also known as A.J., played by Robert Iler) in their kitchen where his wife gently breaks the news that Livia has passed away. Tony is obviously shaken. Soon afterward he shares a shot of vodka with Carmela and Svetlana (Alla Kliouka Schaffer), his mother’s Russian caregiver, who toasts “Proshai, Livushka” (“Good-bye, Little Livia”) to mark her passing. These intimate vignettes illustrate how the gangster narrative reverses “our usual patterns of identification by engaging us and our feelings with career criminals” over “law-abiding citizens,” foreign immigrant stock over mainline Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and the “sacred ties” of family over the unfettered license required “to succeed in a competitive economic system” (Nochimson 2002–2003, 3). Where The Public Enemy presents Tom Powers in the opening credits as a social problem to be solved, Tony Soprano is diagnosed by his psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), as a “criminal personality” and a “sociopath” in “The Blue Comet” (Episode 85 in Season 6). Dr. Melfi similarly characterizes Livia as having a “borderline personality disorder” that makes her incapable of “love or compassion” and “very good at creating conflict for others in [her] circle” in “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” (Episode 13 in Season 1). Tony Soprano is not offered up as a sociological specimen in The Sopranos but rather as an individual who must continually manage his professional responsibilities to his mob associates along with the many commitments he assumes as head of his extended blood family. For example, Tony is the one to call his sisters, Barbara (Nicole Burdette) and Janice (Aida Turturro), to tell them that their mother has died. He even agrees to pay Janice’s plane fare home from Seattle for the funeral after a testy exchange predictably erupts between the two siblings.

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Janice Soprano was certainly her mother’s daughter, especially when making trouble for Tony.

With all these domestic stresses, Tony has a hard time sleeping that night as he trudges downstairs to view The Public Enemy yet again, snickering at the scene in which Tom Powers smashes the grapefruit in Kitty’s face after she tries to mother him into not drinking “before breakfast” but instantly turning sullen as he watches Tom bicker with his brother Mike over

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which one is better at “taking care of Ma.” After Livia’s wake and just before her funeral, Tony is shown for the third time staring forlornly at The Public Enemy, this time the scene in which Tom Powers falls into the gutter after his shootout with the rival gang, acknowledging to no one in particular, “I ain’t so tough.” Tony then manages a wan smile as the scene culminates with Ma Powers visiting Tom at the hospital. The climax of “Proshai, Livushka” involves a group remembrance of Livia initiated by Janice in the Sopranos’ living room following the funeral. The immediate family and friends are there, and after Janice forces several guests to make some reluctant comments about Livia, Carmela finally speaks the truth about a person who “was terribly dysfunctional.” Torn between her desire to “protect [her] children from the truth about their grandmother” and not wanting to behave hypocritically in front of them, Carmela concludes with sympathetic directness toward Livia: “She didn’t want a funeral. She didn’t think anyone would come . . . She figured nobody loved her . . . she knew there was a problem.” Awash in sadness and regret, the scene mercifully ends with everyone tacitly agreeing with Carmela’s remarks. The episode closes with Tony sitting alone cradling another scotch as he watches The Public Enemy for the fourth and final time. Ma Powers and Mike visit a heavily bandaged Tom at the hospital after the shootout. He apologizes to them for his life of crime, and his mother consoles him by saying, “No, no, Tommy! You’re my baby!” The aforementioned climactic scene follows with Tom’s last “appearance as a mummified corpse, horrifically evocative of a swaddled infant” as he collapses through the doorway in a dead heap on the Powers’ living room floor (Nochimson 2002–2003, 4). Tony Soprano cries at the deathly sight, triggered by his deeper and more immediate grief over the loss of his own mother. His own scarred childhood also serves as a stark contrast to the loving and sentimentalized mother-son relationship in The Public Enemy. “The

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death of a parent launches a period of self-reflection and the transformation of adult identity,” reports sociologist Debra Umberson. “For adults who lose an extremely critical or dysfunctional parent, the effect may be more positive than negative. This sort of loss can be freeing to an adult whose self-image was long undermined by the parent” (8–9). This propensity for a psychological release and a renewed start is far more evident in David Chase than the fictional Tony Soprano, who merely learns to be a more effective criminal after seven years of “the talking cure” with Dr. Melfi (“The Blue Comet,” Episode 85 in Season 6). Chase, in contrast, processed what he characterizes as a “lifetime of research” through psychotherapy dating back to the early 1970s, which inspired him to first conceive of a story about “a gangster in therapy” around 1988 following the death of his father and then finish the script in 1994 soon after the passing of his mother (“The Tony Tapes”; Longworth 28–29; Daly 2000, 25). “I really don’t know [if I could] have done it with her alive,” confesses Chase, “if my mother knew that [Livia] was her, she’d be greatly offended” (NPR, 2000; Daly 2000, 25). “A shrink once said to me,” continues Chase, “O.K., so your parents are your parents. What would you like to do? Should we have an auto de fé and burn the old lady at the stake? She’s your mother. What can you do about it?” (NPR, 2000). David’s solution was to couple his mother fixation with his “lifelong obsession with the mafia” to create The Sopranos (Longworth 30). Chase admits that “some of Livia’s dialogue is actual dialogue from my mother” (Rucker 136). For instance, Norma Chase speaks through Livia in the following: “What do you care? Out of sight, out of mind!” and “I wish the Lord would take me now” from “Meadowlands” (Episode 4 in Season 1); “Oh, Mr. Sensitive now” and “I could stick this fork in your eye!” from “Down Neck,” (Episode 7 in Season 1). Chase describes Norma as a “nervous woman who dominated any situation she was in by being so needy and always on the verge of hysteria . . . She

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wouldn’t answer the phone after dark” and “wouldn’t drive in the rain,” which are behaviors exhibited by Livia in the pilot episode of The Sopranos (Biskind 281). Above all else, the roots of The Sopranos is an extended family affair. For example, David Chase’s paternal grandfather was

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David Chase drew heavily on his own extended family in creating The Sopranos. For example, Chase, too, had an uncle who wore large, thick glasses and complained a lot.

Stylistic Eclecticism

David Chase boldly and imaginatively integrated into The Sopranos all of the old classic movie and newer cutting-edge television work he admired. Besides The Public Enemy, he leapt at the opportunity to craft a gangster narrative in the tradition of Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese. Lloyd Braun, then of Brillstein-Grey, first told Chase in 1994 that he believed he had “a great TV show inside of [him]” and suggested he do “a TV version of The Godfather” (Rucker 2003,133). The crimeand-punishment formula had long been a staple on prime-time television, but the more transgressive counter-narrative to the American Dream that governs the gangster genre had few prototypes in TV history. Furthermore, the examples that had been

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a master stonemason who served as the model for Corrado Soprano, Sr., with Tony revealing to Meadow that “he and his brother Frank built” the old neighborhood Catholic Church in Newark that they are sitting in during the pilot episode. In addition, Chase had an uncle who wore thick glasses and complained much like Corrado Soprano, Jr. (also known as Uncle Junior, played by Dominic Chianese). Chase had “a woman psychiatrist” like Dr. Melfi, and this therapist once told David that his mother probably had a “borderline personality disorder.” Chase was forced to put an unwilling Norma into a nursing home right before her death, and he also named Livia after one of his maternal aunts. Chase based Carmela on his cousin Diana who “was a great mother and an extremely capable, sharp woman, but you could not push her” or “you’d hear about it.” And “there’s a dollop of [David Chase’s] daughter [Michele] in Meadow” (Nochimson 2007, 248; Daly 2000, 25; NPR, 2000; Rucker 136). “I do know that my experience as a parent goes into The Sopranos,” confides Chase. “In a way, writing that stuff and seeing it come to life is my favorite part of the show” (NPR, 2004).

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recently tried up to that point—such as The Gangster Chronicles (1981, NBC), Crime Story (1986–1988, NBC), and Wiseguy (1987–1990, CBS)—had enjoyed only mixed success at best. Chase was more inclined to revisit his interest in The Public Enemy and further explore the long-standing gangster tradition in film than to look to TV crime shows as he developed The Sopranos. He had just completed a theatrical spec script with a lead character temporarily named Tommy Soprano after Tom Powers, which he wrote with Robert DeNiro in mind (Longworth 29; Rucker 134). Horace Newcomb delineates how “The Godfather series of films” furnishes a “significant generic foundation for The Sopranos.” He notes how Coppola’s trilogy initiated audiences into the underworld argot, the organizational framework, and most importantly, “the two meanings of ‘family’” that are endemic to the “fictional mafia” (566). The Godfather saga also provided the narrative trope explored in “Commendatori” (Episode 17 in Season 2) that has Tony, “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri (Tony Sirico), and Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) journeying back to Napoli to rediscover their old world Italian roots as well as conducting some business. Martin Scorsese was an even greater inspiration for Chase than Coppola in the way Scorsese provided “an insider’s knowledge and perspective on the world of the gangster” in Mean Streets (1972), Goodfellas (1990), and Casino (1995) (Verevis 212–213). Scorsese adopted a self-proclaimed “anthropological” viewpoint in order to capture the “lifestyle” of gangland “Italian Americans on the everyday scale—not the Godfather, not the big bosses” (Scorsese 162). David Chase readily acknowledges Scorsese’s “tremendous influence” on him in subject matter and stylistics, claiming that Goodfellas was his “bible” in producing The Sopranos (NPR, 2000). Chase likewise embraces a similar brand of “expressive realism” in which the representational emphasis in The Sopranos is on “making things as real as possible” while still filtering these “ethnographic details” through Chase’s own sensibilities and personal agenda as

Cinematic Television

the program’s showrunner (Verevis, 209, 211). Whereas Scorsese has often examined the urban subculture of Italian Americans, Chase shifts the focus more toward suburbia and the complex give and take involved in ethnic assimilation. Scorsese examines masculinity mostly through male relationships, while Chase extends this agenda to the many strong women who simultaneously reinforce and challenge Tony’s sense of self, including his mother, Livia, his wife, Carmela, his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, his sister Janice, and his daughter, Meadow. Scorsese also evinces the traditional Roman Catholic preoccupation with guilt and redemption, while Chase’s outlook is more clinically psychosocial in his admitted obsession with “the crimes that people wreak on each other, psychic punishment, and psychic self-punishment” (Longworth 30). Talk therapy in this sense is a secular, more contemporary variation on the Catholic confession. Moreover, Chase presents Tony and Carmela’s lifestyle as wholly recognizable and akin to the mores and values of most viewers watching The Sopranos, unlike Coppola and Scorsese who show the gangster milieu from the inside out as a world unto itself. Like Coppola and Scorsese, however, Chase is highly literate in cinema. “The Sopranos is first and foremost a gangster saga, but like the best films of Coppola and Scorsese, draws on the art cinema of Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and Jean-Luc Godard,” contends film historian William Siska (26–27). For instance, the deliberate animal cruelty epitomized by the burning of horses in Bergman’s The Passion of Anna (1969) prefigures the fire set by Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano) who immolates the racehorse Pie-O-My for the insurance money in “Whoever Did This” (Episode 48 in Season 4); the dead, bloated stingray pulled ashore at the conclusion of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita (1960) echoes the largely metaphoric appearance of Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero (Vincent Pastore) as a talking fish in one of Tony’s dreams that makes him realize that his longtime friend and criminal associate has turned state’s evidence against him

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as an FBI informant in “Funhouse” (Episode 26 in Season 2); and the lovesick Ferdinand’s second thoughts about committing suicide in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965) anticipates A.J.’s aborted suicide attempt in “The Second Coming” (Episode 84 in Season 6). Literally dozens of analogous examples abound throughout the six-plus seasons of The Sopranos. “There was a lot of influence from European, Japanese, and all kinds of foreign films,” affirms Chase. “I had always loved movies and that’s what I wanted to do” (Longworth 26). David Chase was also greatly impressed by the heightened visual quality and unconventional viewpoints of a few select prime-time series, most specifically Twin Peaks (1990–1991, ABC) and The Simpsons (1989–present, Fox). After being deeply enmeshed in primetime television’s production culture for nearly two decades, Chase claims that Twin Peaks “opened his eyes to the medium’s potential” (Stanley 28). “I didn’t really watch much television until the first season of Twin Peaks in 1990,” concedes Chase. “There’s mystery in everything David Lynch does. I don’t mean, Who killed Laura Palmer? There’s a whole other level . . . of the poetic that you see in great painting, that you see in foreign films, that’s way more than the sum of its parts. I didn’t see that on television. I didn’t see anybody even trying it” (Biskind 281). The effect of Lynch’s work on Chase is apparent within the first five minutes of the pilot episode of The Sopranos when Tony tells Dr. Melfi that several months before his latest panic attack “these two wild ducks had landed in my pool. Amazing. From Canada or someplace, I don’t know. It was mating season.” The scene then flashes back to Tony standing transfixed in his backyard, watching a gaggle of wild mallards waddle out of the bushes and around the Tropitone patio furniture. It is a bucolic summer day in suburbia. Tony is dressed only in shorts and an open bathrobe as he wades up to his waist in the family swimming pool to adjust a plywood launching ramp that he has built for the ducks. He is filled with wonder—more like a little boy than the hardened mob boss that the audience is expect-

Cinematic Television

ing. The bright, luminous lighting and overly saturated colors coincide with Tony’s exuberant mood, rendering this seemingly ordinary morning scene almost dreamlike in its whimsical intensity. These Lynchian touches are used sparingly in The Sopranos, but they serve as an effective counterpoint to the mostly realistic representations that epitomize most of the series. For example, the next memory Tony shares with Dr. Melfi is when he and Christopher unexpectedly bump into a middleaged CPA named Alex Mahaffey (Michael Gaston) who owes them gambling money. When Mahaffey sees the gangsters, he spills his coffee and runs as Tony chases him down in Christopher’s brand-new Lexus 400 with a doo-wop song reminiscent of a Scorsese action sequence playing diegetically in the background. Aside from the music, the scene is straightforward and naturalistic in its mise-en-scène and camerawork. The transition from hyperreality to expressive realism from one scene to the next is relatively seamless, thus reflecting a level of aesthetic flexibility and nuance that was far more common of theatrical films at the time than prime-time television. David Lynch’s impact on The Sopranos can best be summarized as involving ducks and dreams. The mallards suggest a mysterious hidden reality that Tony is neither able nor willing to face on his own. His whole sense of reality is out of balance, judging by the patterns of deception and the endless stream of half-truths that underlie his life. Tony Soprano is never completely honest with anyone—including himself. Sometimes he even treats his wife, children, and Dr. Melfi as mere marks to be conned. Tony shows his true stripes as he whispers into the ear of stool pigeon Fred Peters (also known as Fabian “Febby” Petrulio, played by Tony Ray Rossi), “One thing about us wiseguys—the hustle never ends,” while garrotting him with a wire in “College” (Episode 5 in Season 1). Later that afternoon he sits exhausted and emotionless outside the admissions office at Bowdoin College while Meadow is interviewing inside. He slumps back in his chair, looking up at the inscription above

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the lintel on the door across the room: “‘No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true’—Nathaniel Hawthorne.” As Tony stares blankly at the lettering a student walks by and offers this aside: “he’s our most famous alum.” Although Tony Soprano is streetwise, he is neither overly reflective nor particularly self-aware. As a result, Chase follows David Lynch’s lead by utilizing the symbology of metaphors and dreams to uncover a deeper understanding of Tony’s interior life. Toward the end of the pilot episode, for instance, Melfi helps Tony realize why he is so obsessed with the ducks. He recalls a troubling dream he’s just had, and when she points out that “once those ducks had their babies, they became a family,” together they reach a breakthrough: “You’re right—that’s what I’m full of dread about, that I’m going to lose my family. Just like I lost the ducks. It’s always with me.” David Chase was motivated by Twin Peaks to be innovative in television in ways he had never considered before, such as using the occasional dream sequence in The Sopranos’ serial narrative. He believes David Lynch does “the best dreams in the entire art form” (Nochimson 2007, 241). In turn, Chase enlarged the narrative and visual vocabulary of The Sopranos to include what he characterized as “Twin Peaks in the Jersey Meadowlands” (Delaney). For example, he begins “Meadowlands” (Episode 4 in Season 1) with another therapy session in Dr. Melfi’s inner office, but everything is a little off-kilter. Doctor and patient are flirting with each other, followed by Tony seeing a quick montage of loan shark and advisor Herman “Hesh” Rabkin (Jerry Adler) walking by, A.J. appearing from behind a door, and Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) making love to one of the exotic dancers from the Bada Bing strip club while Tony is seated next to Paulie and “Big Pussy” in the outside waiting room of that establishment. Tony then walks back into the interior office in a daze only to find Livia dressed as Dr. Melfi and seated in her chair. Viewers suddenly realize they are eaves-

Cinematic Television

The Sopranos always stayed true to character, such as when Tony garrotted a stool pigeon in the episode titled “College.”

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dropping on one of Tony’s dreams as he awakes abruptly next to his Russian mistress, Irina Pelsin (Oksana Lada). In a mere ninety seconds, Tony’s early morning reverie suggests he has strong sexual feelings for Dr. Melfi and that he is also worried that his crew and extended family will find out about his secret psychiatric sessions. Moreover, his mother squashes his erotic fantasy by turning it into a frightening nightmare. Dreams have always been a controversial part of The Sopranos for that segment of the audience who most wants the series to be more like a conventional gangster narrative. “This is a story about a man who goes to a therapist,” explains Chase, who wrote the vast majority of the series’ dream sequences, “so those dreams are

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earned” and “often have to be interpreted” (Nochimson 2007, 241). In addition, David Chase gravitated toward “the comic dysfunction and vulgarity of The Simpsons” (Delaney). When a crying Livia calls her grandson A.J. to tell him she’s too ill to attend his birthday party in the pilot episode, the chubby slacker-intraining blurts out as soon as he gets off the phone, “So what, no fucking ziti now?” à la Bart Simpson in front of his mother, father, and family priest. “At its core,” notes creator Matt Groening, “The Simpsons is about being in a family and families drive you crazy” (NPR, 2003). Chase adopts this satirical spirit in The Sopranos in order to leaven the increasingly dark family drama and sporadic acts of violence with an occasional scene of comic relief that approximates “a live-action Simpsons” (Peyser 2001). Even Tony at times resembles the boorish if exasperatingly lovable Homer as in his aforementioned encounter with Meadow’s mixed-race boyfriend, Noah Tannenbaum, in “Proshai, Livushka.” After reading Noah the riot act about Meadow, Noah storms out the front door, and Tony retreats to his cozy kitchen to rustle up some comfort food: Italian cold cuts on white bread. Foraging through the cupboard for a side dish, he catches a glimpse of Uncle Ben on a box of rice, instantly becomes light-headed, drops his glass, and passes out from yet another panic attack. Carmela finds him facedown on the kitchen floor, and when she turns him over the first thing out of his mouth is “Uncle Ben.” Chase then simulates Tony’s memory by playing back the entire scene in reverse motion as he ostensibly fills Carmela in on what happened between him, Noah, and Meadow. “If you want her to be with him,” Carmela warns after hearing Tony out, “keep playing the race card. You’re going to drive her right into his arms.” This scene illustrates the stylistic eclecticism of The Sopranos. It contains the intertextual referencing to The Public Enemy; the overheated, melodramatic exchange between father and daughter’s boyfriend; the broad humorous aftermath at Tony’s

Cinematic Television

expense when he’s thrown for a loop by Uncle Ben; and the reverse-motion flourish that was a fairly common self-reflexive technique employed by at least two generations of European filmmakers from high modernists such as Jean Cocteau in La Belle et La Bête (1946) to New Wave progenitors such as François Truffaut in Les Mistons (1957). Although there are memorable conversations in each and every episode of The Sopranos, Chase refused to be “a prisoner of dialogue,” instead pushing his writing team to “open it up, make it look like a feature every week, try to do a small movie, which means more than just talking heads” (“Hit Man”). As writer and director, he also planned the pilot “to be cinematic,” intending it to serve as the stylistic template for the rest of the series (Biskind 281). As international TV researcher Trisha Dunleavy recounts, “The Sopranos was shot on single-camera film and fully exploited the cinematic regard for visual style, most evident in its feature-like cinematography, subdued and textured lighting, and richly detailed sets.” With such prototypes as Miami Vice (1984–1990, NBC) and Twin Peaks, cinematic television thus came of age with the debut of The Sopranos. It had arrived full-blown as a hybridized style of production that merged the intimacy, immediacy, and long-form narrative complexity of TV with the more controversial and ambiguous thematics, wider palette of visual techniques, and much higher production values typically associated with feature films. The Sopranos synthesized the once separate albeit related aesthetic spheres of cinema and television into one stylistic mélange as never before. Most improbably, it took a TV journeyman with a chip on his shoulder to pull it off. By all accounts, David Chase was not an easy boss on The Sopranos; his years in the trenches at the broadcast networks had made him a demanding taskmaster. “Though he work[ed] with a stable of writers, producers, and directors, it [was] Chase who [was] the final arbiter of The Sopranos’ casting, editing, and musical scoring. The cast and crew began calling him ‘the master cylinder’” early on as their way

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of describing the extraordinary level of control that he exerted over every aspect of production (Daly 1999, 10). Chase in turn showed “little patience for learning on the job.” He tolerated no improvisation from the actors. “During the first season,” he “fired almost every writer on the show when his or her first draft came in.” When all was said and done, “only Robin Green, Mitch Burgess, and Frank Renzulli were left standing” (Biskind 284). The husband-and-wife writing team of Green and Burgess had worked with Chase before on Northern Exposure. Renzulli was especially helpful in knowing “various mob haunts” from growing up in Boston’s North End (Lieberman). By the second season, Terence Winter joined this small cadre of veterans, writing or co-writing twenty-two episodes throughout the remaining five-plus seasons of The Sopranos, second only to Chase’s twenty-five writing credits. David Chase summed up his role on The Sopranos as being “the final story editor” (Longworth 24). “Everything [was] farmed out, but then everything [came] back to him and then [was] shaped by him,” adds longtime collaborator Lawrence Konner. “Every shot, every word of The Sopranos is David in some way or another” (Biskind 284). According to David Lavery and Robert Thompson, “Chase’s stewardship, including his active participation in all the editing . . . maximized the potential of the serial form while protecting his show from becoming a traditional television narrative” (14–15). Only a half-dozen out of 145 networks in all of American television were commissioning hour-long scripted dramas when HBO finally greenlit The Sopranos in late December 1997 (Scanlon 14). Looking back with the kind of dark humor he inherited from his mother, Chase observes that the Sopranos success “happened to me really late in life. Really late. Until then, I was like at best a captain in the Genovese family. I wasn’t even a street boss” (Rucker, The Sopranos: A Family History 131). That didn’t stop him from standing tall in the face of executive pressure at HBO, however, when he refused to compromise on

Cinematic Television

his original conception of the show. A turning point in the series came in the previously mentioned fifth episode, “College,” when Tony takes matters into his own hands and strangles a former member of his crime family who turned FBI informant years before and had been hiding out in the Witness Protection Program ever since. HBO programming chief Chris Albrecht objected to having Tony murder the guy because “it’s too early, the audience will hate him” (Oxfeld). Chase disagreed: Tony is “a mob boss. We need to see him support the code. If he doesn’t kill the guy, the audience is going to lose respect for him.” To his credit, Albrecht listened to his showrunner’s rationale and ended up supporting him. For his part, David Chase surmised that Tony’s cold-blooded act of murder “was the moment when that show became different than every other television show” (Wallace). Chris Albrecht also endorsed the enhanced cost of shooting “on-location (in New Jersey) cinematic-style” even though it greatly increased the series’ overall expense (Lavery “The Sopranos,” 190). “David’s vision really depended on the look of New Jersey,” Albrecht recalls, adding that the state’s distinctive suburban, industrial landscape could not be “manufactured someplace else” (Daly 2000, 23). All parties were in full agreement concerning the importance of creating a credible and compelling sense of place, which helped ensure The Sopranos’ popular and critical success as well as its full realization as cinematic television.

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Disorganized Crime Living Large in the Suburbs

In Jersey anything’s legal as long as you don’t get caught. Bob Dylan, “Tweeter and the Monkey Man”

A

s is commonplace with stereotyping, the popular image of New Jersey has been shaped mostly by people from outside the state. New Yorkers have traditionally looked down on their cousins across the Hudson River, just as members of the fictional Brooklyn-based Lupertazzi mob often felt and acted superior to the North Jersey DiMeo crime family headed by Tony in The Sopranos. New York has always been the home base of the Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”) or U.S. Mafia, comprised of five major Italian-American families—Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese—who have at times derisively referred to their criminal counterparts in North Jersey as “farmers.” David Chase, his appetite whetted by local print and TV news stories, was a gangster film aficionado who immersed himself in mob folklore at an early age. Chase’s Mafiarelated fictional recreations in The Sopranos are in turn reasonable facsimiles of their real-life inspirations, such as the DiMeo clan standing in for the DeCavalcante crime family of northern

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New Jersey and the Lupertazzi syndicate as a loose surrogate for the Gambino organization. Chase and his creative team strove for a convincing level of verisimilitude in their presentation of all things underworld, such as in the staging of Christopher Moltasanti’s “made man” induction ceremony (which involved formally instating him into La Cosa Nostra) in “Fortunate Son” (Episode 29 in Season 3), complete with its secret location, dimly lit room, brightly illuminated sacred candle, lots of allmale bonhomie, and a pinprick on the novice’s trigger finger dripping blood on the picture of a saint (in this case, St. Peter) that is burned in the taper’s flame as the initiate takes the oath of Omertà (i.e., silence): “May I burn in hell if I betray my friends.” The Sopranos often featured these kinds of exotic accoutrements of organized crime, much in the same way that the contemporaneous ER fetishized the arcane surface-level details and routines of the medical profession. The Sopranos even occasionally inserted well-placed gangster culture expositions such as in the highly efficient three minute and ten second opening pre-title scene in “46 Long” (Episode 2 in Season 1) in which Tony, Silvio, “Big Pussy,” Paulie, and Christopher are in the back room of their favorite hangout, the Bada Bing strip club (which is owned and operated by consigliere Silvio Dante). The DiMeo inner circle are sorting and counting a tabletop full of cash while watching a TV talk show during which a U.S. attorney and a former Genovese soldier, Vincent Rizzo (Steven Randazzo), currently a best-selling author, opines about why there’s “confusion” and “instability” in the Mafia today caused largely by “drug trafficking” and the 1970 RICO statutes where racketeering charges on any continuing criminal organization are now clustered together resulting in “a mandatory thirty-five to life in prison” for criminals who “rat on each other just to avoid prosecution,” according to Rizzo. The host then asks his underworld guest “so the code of silence or Omertà or whatever you want to call it, just went by the boards?” Rizzo replies that “the heyday, the golden age of

Disorganized Crime

the mob, is gone,” but “as long as the human being has certain appetites for gambling, pornography, or whatever,” there will be organized crime. Despite the Mafia 101 didacticism, which comes in handy later in The Sopranos’ elongated serial narrative to explain why specific mob characters betray their longtime friends and associates, this particular scene is brought to life through the male-bonding rituals of trading good-natured insults and encouraging Silvio at the beginning and the end to perform what is apparently his signature impersonation of Al Pacino from The Godfather, Part III—“Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back in”—to the high-fiving delight of his fellow mobsters. Unlike most gangster narratives since The Godfather (1972), The Sopranos is not a period piece; instead, it is in close synchronicity with the mood and agenda of its audience as it unfolded between 1999 and 2007. A renewed preoccupation with “the mafia and The Sopranos fit in with the current fin de siècle melancholy that seems momentarily to have gripped the culture,” wrote Albert Auster in 2001 (38). “I think there’s an overwhelming sadness about The Sopranos,” David Chase likewise added. “The original joke or conceit of the show is that things had gotten so selfish in America that it even made a gangster sick” (Nochimson 2007, 255). In the pilot episode, for example, Tony tells Dr. Melfi that he’s haunted by feelings that “things are trending downward,” even though he’s successfully climbed out of his Down Neck Newark childhood to the fashionable upper-middle-class suburb of North Caldwell some fifteen miles to the northwest. He voices the disappointments and frustrations of many viewers when he offers observations to Dr. Melfi about “male baby-boomer American leadership in an age of irreconcilable demands and diminished expectations” (Poniewozik March 2007, 125): “Lately I’m getting the feeling I might be in at the end—that the best is over . . . Take my father. He never reached the heights like me. But in ways he had it better. He had his people—they had their standards. They had pride. Today what do we got?”

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54 Left to right: Ralphie, Silvio, Tony, and Paulie talk shop outside Satriale’s Pork Store, which was a stand-in for Sacco’s Meat Market, a favorite hangout of the DeCavalcante crime family of North Jersey.

Even a mafioso like Tony Soprano feels that the United States has lost its way and no longer lives up to its core beliefs. The vast majority of Americans at the time similarly perceived that their civic institutions had eroded, and corruption was far more prevalent at the turn of the twenty-first century than it was just a half-century before. “We don’t see high ideals as being a benefit” anymore, reports anthropologist Mark Shutes. “We see [them] as being a weakness.” No longer are criminals viewed as a breed apart, he continues: “their values are our values” (Grann 31). No wonder The Sopranos captured the zeitgeist so completely beginning in 1999—at the tail end of the Clinton era and the immediate wake of the Monica Lewinsky scandal— and continued unabated for the greater part of the George W. Bush years into the early summer of 2007. In “Nobody Knows

A Sense of Place

Twenty-five years earlier, David Chase learned a valuable lesson when he wrote his Emmy-award-winning made-for-television movie Off the Minnesota Strip. Chase reveals, “It was about a teenage prostitute who goes back to her small town in Minnesota, but I just couldn’t get it. I couldn’t write the thing until I

Disorganized Crime

Anything” (Episode 11 in Season 1), for instance, high school senior Meadow challenges her parents at the dinner table by arguing that “most civilized countries have legalized prostitution. I mean, it’s a joke. Look what they’re putting the President through.” Carmela counters that Clinton “deserved what he got,” to which Meadow replies, “I just don’t think sex should be a punishable offense.” Tony, who’s been trying to quell this line of conversation ever since it started, agrees with his daughter that “I don’t think sex should be a punishable offense either, but I do think talking about sex at the breakfast table is a punishable offense, O.K.?” “It’s the 90s,” protests Meadow. “Parents are supposed to discuss sex with their children.” Walking over to the kitchen window and pointing outside, Tony continues, “Yeah, but that’s where you’re wrong. You see out there it’s the 1990s, but in this house it’s 1954.” Tony Soprano is obviously not a moral paragon who practices what he preaches; instead, he is the proverbial everyman for millions of viewers who relate to the way he struggles with the many personal problems and professional demands that weigh him down on a daily basis. Moreover, New Jersey is not merely a backdrop for The Sopranos; Chase and his creative colleagues have made it a profoundly resonant synecdoche for the entire country. In this way, North Jersey in The Sopranos is the embodiment of America’s environmentally challenged landscape, which is deteriorating hand in hand with what conservative pundits and politicians at the dawn of the new millennium referred to as traditional family values.

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The Sopranos’ branding image for Season 5 features New Jersey’s environmentally challenged landscape.

pictured this girl in Caldwell [New Jersey]” (Martin 23). Chase’s sense of place as a writer and showrunner is a consistent and essential component that enables the serial narrative of The Sopranos to assume a patina of authenticity for audiences all around the world. Eschewing the cheap and easy stereotypes that posit “all Garden Staters [as] abrasive, boorish, usually Italian-American meatheads and bimbos,” his portrait of northern New Jersey is more nuanced and indigenous, thus making a mostly parochial representation of local mores and folkways relatable to both domestic and international viewers (Romano). David Chase’s Sopranoland is the natural habitat for his imagination, where he can grapple with the problems of rendering contemporary life meaningful on his own terms. Dana Polan describes how “The Sopranos is about a provincial way of life,” contending that its producers adopt “a style of relative restraint” in stark contrast to the usual caricatures found in works that address similar subjects such as Married to the Mob (1988) or portray related settings such as Jersey Shore (2009–12, MTV) (94). The

Disorganized Crime

cultural geography of The Sopranos often reflects a lifestyle out of balance, pitting the one-time pristine natural habitat of the Meadowlands against the current logjam of polluting smokestacks, noxious landfills, and densely populated neighborhoods that comprise the omnipresent suburban sprawl of the series. Tony Soprano is ostensibly in the waste management business, which is not only a generic cliché for a gangster but wholly appropriate for the kind of pictorial approach that is adopted in The Sopranos. The look and texture of the series was created in the pilot episode by the director of photography, Alik Sakharov, via David Chase. Sakharov is an expatriate from Uzbekistan, which was part of the old U.S.S.R. His background before The Sopranos was exclusively as an independent filmmaker. Chase originally contacted Sakharov because he admired his experimental short Pausa (1992), which was supposed to be set in Russia but was shot mostly in New Jersey. “He told me,” Sakharov recalls, “‘what you did with that New Jersey landscape is very appealing to me.’ He wanted the same kind of cinematographic weight that represented a certain kind of Eastern European sensibility,” meaning a tendency toward naturalism with a somewhat austere and unsentimental use of color and shading (Sakharov interviewed by Stephen Pizzello). The cultural geography of Essex County from Newark to North Caldwell as depicted in The Sopranos often equates New Jersey with industrial and suburban overdevelopment. Sakharov eventually shot thirty-eight of the episodes while simultaneously training his one-time camera operator during the first season, Phil Abraham, to transition seamlessly into the role of cinematographer for the other forty-eight episodes of the series. Over the sixplus seasons of The Sopranos, therefore, North Jersey ends up being more than just the home turf of the poor relations across the river; it emerges as the metaphoric epicenter of contemporary America, warts and all. Moreover, the serial drama that takes place in the New Jersey of The Sopranos functions as a

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picaresque tale with Tony Soprano as the lead protagonist who serves as an object lesson in the excesses of free market Capitalism, entrenched criminal interests, and wholesale political mismanagement run amuck. More to the point, Tony and Carmela Soprano are living out a contemporary, though thoroughly compromised, version of the American Dream in which they were brought up to expect a better life than their parents; and they in turn are determined to provide an ever higher standard of living for their children, complete with all the creature comforts that money can buy. During the Great Depression, novelist and short story author Sherwood Anderson identified “a crisis of belief” caused by what he called the “American theory of life” in which “we Americans have all been taught from childhood that it is sort of a moral obligation for each of us to rise, to get up in the world” (McCann). This underlying precept of the national ethos is Calvinist in origin and was brought to this country by the Puritans, who believed that the appearance of material success was a direct reflection of underlying spiritual goodness and visible proof of living a virtuous life. This whole ethic was soon secularized and found its first popular expression in the maxims of Benjamin Franklin as published in Poor Richard’s Almanac in the mid-eighteenth century. He valorized the “credo of the American cult of upward mobility” in such sayings as “God helps those who help themselves.” A century later this saying merged effortlessly with American Pragmatism in its most street-level vernacular derivation as “the ends justify the means,” thus laying the groundwork for the emerging gangster mythos during the Prohibition era (Marsden 70–71). Social mobility as a concept was simultaneously coined in 1925 by Russian-American sociologist Pitirim Sorokin, who introduced the term in order to emphasize its shortcomings. “America became less equal and less fluid in the 1920s, as the era’s prosperity increasingly benefited the wealthiest. By the end of the decade, the top 1 percent of the population received nearly a quarter of the national

Disorganized Crime

income,” a high-water mark that would not be replicated until the late 1990s (McCann). The vision of an American Dream built on economic fairness coupled with the ideal of a fluid and open society were together being called into serious question yet again just as The Sopranos debuted. In addition, the widespread perception that the nation was on the wrong path gained increasing momentum for a majority of Americans during the two terms of George W. Bush’s administration. The confused and clinically depressed A.J. even offers his callow interpretation of the situation to a table composed mostly of peers at Vesuvio’s restaurant following the burial of the recently assassinated capo Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri (Steve Schirripa) in the final episode, “Made in America”: “You people are fucked. You’re living in the dream . . . don’t you see it? Bush let al-Qaeda escape, the mountains. Then he has us invade some other country . . . It’s like America. I mean this is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And what do they get—bling? And come on for shit they don’t need and can’t afford.” By the end of the series, Tony and Carmela’s relentless pursuit of the American Dream leaves their immediate family empty, guilty, and searching for something more meaningful in their lives. All of Tony’s crew members are either dead, critically wounded, or in serious retreat, leaving them a disorganized crime syndicate at best. As early as the third season, Carmela opts out for the security of earning a real estate license so she can build houses on speculation with Tony’s blood money as her way of trying to be more self-sufficient and thus coping with the precariousness of her husband’s future. Meadow, the Soprano’s Italian-American princess and overachieving first child, abandons her own and her parents’ dream that she become a pediatrician in Season 6 once she starts dating lawyer Patrick Parisi (Daniel Sauli), the son of Tony’s accountant and soldier, Patsy Parisi (Dan Grimaldi), whose firm specializes in doing business for the mob. And last but not least, A.J., the maladjusted underachiever,

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spirals ever deeper into depression during the final season, hinting at a genetic predisposition passed down to him by his father, paternal grandfather, and grandmother. In “The Second Coming” (Episode 84 in Season 6), Anthony Junior even attempts suicide in the backyard pool. Tony luckily arrives home just in time to save him, eventually working closely with Carmela to get their son professional help, before pulling strings to secure A.J. an entry-level job in the movie business as a development executive complete with a brand new BMW, which he uses to squire around his high school-aged girlfriend. The “sins of the father” thematics that animate The Godfather trilogy—from Vito Corleone’s crimes of survival in New York’s Little Italy polluting his pride and joy, Michael, to the operatic assassination of his granddaughter Mary—is further complicated in The Sopranos. The determinism implicit in this traditional generic narrative is given a much more ambiguous nature and nurture rationale. For example, both Tony’s own inherited biological and professional legacies strongly influence Anthony Junior’s subsequent personal development and mental health and, to a much lesser degree, Meadow’s eventual decision to become a lawyer. Like father, like son, A. J. “sometimes has trouble following the rules” to the point that the Catholic school psychiatrist at Verbum Dei thinks “there’s a good possibility Anthony could be ADD [Attention Deficit Disorder]” in the episode “Down Neck.” Earlier in this episode, thirteen-year-old A. J. is suspended for three days along with two friends for stealing and drinking sacrificial wine from the nearby sacristy and then showing up drunk to gym class. When Livia learns about this incident at the Sunday dinner table, she blurts out in front of the whole family that Tony stole a car as a ten-year-old, concluding that “his [A.J.’s] father was the same way. I practically lived in the vice principal’s office.” In an attempt to make sense of A.J.’s budding juvenile delinquency, Tony rhetorically asks Dr. Melfi, “me, my father, it’s probably in the genes, right. You know this ADD thing. It’s

Nature and Nurture

The Sopranos thus exercise their ethnic capital by purchasing their trophy home in an upper-middle-class suburban enclave

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probably genetic.” Melfi is at first noncommittal, encouraging Tony to reminisce about his father (e.g., “his belt was his favorite child development tool”) before suggesting, “genetic predispositions are only that—predispositions. It’s not a destiny written in stone . . . there’s a range of choices. This is America.” The Sopranos’ serial narrative therefore mixes the psychological with the social to illustrate how immigrant populations typically rely on intergenerational (instead of individual) social mobility to improve their personal and family circumstances in a new and unfamiliar foreign country. The Sopranos’ saga starts with a first generation—personified by remembrances of Corrado Soprano, Sr. and Mariangela Soprano—that has a hard time making ends meet as new arrivals to the United States from the province of Avellino, Italy, in 1910. The second generation—headed up by “Johnny Boy” Soprano and Livia Pollio—finds ways of catching up economically circa midcentury by utilizing any means possible, while the third generation—represented in the present day by Anthony “Tony” Soprano, Sr. and Carmela DeAngelis— adopts strategies at the turn of the twenty-first century to settle in, succeed materially as never before, and pass like any other mainstream bourgeois American family (Borjas). The ethnic makeup of Essex County in The Sopranos includes older, more established constituencies, such as the Italians, Irish, WASPs, African-Americans, and Jews, along with the newer immigrant groupings, such as the Russians, Polish, Ukrainians, Koreans, and Middle Easterners, among others. Tony, Carmela, and their children are the beneficiaries of a widely identifiable American narrative of wealth, class, and aspiration. Their dream is not to keep up with the Joneses, per se, but more so their neighbors in North Caldwell like the Cusamanos.

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that is overwhelmingly Italian-American. Their ultimate goal is to blend in with the other successful professionals in their neighborhood while still holding onto their ethnic identity and cultural heritage. The Sopranos’ next-door neighbor, Dr. Bruce Cusamano, is the family physician who refers Tony to Dr. Jennifer Melfi, a personal acquaintance who has been at his home for parties hosted by his wife, Jeannie. As Tony explains to Melfi in “Pax Soprana” (Episode 6 in Season 1), “Cusamano gave me a choice between two Jewish guys and a paisan [compatriot] like me, so I picked the paisan.” In “Down Neck,” Tony also reveals to Melfi the trauma of being a seven-year-old and seeing his father arrested, handcuffed, and driven away in a police van (“I thought my head would explode”): he remembers when he “got home [his] mother had a different perspective, which made [him] feel better.” She told him, “He didn’t do anything. They just pick on Italians.” This sense of shared victimization passed down from one generation to the next also comes back to haunt Tony in “Made in America” when Meadow explains to him during a close-knit father-daughter luncheon that what made her rethink her choice of becoming a pediatrician was “seeing the way Italians are treated . . . If I hadn’t seen you dragged away all those times by the FBI, then I’d probably be a boring suburban doctor.” This revelation saddens Tony and leaves him speechless as he realizes his criminal activities have inadvertently undermined what he and Carmela most wanted for Meadow. In the final analysis, there are no simple answers to definitively explain the push and pull between nature and nurture that motivates all of the Sopranos to make the life decisions they do. Early on, Tony finds out from Hesh in “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (Episode 18 in Season 2) that his father also had a “condition” in which he experienced anxiety attacks maybe “once or twice a year.” In “The Happy Wanderer” (Episode 19 in Season 2), he is likewise surprised to find out from Uncle Junior that he and “Johnny Boy” had another brother (“between me and your

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Tony admits to Dr. Melfi that he chose her as his psychotherapist because she’s a paisan.

father in age. His name was Eckley—actually Ercoli—Hercules, named after my grandfather”). Junior explains that Eckley was institutionalized because “he was slow [born with Down syndrome] . . . They didn’t understand these things back then . . . Jesus, what were we thinking?” Now fifteen-year-old Anthony Junior is showing signs of panic disorder when he passes out on the football field in front of all his teammates after being named defensive captain of his freshman team in “Fortunate Son” (Epi-

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sode 29 in Season 3). From that point onward, A.J. struggles with intermittent bouts of depression like his father and grandmother before him. Once out of high school, he drops in and out of community college before flunking out of NYU for good. He is neither physically nor psychologically equipped to join Tony in the family business, telling his mother in “All Due Respect” (Episode 65 in Season 5) that he likes “event planning” after earning $300 throwing a house party and charging admission. This interest is short-lived, however, as A.J. spends most of his waking hours playing video games, frequenting the New York club scene, experimenting with cocaine, and sleeping late before Tony forces him to take a construction job in “Cold Stone” (Episode 76 in Season 6). Within days, A.J. meets Blanca Selgado (Dania Ramirez), an attractive Dominican administrative assistant at the work site. He is immediately smitten by her and initiates a whirlwind courtship. A few months later, A.J. invites Blanca and her three-yearold son, Hector, home for Christmas Eve dinner to meet the rest of his family in “Kaisha” (Episode 77 in Season 6). Carmela quietly disapproves and complains to Tony that “she’s ten years older than him and she’s Puerto Rican?” “Dominican, maybe,” he replies, trying to mitigate her concerns, “least she’s Catholic.” A.J.’s feelings for Blanca grow, and he proposes marriage to her in “Chasing It” (Episode 81 in Season 6). She accepts after some coaxing from A.J., but Blanca soon experiences second thoughts, breaking up with him for good a few weeks later by explaining that she just doesn’t “feel it.” This turn of events leaves A.J. severely depressed and unable to sleep as he stares aimlessly for hours at the large-screen TV in the family room, even making vague references to suicide from time to time in “Walk Like a Man” (Episode 82 in Season 6). Meadow tells her parents that she’s worried about her brother. Carmela confides that “I’m afraid to leave him alone.” Neither Carmela nor Tony know how to talk to their son about his troubles, never mind exploring strategies for him to better cope with the situation.

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Tony instead retreats into genetic scapegoating as his way of reconciling the matter in his own mind when discussing it with Dr. Melfi: “My son is devastated . . . obviously I’m prone to depression, a certain bleak attitude about the world, but I know I can handle it . . . but him . . . then to think you’re the cause of it . . . my rotten fuckin’ putrid genes have infected my kid’s soul. That’s my gift to my son.” Where A.J. represses, Tony expresses. His solution is to order A.J. to attend a party at the Bada Bing with some Rutgers students who also happen to be junior mafiosi that he enlists to show his son a good time in the hopes of snapping him out of his melancholia. In retrospect, this remedy is merely a more adult version of Tony spraying Reddi-wip straight into his A.J.’s mouth as father and son self-medicate with ice cream sundaes after receiving the ADD diagnosis in “Down Neck.” Tony means well as a father; he simply is relying on the same short-term fixes that he has resorted to his entire adult life in treating his own depression, such as overeating, substance abuse, and sexual promiscuity. Much of Tony’s charisma as a mob boss and his empathy as a father derive in large part from James Gandolfini’s rich and generous physicality as an actor. Throughout the series, he is continually touching, kissing, embracing, grabbing, shaking, pushing, and sometimes even punching the people around him. As a result, Tony’s most obvious parenting skills are corporeal in nature. In “The Second Coming,” for instance, Tony fishes the suicidal A.J. out of the same backyard swimming pool in which he lovingly nurtured the family of wild ducks in the pilot episode; Tony cradles and rocks his twenty-year-old son while cooing tenderly in his ear, “Come on baby, you’re all right.” At the same time, he is all too ready to reflexively repeat the same old dysfunctional behavior patterns that he learned as a child at the knees of “Johnny Boy” and Livia. When he attends the first family therapy session after A.J.’s suicide attempt, Tony’s initial words to his son echo Livia’s words. “Oh, poor you,” he mocks, accusing A.J. of being

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a “mama’s boy.” Tony’s actions and words in this regard are as a child-parent who is allowing his mother’s hypercriticism to continue to have a negative effect on her grandson even though she is no longer alive. A.J., too, has internalized his grandmother’s fatalistic worldview by recounting how Livia told him when his father “made me go see her” that “life is all a big nothing . . . in the end, your friends and family let you down and that you die in your own arms.” Alone in their kitchen afterward, Tony pulls out the old excuse that “it’s an illness and it’s hereditary.” Carmela doesn’t let him off the hook this time, though, saying she’s sick and tired of “the Soprano curse . . . you’ve been playing the depression card until it’s worn to threads and now you have your son doing it.” Sopranos R Us

The Sopranos have relocated to a beautiful home in an exclusive neighborhood, but like many Americans who move to a better locale, they’ve brought their family dysfunction with them. Unlike most gangster narratives, the Sopranos and their connected family members, friends, and associates are not emblematic of a shadowy underworld where their personal and filial flaws set them apart from the more established representatives of straight society. In contrast, The Sopranos “also depicts the sniveling hypocrisy of mainstream middle-class Caucasian professionals (clergy, teachers, lawyers, therapists, politicians, doctors) who are supposed to be guardians of the public sphere, but who are cowardly and morally derelict in varying ways” (Nochimson 2002–2003, 7). For example, Father Phil Intintola (Paul Schulze) and the Roman Catholic Church are presented as being tangentially complicit in sharing in the bounty of Tony’s criminally supported lifestyle. As Carmela’s parish priest, he is described by her in the pilot episode as her “spiritual mentor. He’s helping me be a better Catholic.” No doubt Father Phil is well intentioned, but he frequents the Sopranos’ residence to

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mooch free meals, good wine, and innocent female companionship—usually when Tony is not at home. He even self-depreciatingly refers to himself as a schnorrer (a Yiddish term meaning freeloader) when he shows up unexpectedly while Tony and Meadow are off in Maine visiting highly selective schools like Bowdoin and Bates in “College.” During dinner and a movie consisting of ziti and the middlebrow melodrama The Remains of the Day (1993), Carmela is suddenly overcome with overwhelming feelings of shame and guilt, confessing to Father Phil that “my husband has committed horrible acts.” She admits that she knew of Tony’s profession when she married him, but she continues to turn a blind eye to all of his illegal activities and his serial infidelities in order to luxuriate in the seductive if corrupted version of the American Dream that she enjoys because of her husband’s criminal success. Still, her faith puts her in conflict with the life choices she’s made as she pours out the darkened recesses of her Catholic undersoul of culpability and contrition to Father Phil: “I can’t pretend anymore. The pain is unbearable. I got a bad feeling that it’s just a matter of time before God compensates me with outrage for my sins.” This sense of impending doom takes many forms in the series and gains added momentum throughout the six-plus seasons of The Sopranos. In Carmela’s case, it’s tied up with her religious beliefs, which “serve as a powerful form of denial rather than a mode of fighting against evil” (Nochimson 2002–2003, 7). Father Phil is well aware of Tony’s criminality and nevertheless innocuously tells Carmela to “help change him into a better man.” In the appropriately titled “Second Opinion” (Episode 33 in Season 3), Dr. Melfi recommends that Carmela follow up her couples therapy sessions with Tony (and Dr. Melfi) by seeing Dr. Krakower all by herself. He ultimately advises her to “take only the children—what’s left of them— and go.” When Carmela hems and haws at the enormity of Dr. Krakower’s recommendation, he tells her quietly but firmly: “One thing you can never say—you haven’t been told.”

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Anthony Junior expresses his anxieties through a completely different pathway than his mother’s Catholicism. Once his condition stabilizes, he projects his own worst fears on the growing conflict in the Middle East. In “The Second Coming,” A.J. is intently perusing Al Jazeera’s English-language Web site for news. In “Blue Comet,” he is transfixed by the violent imagery contained in a PBS documentary on Iraq. In “Made in America,” he purchases Arabic-language audio CDs and informs his father “I’m going to join the army” to fight al-Qaeda. Following somewhat in Tony’s footsteps, he experiments with externalizing his unhappiness, but for A.J. that involves plans to enlist in the armed forces and become a helicopter pilot in either Iraq or Afghanistan. Historian Thomas Prasch has noted that references to 9/11 were “routinized” on The Sopranos beginning with the fourth season (which debuted on September 15, 2002, or sixteen months after the end of Season 3) as a way of reinforcing “the sense of generalized peril” for Tony and his crew who are lifers in a most dangerous profession. In addition, these allusions intensify the feelings of suburban angst that underlie the series’ broader portrayal of middle class “America in crisis” (23). Forty-seven of The Sopranos eighty-six episodes were written and produced after September 11, 2001. In this way, “Chase’s vision” grew ever “darker,” according to New Yorker editor David Remnick, to the point at which things “only got worse” as the show “descended into the death spiral of the final episodes.” Toward the end of “Made in America,” Tony and Carmela sit A.J. down at the kitchen table and have a frank heart-to-heart discussion with their son because they “don’t feel [his] going in the army is in [his] best interest.” They easily distract him from his planned “military sacrifice for a film job” complete with his own brand-new luxury car. Consequently, “A.J.’s idealism remains rooted in materialism,” contends Maurice Yacowar, in that his “joining the army could get him helicopter pilot training,” which he fantasizes will eventually “get him a job with

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Donald Trump” (Yacowar The Sopranos Season Seven, 26). A.J.’s career plans are as fanciful and overblown as the high-end furniture, appliances, and household accessories that envelop him and his parents in their outsized home. The McMansion in North Caldwell is the ideal dwelling place for the Sopranos’ operatic lives. As in the breakfast table scene, the eat-in kitchen and formal dining room are “where many meals are eaten and plot points advanced” (Frank 112). The Sopranos’ home is central to the family’s drama as the rooms within “reveal or amplify the characters who inhabit them,” such as the nouveau Jersey flourishes in the family room like the fluted columns and marble accents, as well as the utter chaos of A.J.’s bedroom (Frank 106). The run of The Sopranos roughly coincided with what the Wall Street Journal called “the golden age of McMansions” (Fletcher). Beginning in the mid-1990s, the U.S. housing bubble eventually peaked in 2006 and then burst with the collapsing real estate market in the summer and fall of 2008. What drove the McMansion craze more than anything was the belief that mega-sized houses were a sound financial investment. From a historical perspective, the average American home size in the 1960s was 1,200 square feet; in the 1980s, 1,710 square feet; and in the 2000s, 2,330 square feet. A McMansion, by contrast, is “a house larger than 5,000 square feet with four or more bedrooms . . . two-story entryways, three-car garages, doubleheight family rooms and master bedroom ‘suites’ equipped with sitting areas and whirlpool tubs” (Fletcher). Production manager Ilene Landress surveyed over 150 houses in Essex County before David Chase was satisfied with the “6,000 square foot, $3.5 million mini-mansion” that was chosen in North Caldwell and “managed to convey bourgeois respectability without telegraphing Tony Soprano’s profession” (Trebay). “From the very beginning, David was insistent that we not condescend to the characters,” discloses set decorator Janet Shaw. “He said, ‘I don’t see the Sopranos living in stereotypical, Married to the Mob dé-

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cor. No plastic on the sofas, nothing cheap or satirical’” (Frank 104). Tony and Carmela’s McMansion is thus an outward reflection of who they are as characters; it also serves as a continuing metaphor for their acquired success and their family’s overconsumptive behavior. Architecturally speaking, “the house reflects a trend towards larger spaces, with ample volumes, and applied Neoclassical details” (Frank 112). Carmela especially “is one of these women who wants to rise socially through her home,” projects Shaw; “she has some flair” and is “pleased to have done her own house” (Frank 112). Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott concurs that “Carmela Soprano is no vulgarian . . . her home décor, dress, and conduct show a pinch of restraint reflecting an avidity for personal improvement and refinement.” Series production designers Edward Pisoni, Dean Taucher, and Bob Shaw meticulously reconstructed the North Caldwell McMansion’s family room, kitchen, dining room, and bedrooms, along with other important interior locations such as Dr. Melfi’s office and Artie Bucco’s Nuovo Vesuvio restaurant at Silvercup Studios in Queens. Typically 30 percent of each episode’s ten-to-twelve-day shooting schedule took place at Silvercup with the remaining 70 percent filmed on location throughout northern New Jersey and the New York metropolitan area (Martin 32). Moreover, the thin line between fact and fiction was becoming harder to distinguish as the original designer and builder of the McMansion used in the series produced a CD that included floor and landscaping blueprints along with illustrated snapshots that could be purchased online for $699 at www.sopranohomedesign.com beginning in the summer of 1999. By August 2002, the New York Times reported that “250 replicas of the house have been built already” (Trebay). Because of The Sopranos popularity, the same McMansion was also the subject of a feature article and photographic spread in the September 2002 issue of Architectural Digest, the country’s premiere interior design magazine (Frank). The Sopranos made New Jersey chic and North Jersey a fashionable place to live in the early

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Carmela’s nouveau Jersey appearance—on display here while attending one of Meadow’s soccer matches with Tony—reveals her ambition as well as a pinch of restraint.

to mid-2000s. After all, The Sopranos was created and shepherded through six-plus seasons by native son David Chase, who converted his unwavering sense of place and his obsession with his own ancestry into a serial narrative to which viewers all around the world looked beyond the specificity of a mob-based fictional world to personally identify with the foibles and follies of Tony, Carmela, and their biological and gangland families.

Chapter 4

Situation Tragedy A Midlife Crisis for the Gangster Genre

I do have an idea on how it’s going to end . . . the gangster movie is a long American tradition . . . It’s usually the rise and fall . . . I have always felt that while Tony’s having his rise, he’s always having his fall every day. David Chase, creator of The Sopranos, in 2004 (NPR)

O

n September 17, 1999, approximately midway through the nine-month hiatus between Seasons 1 and 2 of The Sopranos, journalist and author Roger Rosenblatt produced a short video essay for Jim Lehrer’s PBS NewsHour, calling the series TV’s “first situation tragedy.” He argued that the “situation” derives from the show’s preoccupation with family, both Tony’s blood relations and his de facto position as the paterfamilias of the DiMeo crime family of North Jersey, while the “tragedy” results from the inevitability of his fate as the gangster-hero. Rosenblatt concluded that Tony “is a great, good, and smart man caught in the trap of his own manufacture . . . [where] one knows that whenever this series ends, he has to die, has to be killed. There is no other way out.” Back in 1999, few viewers

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of The Sopranos with even a cursory knowledge of the gangster genre would have disagreed with Rosenblatt. David Chase always conceived of The Sopranos as part of a rich and enduring generic tradition. The dozens of gangster-related allusions throughout the six-plus seasons of The Sopranos underscore the foundational influence of this genre on the series as a whole (Lavery This Thing of Ours 235–253). Moreover, Todd Gitlin has said that creativity on television is primarily “recombinant,” arguing that if “clones are the lowest forms of imitation, recombinants of elements from proven successes are the most interesting” (75). Within this framework, The Sopranos is a gangster series first and foremost, but it is also an amalgam of the soap opera (with its multilayered plotlines and large cast of continuing characters), a situation comedy (with its well-placed scenes of comic relief featuring such offbeat and often unintentionally funny characters as Livia Soprano, Uncle Junior, Paulie Walnuts, and Christopher Moltisanti), and, most innovatively, the therapeutic talk show (with its ongoing trope of Tony revealing his innermost thoughts and feelings to Dr. Jennifer Melfi). A Generic and Serial Hybrid

David Chase’s idea of placing therapy at the center of a gangster narrative opens up the mob movie genre as never before by blending the masculine traditions of the Hollywood gangster film with the more feminine and sometimes feminist appeals of daytime TV talk programming, which Tony explicitly refers to in the pilot episode when he complains to Dr. Melfi that “today everybody goes on Sally Jessy Raphael and talks about their problems. Whatever happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type. That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do!” In the opening scene of the series, Tony appears to be the proverbial fish out of water when he sits uneasily on a couch in Dr. Melfi’s waiting room and stares up at a spindly green nude sculpture of a woman

Situation Tragedy

looming high above him in stark contrast to the far more accessible and submissive naked dancers that he is used to eyeballing at the Bada Bing strip club. This debut episode is structured around four successive therapy sessions with Tony expressing to Melfi his reluctance (“Look, it’s impossible for me to talk to a psychiatrist.”) and skepticism about the entire process (“This is not going to work.”). At the same time, he also takes baby steps toward genuine self-disclosure, personal introspection, and emotional exploration in his beginning discussions with Dr. Melfi. Her inner office serves as a liminal space for Tony that provides him with his last best opportunity to learn from his past mistakes, cope with the chronic dysfunction of his extended family, and moderate his inveterate antisocial tendencies that often culminate in some uncontrollable expression of deep-seated anger and rage accompanied by the occasional violent outburst. However fleeting the possibility, Tony Soprano’s engagement with psychotherapy affords him a way out of the inevitability of those dead-end circumstances that have trapped every other gangster who has appeared on a movie or television screen before him. “One is always trying just to do something different,” acknowledged David Chase in 2000, especially since “the mob genre has been done a million times.” Early on, he “realized that you really didn’t have any insight into these women,” so fleshing out a full cadre of complex multidimensional female characters—including Tony’s mother, Livia; his wife, Carmela; his psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi; his sister, Janice, his daughter, Meadow, and his numerous comari (mistresses)—is how Chase expanded and deepened the parameters of his evolving gangster narrative (NPR). At the outset, The Sopranos’ pilot effectively establishes that Tony feels he is part of a dying breed (“I came too late . . . I know . . . the best is over”). It also introduces such basic dramatic conflicts as Tony versus Livia, work versus home, and masculine versus feminine. As Tony drives the seven miles from his McMansion in North Caldwell to Dr. Melfi’s office in Mont-

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clair, he is entering a no man’s land where all the traditional patriarchal assumptions and rules that control and regulate his two families—biological and criminal—outside of this doctorpatient in-between space are called into question. The liminality of Dr. Melfi’s office is literally a dangerous place for Tony as he expresses his fear and discomfort with the situation by regularly threatening to end his involvement in the therapeutic process altogether. As he confides to Carmela in the first episode, if “the wrong people knew about [his seeing a therapist] I’d get a steel-jacket antidepressant right in the back of the head.” In the hypermasculine world of organized crime, Tony correctly assumes that being a mental health patient makes him look weak, while the secrets he discloses in talk therapy pose an implicit threat to La Cosa Nostra’s code of silence. Dr. Melfi’s office is terra incognita for Tony, a place where a woman is provisionally in charge, setting an initial agenda for him, and at times forcing him to face up to his own dysfunctional tendencies that he’s glibly ignored and suppressed his entire life. “The thing with the shrink,” explains Chase, is that “it had all been about men before” (Carter 2006 1). Now a series of strong women occasionally challenge and at other times reinforce Tony’s sense of self. In the case of Dr. Melfi, for example, she suggests that he might be suffering from alexithymia (the inability to express one’s feelings) in “House Arrest” (Episode 24 in Season 2). Melfi likens him to a “shark” in describing certain “antisocial personalities” who crave “ceaseless action” in order to deny “the abhorrent things they do.” Taken aback, Tony asks her what happens when these people “stop moving.” She tells him that “they have time to think about their behavior. How what they do affects other people. About feelings of emptiness and self-loathing, haunting them since childhood. And they crash.” Most innovatively, Jennifer Melfi develops into much more than a plot device by the second season. Her role was always as the viewers’ surrogate; her point of view informs their perspective, her growing fascination with Tony’s

Situation Tragedy

pathologies mirroring their ever-increasing identification and complicity with him as a protagonist. Dr. Melfi first takes Tony on as a patient as a favor for her colleague and friend Dr. Bruce Cusamano. By “Toodle-Fucking-Oo” (Episode 16 in Season 2), she apparently feels a deep professional responsibility to help Tony, which is indicated when she wakes up anxiously from a nightmare that he died behind the wheel of a car after having another panic attack. Eight episodes later in “House Arrest,” Dr. Melfi begins to lose both her professional perspective and personal equilibrium when she admits to her own therapist, Dr. Elliot Kupferberg

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Dr. Jennifer Melfi becomes much more than a plot device as the series develops.

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(Peter Bogdanovich), that she’s “drinking in-between sessions . . . on the days that [she sees] him. Elliot, it’s like . . . watching a train wreck. I’m afraid and repulsed by what he might tell me, but somehow I can’t help myself from wanting to hear it.” Dr. Kupferberg’s diagnosis is that she has a “compulsion” and might be “an alcoholic.” He advises her to take “steps to seriously end” treating Tony. She nevertheless continues into her own uncharted territory. Throughout The Sopranos, Tony is presented as a modern-day Mephistopheles whose dark, dangerous charisma affords him the ability to corrupt almost anyone he encounters. Jennifer Melfi’s own temptation with Tony comes to a head in “Employee of the Month” (Episode 28 in Season 3) when she is brutally raped in a parking garage one day after work. The police find and arrest the culprit, Jesus Rossi, a twenty-eight-year-old with no prior convictions, but he is eventually released on a legal technicality when the authorities temporarily misplace the evidence. To add insult to injury, the now physically and emotionally battered Melfi discovers to her horror that Rossi has been named “employee of the month” while she is buying lunch at a nearby fast-food restaurant soon after the assault. No mob-related narrative before The Sopranos has so unequivocally confirmed the gangster worldview that the law-abiding establishment is weak and ineffectual and the criminal justice system broken and untrustworthy. Not even an upstanding white-collar professional like Jennifer Melfi can expect fair and competent treatment in this bankrupt fictional milieu. As the series continues, Melfi is still charmed by Tony in a variety of ways, even having an erotic dream about him in “Two Tonys” (Episode 53 in Season 5). Still, “Employee of the Month” is the one time she is seriously tempted to choose the immorality of the mob over what she calls the “social compact” by enlisting Tony’s help in wreaking vengeance on her rapist. Melfi’s individual struggle climaxes when she experiences a revenge dream in which her arm gets caught in a soda vending machine, Rossi attacks her again, and she is rescued by a

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vicious black Rottweiler who symbolizes Tony. “I felt such a sense of relief,” she confides to Dr. Kupferberg at their next therapeutic session. The stage is thus set for the final scene of the episode between Tony and Dr. Melfi, the latter of whom remains emotionally fragile and upset by her ordeal. Tony brings up her earlier suggestion that he consider “behavior modification therapy” with another doctor, and she uncharacteristically starts to cry. He is puzzled by her reaction though genuinely concerned, telling her he had been “getting the distinct feeling” that she was trying to give him “the boot.” In an attempt to console Melfi, he asks, “What’s the matter? You want to say something?” As she pauses, the momentum of the narrative and the sympathies of the audience suggest she will tell Tony about the rape and its aftermath and he will mete out the rough justice that the straight world is unable to give her. There is little doubt that Tony Soprano would serve as her willing avenger under the circumstances. She nevertheless says “no,” asserting her own ethical code of silence. Within the fictional terrain of The Sopranos, Jennifer Melfi represents an alternative way of being in contrast to the other characters, most particularly Tony as well as Carmela, who later makes her own pact with the devil by reconciling with Tony in the fifth season after the searing breakup of her marriage in “Whitecaps,” the finale of Season 4. In a soap opera-like narrative arc reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s five-hour television miniseries Scenes from a Marriage (1973), Tony’s serial philandering finally causes an emotionally grueling and relationally penetrating showdown between Tony and Carmela. As a result, Tony finally moves out following a knock-down, drag-out fight where no marital button goes unpushed and no grievance between the couple is left unaired. Tony and Carmela eventually get back together just past the midway point of Season 5 at her father’s seventy-fifth birthday party in “Marco Polo” (Episode 60 in Season 5), culminating in his return to their McMansion for good in “Long Term Parking” (Episode 64 in Season 5) after he promises that his womanizing

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“won’t happen again” and he also gives her $600,000 to build a spec house in the hopes of finding a buyer as her entrée into the real estate business. Consequently, the Soprano marriage survives as a complicated mélange of love, codependence, and, on Carmela’s part, hard-nosed commercial self-interest. For the remainder of the series, moreover, Carmela makes peace with the compromised state of her marriage and more or less settles into the role of being the “good wife” to her professionally embattled husband. Furthermore, all of the ebbs and flows in Tony and Carmela’s relationship are best understood as an improvisational journey created by the writers on the show with David Chase leading the way. Significantly, Chase hung a framed photograph of Federico Fellini in the conference room of The Sopranos’ production suite at Silvercup Studios. “Fellini said making a movie is like a voyage,” notes Chase in referencing one of his earliest influences. “It’s all a big discovery process” (Carter 2006 1). In that way, Chase and his writing team spent six-plus seasons promiscuously mixing and matching generic and stylistic elements from both film and television, admittedly “making this up as we go along because there is no template for The Sopranos” (NPR 2000). Overall, this serial hybrid pushed well beyond the boundaries of the gangster genre, ignoring television’s conventional wisdom and seamlessly shifting tones from excitement to despair to poignancy while even including the blackest of humor at times. In the latter case, “Pine Barrens” (Episode 37 in Season 3) features Paulie Walnuts and Christopher turning a routine assignment into a comedy of errors gone terribly awry. Paulie and Christopher were never the smartest members of Tony’s crew, but left to their own devices, they add up to much less than the sum of their parts. When Tony sends them out to collect money from a Russian hood named Valery, Paulie needlessly picks a fight with Valery, which ends badly when he and Christopher use a lamp to crush the Russian’s windpipe. They then throw a seemingly lifeless Valery into the trunk of Paulie’s Cadillac with

The Banality of Tony Soprano

In contrast, the demystifying of Tony Soprano as gangster-hero ends up being a much more ambitious and deadly serious undertaking in which the ultimate resolution was appropriately reserved for the final episode of the series. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City sponsored an early retrospective of The Sopranos during the first two weeks of February 2001. MoMA’s Titus Theater screened Seasons 1 and 2 in their entirety one month before the premiere of the third season, cul-

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the intention of driving him to South Jersey where they will get rid of the body in the heavily forested and sparsely populated Pine Barrens. Once there, they are surprised to discover that the hearty Valery is still alive à la Goodfellas, and after more incompetence by the duo, the ex-Russian commando outfights and escapes his hapless captors. For much of the remainder of the episode, Paulie and Christopher are out of their element, lost in the woods, trying to chase down Valery as if he were the elusive white whale haunting their imaginations. As the temperature drops, the mobsters regress: Paulie loses one of his shoes in the snow; Christopher rubs two twigs together to start a fire like a Boy Scout (it doesn’t work); and both self-styled tough guys suck on discarded ketchup packets that they find in an abandoned van for sustenance. Stripped of their bluff and bluster, Paulie and Christopher are plunged into an existential crisis that has them acting like feral animals poised at each other’s throats, blaming one another for the predicament they find themselves in. So much for honor among thieves as Tony and Bobby must drive downstate in the middle of the night to rescue this pathetic duo while Valery remains a loose end just beyond Paulie and Christopher’s comprehension. In episodes such as “Pine Barrens,” The Sopranos resembles a morbid situation comedy that unmasks mafiosi such as Paulie and Christopher for the shallow and violent criminals that they are.

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minating in a February 12 interview between media critic Ken Auletta and David Chase. Asked by Auletta how he might finish the fourth and what was planned at that time to be the final season of The Sopranos, Chase was purposefully vague, saying that he hoped to “avoid predictability” but adding almost as an aside, “I don’t think he should die” (Zoller-Seitz). Three years later on March 2, 2004, or less than a week before the debut of the fifth season, David Chase told Terry Gross of Fresh Air that he had decided how he would end the series because “I do need to know that to proceed now” (NPR). What occurred on June 10, 2007, after three contractual reprieves that extended The Sopranos into fifth and sixth seasons and then a nine-episode addition to the sixth season, Part 2, was one of the most controversial finales in television history. Many audience members felt confused, even cheated, by the open-endedness of the last scene. Journalists and bloggers had a field day trying to decipher whether Tony Soprano had survived or not. The ensuing uproar remained a cultural flash point for weeks. For his part, David Chase refused to explain his intentions, other than to say that “there was a clean trend on view—a definite sense of what Tony and Carmela’s future looks like” (Martin 184). Suffice it to say, Chase made up his mind long before writing and directing the final episode that his original decision to have Tony glance up toward the camera, like a deer in the headlights, followed by an abrupt smash cut to black would be how his epic domesticgangster drama would end. David Chase’s thorough awareness of the gangster’s longstanding tradition in film and television is again clearly evident in the series finale. A half-century before the debut of The Sopranos, Robert Warshow mapped out the terrain of “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” in his seminal 1948 article of the same name for The Partisan Review. Warshow zeroed in on the general audience’s ambivalence toward the gangster-hero when he described him as “a creature of the imagination. The real city produces only criminals; the imaginary city produces the

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gangster: he is what we want to be and what we are afraid we may become” (243). This sort of personal identification is at the heart of Tony Soprano’s widespread appeal. It is also the kind of ambivalence that David Chase and his writing team struggled with throughout the six-plus seasons of The Sopranos. At times, Tony’s situation did verge on tragedy; just as often, though, he is depicted as just another common criminal, especially during the additional nine episodes of the series’ sixth and final season (specifically Episodes 78–86). As the series wound down, Chase and his writers gave viewers fewer reasons to like Tony; he grew increasingly narcissistic and sociopathic, a direction that is not preordained in the way The Sopranos’ narrative evolved. Warshow recognized that “when we come upon [the gangster] he has already made his choice or the choice has already been made for him . . . we are not permitted to ask whether at some point he could have chosen to be something else than what he is” (243). This classical brand of narrative determinism gives way to a far more complicated fictional world in The Sopranos. As the son of “Johnny Boy” Soprano and the nephew of “Junior” Soprano, Tony was indeed born into the family business. As early as “Down Neck,” however, he reveals to Dr. Melfi that “sometimes I think about what life would have been like if my father hadn’t gotten mixed up in the things he got mixed up in.” Half-jokingly he muses, “maybe I’d be selling patio furniture in San Diego or whatever.” More seriously, viewers literally see him in “Join the Club” (Episode 67 in Season 6) and “Mayham” (Episode 68 in Season 6) as a different person—Kevin Finnerty, a solar-heating systems salesman from Arizona—after Tony is shot in the stomach by a confused and demented Uncle Junior toward the end of “Members Only” (Episode 66 in Season 6). This severe trauma plunges Tony into a deep coma in which he appears several times as Finnerty in his own dreams. Kevin Finnerty is a gentler, far more self-reflective version of Tony, even asking at one point “I’m forty-six years old. Who am I? Where am I going?” When Tony finally comes out of his

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coma, he temporarily adopts a new attitude toward life, telling Carmela, his sister Janice, and later Dr. Melfi that “from now on, every day is a gift.” Slowly but surely, though, the old ruthless, coldhearted, and self-absorbed Tony reemerges with a vengeance (even snuffing the life out of Christopher and then flying off to Las Vegas to sleep with his nephew’s mistress in “Kennedy and Heidi,” [Episode 83 in Season 6]). In a highly manipulative gesture, Dr. Kupferberg tells Jennifer Melfi in “The Second Coming” that the psychological research suggests that talk therapy is useless with sociopaths. He warns her that “they sharpen their skills as con men on their therapists.” Despite her justified annoyance with Kupferberg, Melfi checks out his claims in the clinical literature and learns he’s right on target. Soon afterward, Jennifer Melfi terminates her relationship with Tony Soprano in an emotionally turbulent scene in “The Blue Comet.” Tony pleads, “we’re making progress . . . after seven years.” Melfi nonetheless sees his appeal as just more duplicity, telling him that “since you are in crisis. I don’t want to waste your time.” Considering the centrality of therapy to the entire eighty-six-hour narrative flow of The Sopranos, Dr. Melfi closing her office door in Tony’s face in the penultimate episode is a kind of psychological and spiritual death sentence for him since in essence she is writing him off for good as incurable and irredeemable. Tony Soprano is never more diminished than in the opening and closing scenes of The Sopranos’ finale, “Made in America.” In the first scene he is shown from a bird’s-eye view as he’s holed up in a second-floor bedroom of a safe house cradling the AR-10 machine gun that his brotherin-law Bobby “Bacala” had just given him on his forty-seventh birthday. In “The Blue Comet,” Bobby had been assassinated by the rival Brooklyn mob and Tony’s best friend and consigliere, Silvio Dante, was wounded and rendered comatose. Tony momentarily flashes back to Bobby’s prescient remark that “you probably don’t even hear it when it happens,” reconfirming his

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After being shot by Uncle Junior, Tony is plunged into a deep coma in which he appears several times in his own dreams as a different person named Kevin Finnerty.

brother-in-law’s own abrupt demise in a model-train store and foreshadowing what probably lies ahead for Tony in “Made in America.” Like The Sopranos as a whole, the final episode is far more preoccupied with family matters than mob business. A great deal of closure actually occurs in “Made in America” as Carmela continues to build and sell houses on speculation with Tony’s blood money as her way of coping with a future that’s precarious at best. Meadow appears destined for a career in law through her budding relationship with lawyer Patrick Parisi. A.J. spirals into depression in Season 6, mirroring his dad, before Tony finally finds him a starter position in the movie business. Finally, Tony’s longtime blood nemesis, Uncle Junior, is now confined to a nursing home, lost in senile dementia. Even Tony Soprano’s work situation has somewhat improved in the war between the North Jersey and Brooklyn mobs as his chief antagonist and rival crime boss, Phil Leotardo

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In the penultimate scene of the series, Tony visits Uncle Junior in a state-sponsored nursing home and tells him: “You and my dad. You two ran North Jersey.” Lost in senile dementia, Uncle Junior responds: “We did? Hmm. Well. That’s nice.”

(Frank Vincent), has been shot dead in front of his wife and grandchildren following a fragile truce that was brokered earlier in the finale between the DiMeo and Lupertazzi crime families. Nevertheless, lots of people still have reason to kill Tony. In addition, his lawyer, Neil Mink (David Margulies), has just informed him that his captain, Carlo Gervasi (Arthur Nascarella), “has flipped” and that his “hunch is there is an eighty to ninety percent chance [Tony]’ll be indicted.” The FBI has been hot on Tony Soprano’s trail ever since the beginning of the series, slowly building a RICO case against him. The momentum of the serial narrative is therefore ginned up to a fevered pitch as Tony enters Holsten’s family restaurant in the final scene, choosing a booth to wait for his family and playing Journey’s power ballad “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the jukebox, the latter of which adds a slowly building intensity to the subsequent action. As Tony sits alone in Holsten’s, an impending indictment looms

Tony, Carmela, and A.J. come together one last time in the final scene at Holsten’s family diner.

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over his head like the sword of Damocles. Carmela arrives first, then A.J. All of the stylistics of this final scene—the ever-quickening montage editing accompanied by Journey’s hard-driving melodramatic anthem—belie a seemingly ordinary family outing. Director of photography Alik Sakharov admitted that the entire scene was “shot listed,” or planned out shot by shot, and that “we deliberately jumped the line when certain characters entered the diner [a trucker sporting a USA cap, a suspiciouslooking stranger in a members-only jacket, and a pair of young African-American males] to bring a little edge to it.” Furthermore, Sakharov revealed that he and David Chase intentionally incorporated references to The Godfather (“when the guy went into the bathroom [like Michael Corleone] to build suspense”) and the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey (“where it looks like something is happening but the audience is left wondering”) (Sakharov). Finally, the front doorbell jingles, and

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Tony looks up—ostensibly to see Meadow come in—and the picture famously cuts to black along with a complete cessation of sound. Time has abruptly run out for Tony, who is left staring forlornly at the camera, anxiously waiting for the next shoe to drop. Colin McArthur has written in Underworld U.S.A. “that the gangster [lying] dead in the street [is] perhaps the most rigid convention of the genre, repeated through successive phases of its development” (McArthur 35) “Success is evil and dangerous,” adds Robert Warshow; thus this “dilemma” is embodied “in the person of the gangster” and alleviated “by his death. The dilemma is resolved because it is his death, not ours. We are safe for the moment” (244). In this way, viewers vicariously participated in Tony’s numerous transgressions for sixplus seasons, being simultaneously thrilled and appalled. They in turn counted on eventually being purged of any connection with him when he received what he had coming to him in the end. “The way I see it is that Tony Soprano had been people’s alter ego,” contends David Chase. “They had gleefully watched him rob, kill, pillage, lie and cheat. They had cheered him on. And then, all of a sudden, they wanted to see him punished for all that. They wanted ‘justice’” (Martin 184). Chase, however, was reluctant to oblige. In the final analysis, David Chase refused to let either Tony Soprano or the audience off the hook. He defied generic convention by delivering an open-ended conclusion that closed “not with a bang but a whimper,” dooming Tony to nervously live out whatever time he has left looking over his shoulder for either the FBI (who are closing in on him fast) or one of the many underworld enemies he’s made over the years. Right up to the last shot, Chase preserved the rigorous fidelity of the fictional world he had created. Stated another way, “it was a question of loyalty to viewer expectations, as against loyalty to the internal coherence of the materials,” delineates David Milch, creator of NYPD Blue (1993–2005, ABC, with Steven Bochco) and Deadwood (2004–2006, HBO). “Mr. Chase’s position was

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89 Tony Soprano was the “people’s alter ego,” contends David Chase, someone they “cheered on” for six-plus seasons but wanted “punished” in the end.

loyalty to the internal dynamics of the materials and the characters” (Carter 2007). Unlike the characters in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Tony Soprano doesn’t go out in a mythic blaze of glory, which Robert Warshow has described as an “astonishingly complete presentation of the modern sense of tragedy” (241). Instead Tony Soprano remains frozen in time as merely a common criminal and dysfunctional family man. Audience members, moreover, are not allowed to pull away from the gangster visually, emotionally, or psychologically, but are left to ruminate on the meaning of the final shot and the inconclusiveness of Tony’s fate. David Chase gives The Sopranos’ viewers a criminal of decidedly unheroic proportions, less tragic than ordinary, and someone they are fully complicit with from start to finish. As the last shot cuts to black, Tony Soprano fades into memory as just another banal reflection of America caught in millennial decline.

Conclusion

Strategic Ambiguity: The Sopranos’ Aftereffect

The Great American Novel is no longer writable . . . You can’t cover all of America now. It’s too detailed . . . It takes something like The Sopranos, which can loop into a good many aspects of American culture . . . The notion of a wide canvas may be moving to television with its possibility of endless hours. Norman Mailer in 2004 (Hammond)

W

hile still editor of the New York Times Book Review in 1995, Charles McGrath wrote an extended commentary on what he identified as “a brand-new genre” that he called the “prime-time novel.” McGrath pinpointed it as surfacing with Hill Street Blues (1981–87, NBC) and St. Elsewhere (1982–88, NBC) and characterized it as “flourishing” with such noteworthy contemporaneous series as Picket Fences (1992–96, CBS), Homicide: Life on the Streets (1993–99, NBC), NYPD Blue (1993– 2005, ABC), ER (1994–2009, NBC), “and the lamentably canceled My So-Called Life” [1994–95, ABC] (52–55). Considering these and other distinguished post-1981 TV dramas, the milestone status of The Sopranos was not achieved in an industrial,

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aesthetic, or cultural vacuum. David Chase and his production team were deeply enmeshed in the practices and techniques of broadcast television, even though the creator of The Sopranos was aspiring to move beyond these institutional parameters as a writer, producer, and director. All of the strains of The Sopranos’ generic DNA (consisting of the gangster program, soap opera, situation comedy, and therapeutic talk show) were well represented on the broadcast networks beforehand. What set The Sopranos apart when it premiered in 1999 was the seamless way in which these four story forms were integrated together, along with the series’ pervasively dark weltanschauung, which dovetailed perfectly with America’s insecure and restive mood at the turn of the twenty-first century. The Sopranos had all to itself “a certain tier of television that had been surrendered by the broadcast networks,” recalls FX president John Landgraf. “There was a two-year span when it was the only thing like it on television” (Smith). First and foremost, the arrival of The Sopranos marked a tipping point in the television industry whereby the cable-andsatellite sector overtook the broadcast networks as the primary producer of breakout scripted programming. HBO emerged as the most innovative and influential channel on all of TV in 1999. “The Sopranos was the hammer that broke the glass ceiling for us,” affirms Chris Albrecht (Biskind 285). It “showed us as players in this medium in a way we hadn’t been perceived before. It was a real turning point and a calling card for other people to come and want to do business with us” (Levin). In the immediate wake of The Sopranos’ success, Albrecht and his fellow HBO programmers began luring many talented writerproducers away from the broadcast networks beginning with Alan Ball of Cybill (1995–98, CBS) and the Academy Award– winning American Beauty (1999) for Six Feet Under (2001– 5); David Simon of Homicide: Life on the Streets for The Wire (2002–8); and David Milch of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue for Deadwood (2004–6). The Sopranos’ aftereffect is now widely

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apparent both inside and outside of HBO. For example, Kiefer Sutherland admits, “I would never had done 24 [2001–10, Fox] if The Sopranos didn’t make the impact that it did. Before that, I had no desire to do television.” Likewise, Shawn Ryan, creator of The Shield (2002–8, FX), is convinced “The Shield would not be on the air without The Sopranos” (Deggans). John Landgraf, who was also the NBC vice president of prime-time series during that network’s halcyon days from ER to The West Wing (1999–2006), concurs. As the newly appointed president of FX (Fox eXtended), Landgraf’s incoming strategy was to position the channel “as the HBO of basic cable,” occupying a “middle ground” between pay television and the broadcast networks by producing a portfolio of original programs that featured “Sopranos-style moral ambiguity,” such as The Shield, Nip/Tuck (2003– 10), Rescue Me (2004–11), and Damages (2007–10), which was co-created by veteran Sopranos’ writer-producer Todd A. Kessler (Levin; Hale). Just as Landgraf and his corporate colleagues repositioned FX as a channel that would expand the Fox identity into a more innovative, edgier brand of programming, CBS Broadcasting Inc. adopted a similar strategy for Showtime in 2004, introducing The L Word (2004–9), Huff (2004–6), Weeds (2005–present), Sleeper Cell (2005–6), and Brotherhood (2006–8). CBS president and CEO Leslie Moonves explained that “there is no reason Showtime won’t become for CBS what HBO is for Time Warner”—that is to say, a highly profitable boutique network (Vernadakis). Executive producer Ben Silverman similarly reveals that when he brought The Tudors (2007–10) to Showtime “my original pitch was Henry VIII as Tony Soprano” (Deggans). Soon the USA Network, TNT, and literally dozens of other basic cable networks entered the business of original production, upping the ante for the broadcast networks, HBO, FX, and Showtime. “We showed what was possible to do on television,” asserted Chris Albrecht. “I think what that did was bring more people into the category and to spend more money on original

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scripted programming. It’s good for everybody when the bar gets raised” (Umstead). Moreover, many key Sopranos’ alumni later created critically acclaimed television dramas on their own, most notably Matt Weiner with Mad Men (2007–present, AMC), Terence Winter with Boardwalk Empire (2010–present, HBO), and Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess with Blue Bloods (2010–present, CBS). Weiner is characteristic of all these writer-producers in that he readily acknowledges that “everything about The Sopranos influenced me” (KCRW). “There was such depth and complexity to the show, and at the same time it was commercially successful . . . Then of course seeing how the sausage was made” (NPR 2007). Secondly, David Chase’s more complex, personal vision as realized through The Sopranos ushered in a new era of densely plotted, morally ambiguous TV dramas, expanding the range of storytelling and character options on all of television. Not everything about The Sopranos is groundbreaking. Nevertheless, Chase’s original conception of combining an epic novelistic structure, a cinematic vocabulary, and a dystopian worldview with the usual conventions of prime time resulted in a uniquely singular generic and serial hybrid that inspired the next generation of television dramatists. The Sopranos’ narrative is at once knitted and freewheeling in structure, alternately intimate and unsentimental in tone. The plotlines are also strategically ambiguous and most of the characters morally compromised. Clichéd TV tactics are still evident, such as the regular use of URST (unresolved sexual tension) in Carmela’s relationships with Father Phil in Season 1 and especially with Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio) in Season 4. Such predictable narrative maneuvers are more often than not offset by the many wellplaced loose ends, such as the disappearance of Russian mobster Valery in Season 3, the unresolved whereabouts of terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed in the extended episodes of Season 6, Part 2, and Tony’s ultimate fate in the last scene of the final episode, all of which simulate a lifelike open-endedness

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for The Sopranos’ fictional world. Narrative arcs and characters do come and go in a seemingly random fashion, developed over the long run of the series in an improvisational manner. PostSopranos television dramas are no longer obligated to always abide by the usual culs-de-sac of traditional prime-time storytelling, which are designed to be risk adverse, resolve every conflict, and provide plenty of easy answers. In addition, The Sopranos transforms many of the old imperatives of prime-time TV into ethically resonant conundrums. For instance, the series predictably traffics in violence as a dramatic trope as the most effective and efficient means of clarifying power relationships and resolving character conflicts. Unlike most one-hour action-oriented dramas, however, The Sopranos emphasizes the consequences of violence more than its gratuitous effects, as in Christopher’s bout of depression after killing rival gangster Emil Kolar (Bruce Smolanoff) in the pilot episode and Bobby’s profound feelings of sadness and remorse after being forced by Tony into committing his first murder in “Soprano Home Movies” (Episode 78 in Season 6). Tony Soprano is sui generis as a television protagonist in the way in which he blights the lives of almost everyone he encounters. James Poniewozik dubs The Sopranos the “Urtext of male antiheroes” (2008). After television viewers welcomed Tony Soprano into their homes, pill-popping Gregory House, eager torturer Jack Bauer, and serial killer Dexter Morgan were more than acceptable as lead TV characters. Prime time is now an aesthetic frontier where bad as well as good qualities are part of nearly every protagonist’s makeup in that the seriously flawed Dr. House does cure people, special agent Bauer does make the world safe for democracy, and forensic analyst Morgan does mete out punishment to those who deserve it most. In contrast, Tony Soprano stands alone as the lead television character who has no redeeming value whatsoever. At odds with TV’s other antiheroes, Tony does not mean well; he is an

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Tony Soprano is sui generis as a television protagonist and antihero.

immoral and spiritually bankrupt psychopath who in the final analysis is only out for himself. Third and lastly, The Sopranos so thoroughly captured the zeitgeist of suburban ennui and angst during the current fin de siècle that Tony and his family’s lifestyle in New Jersey became emblematic of the American mind and character at the turn of the new millennium. “I’m bored,” announces Tony to Dr. Melfi in “House Arrest,” explaining how he wasn’t even able to enjoy a slickly made thriller like Se7en (1995) in his home theater. “Halfway through it, I’m thinking, this is bullshit. A waste of my fucking time . . . You go to Italy, you lift weights, you watch a movie. It’s all a series of distractions ’til you die.” The fact that Tony’s existential discontent is rooted in his overconsumptive behavior is the unspoken and largely unacknowledged condition that he shares with many of his viewers. Television’s “first priority is to push a lifestyle,” laments David Chase. “I think what they’re trying to sell is that everything’s O.K. all the time, that this is just a great nation, a wonderful society and everything’s O.K. and it’s O.K. to buy stuff” (NPR 2004). Set within

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a despoiled New Jersey landscape, The Sopranos unflinchingly portrays an out-of-control cultural environment where characters habitually overeat, watch too much TV, and spend most of their waking hours in hot pursuit of instant corporeal and material gratification. The expanding girth of Tony and his wiseguy brethren is a literal embodiment of their overconsumptive ways, and nothing they do serves as a palliative to the emptiness they feel. Unlike any television show before it, Chase and his writers hold all Americans—including themselves—accountable. For example, they skewer the culture’s obsession with psychotherapy and its love/hate relationship with the gangster’s anachronistic style of masculinity in the ironically titled “The Strong, Silent Type” when Russian émigré Svetlana Kirilenko tells Tony, “that’s the trouble with you Americans. You expect nothing bad ever to happen when the rest of the world expects only bad to happen. They’re not disappointed.” Tony replies, “That’s a fucking grim outlook.” Svetlana shoots back, “You have everything and you still complain. You lie on couches and you bitch to your psychiatrist. You got too much time to think about yourself.” But she warms up to Tony at the end of her rant, saying, “You’re not so bad. You have many fine qualities. You are big and strong, full of life, mischief. I have always feel positive towards you.” Such is the paradox of Tony’s appeal. The key to The Sopranos’ success was always how an easily relatable protagonist’s relationship with his suburban family trumped mob matters in the narrative arcs of each and every season. As an illustration, the final scenes in all six-plus seasons end with the Sopranos coming back together to assess the state of their family given all that’s happened in the intervening episodes. During the penultimate scene of “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” in Season 1, Tony, Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. are unable to make it home in their car because of a nor’easter that has blown a tree down and blocked their street. They decide to take refuge at Nuovo Vesuvio where Artie Bucco whips up

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penne all’arrabbiata and Tony toasts his family with a Ragaleali cabernet, telling his daughter and son specifically that “someday soon you’re going to have families of your own, and if you’re lucky, you’ll remember the little moments like this, that were good.” The camera then pulls back from the table as thunder cracks and lightning flashes outside. Artie also caters Meadow’s high school graduation party at the Soprano home at the close of Season 2 in “Funhouse.” In the last scene, A.J., Tony, Meadow, and Carmela pose as the prototypical happy family in a graduation portrait as the action crosscuts to all of Tony’s illegal activities (e.g., pornography, extortion, and even a passing reference to “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero’s murder) à la the climactic sequence of The Godfather in order to remind viewers how Tony as the breadwinner supports his upper-middle-class lifestyle. Season 3 finishes with the extended domestic and mob families gathered again at Nuovo Vesuvio after the viewing and burial of gangster-in-training Jackie Aprile, Jr. (Jason Cerbone) in “Army of One” (Episode 39 in Season 3). Uncle Junior serenades the assembled guests with Core ‘ngrato (“Ungrateful Heart”), and the adults in particular are deeply moved by the old-world Italian song that expresses their collective sorrow in the wake of losing a member of the younger generation who had such a bright future. Season 4 wraps up with “Whitecaps” (Episode 52 in Season 4) as the Soprano marriage is coming apart because of Tony’s habitual philandering. The Soprano family congregates in the kitchen at home as Tony honors Carmela’s wishes and decides, “It’s probably better if I don’t live here anymore.” Tony bear-hugs his teary-eyed children and then drives off by himself in the family’s red Chevy Suburban. Tony and Carmela slowly get back together in Season 5, which culminates with a scene in which Tony also makes peace with John “Johnny Sack” Sacramoni (Vince Curatola), the then head of the Brooklyn-based Lupertazzi crime family who had also moved out to North Caldwell just three miles from Tony’s McMansion.

Strategic Ambiguity

99

Left to right: Carmela, Tony, A.J., and Meadow appeared as the prototypical American family at the dawn of the new millennium.

As the two bosses hug in reconciliation, the FBI unexpectedly shows up to arrest Johnny Sack, leaving Tony to run away like the thief he is through the nearby woods to avoid being apprehended. Tony eventually finds his way home, avoiding police cars, even tiptoeing through a brook, and Carmela asks him in

Conclusion

100

amazement, “What happened to you? Your shoes are soaking wet.” This close call is part of an ominous pattern that suggests the FBI will close in soon on Tony as well. The Christmas tableau of the Soprano family gathered together around a warm and cozy fireplace in the last shot of Season 6, Part 1, is merely the calm before the oncoming storm of the finale. In the series’ concluding scene in “Made in America,” Tony walks into Holsten’s Brookdale Confectionery, grabs a booth in anticipation of his wife and children’s imminent arrival, and orders onion rings for the table, a far cry from one of Artie Bucco’s traditional Italian specialties. Once again, the particularity of the setting is ripe with significance. Unlike all of the other final scenes, which take place at either Nuovo Vesuvio or in the privacy of the Sopranos’ home, this one occurs in an ethnically indeterminate 1950s-style ice cream parlor that underscores how easily Tony and his family pass as ordinary mainstream Americans living out their lives in suburbia. Tony may have referred to Dr. Bruce Cusamano, whose private country club remained “closed” to him, as a “Wonder Bread wop” or “merigan” (meaning an unimaginative, Americanized Italian) in “A Hit Is a Hit” (Episode 10 in Season 1), but Tony, Carmela, Meadow, and A.J. are as assimilated as anyone else sitting in Holsten’s diner during that final scene. In the end, the Sopranos’ lifestyle is inextricably linked to the American dream that inspired it, the family lineage that nurtured it, and the North Jersey milieu that infused it with its own unique provincial suburban character. Smash cut to black . . .

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109

SUBJECT INDEX

Television programs and episodes are listed in the Television Series Index.

A&E, 20 ABC, 3, 8, 23, 28, 42, 88, 91 Abraham, Phil, 57 Adler, Jerry, 44 Albrecht, Chris, 11, 49, 92, 93–94 Ali, Muhammad, 8 Al Jazeera, 68 al-Qaeda, 59, 68 AMC, 20, 94 American Beauty (film), 92 American Broadcasting Co. See ABC Anderson, Sherwood, 58 Arts & Entertainment. See A&E Auletta, Ken, 82 Ball, Alan, 92 Belle et La Bête, La (film), 47 Bergman, Ingmar, 41, 79 Bewkes, Jeffrey, 11–12, 14, 30 Bochco, Steven, 88 Bogdanovich, Peter, 78 Bonanno crime family, 51 Bracco, Lorraine, 34 Brand, Joshua, 28 Braun, Lloyd, 39

Brillstein-Grey, 3, 29, 39 Brokaw, Cary, 21 Burdette, Nicole, 34 Burgess, Mitchell, 48, 94 Bush, George W., 54, 59 Cagney, James, 31–32 Casino (film), 40 Castelluccio, Federico, 94 CBS, 2, 3, 8, 28, 29, 40, 91–94 Cerbone, Jason, 98 Chase, David, 7, 23–24, 51–53, 68–71, 92–94; Alik Sakharov and, 57, 87; college years, 27; as a demanding boss, 47–48; early career of, 2–3, 28–29, 47, 55–56; early life of, 24–25, 51; fan culture and, 16–17; favorite early TV shows of, 23; influence of other filmmakers on, 27, 39– 47, 80; negotiations with HBO, 29–30, 48–49; psychotherapy and, 27, 37–39, 45–46, 74–79; The Public Enemy and, 31–37, 46; Sopranos characters modeled

111

Subject Index

112

Chase, David (continued) after family members of, 24–26, 37–39; Sopranos pilot episode and, 29–30, 38–39, 42–44, 57; views on the series’ conclusion, 73, 82–83, 87–89; views on television culture, 96–97 Chase, Henry, 24–25, 37 Chase, Michele, 39 Chase, Norma, 24–27, 37–39 Chianese, Dominic, 39 Cinemax, 10 Clinton, Bill, 54, 55 Cocteau, Jean, 47 Colombo crime family, 51 Columbia Broadcasting System. See CBS Cooper, Gary, 74 Coppola, Francis Ford, 39, 40, 41 “Core ‘ngrato” (song), 98 Cosa Nostra, La. See Mafia Coulter, Allen, 1 Curatola, Vince, 98 DeBitetto, Bob, 20 DeCavalcante crime family, 51–52, 54 DeNiro, Robert, 40 Dolce Vita, La (film), 41 “Don’t Stop Believin’” (song), 86–87 Dylan, Bob, 51 8 1⁄2 (film), 27 Emmy Awards, 4, 28, 55 Falco, Edie, 4 Falsey, John, 28 Fellini, Federico, 27, 41, 80 Fox, 3, 20, 29, 42, 93 Franklin, Benjamin, 58 Frazier, Joe, 8

Fresh Air (radio program), 82 FX, 20, 92, 93 Gambino crime family, 51, 52 Gandolfini, James, 4, 65 Gaston, Michael, 43 Genovese crime family, 48, 51, 52 Godard, Jean-Luc, 41, 42 Godfather, The (film trilogy), 39, 40, 53, 60, 87, 98 Golden Globe Awards, 4 Goodfellas (film), 40, 81 Grave of the Vampire (film), 28 Green, Robin, 48, 94 Grey, Brad, 29 Grimaldi, Dan, 59 Groening, Matt, 46 Gross, Terry, 82 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 44 HBO, 3, 5, 29–30, 48, 49, 88; branding of, 5, 10–13, 14, 16–19, 56; history of, 7–13, 92; impact on other programs and networks, 92–94; success of during the 2000s, 12–21 Heritage Awards, 5 Home Box Office. See HBO Iler, Robert, 34 “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles” (song), 32 Imperioli, Michael, 40 Internet, 11, 15–17, 68 Journey, 86–87 Kelly, Denise, 27 Kessler, Todd A., 14, 93 Kliouka Schaffer, Alla, 34 Konner, Lawrence, 28, 29, 48

Mafia, 37, 41, 51–53, 76 Mailer, Norman, 91 Marchand, Nancy, 24 Margulies, David, 86 Married to the Mob (film), 56, 69 Mean Streets (film), 40 Milch, David, 88, 92 Mistons, Les (film), 47 MoMA, 81 Moonves, Leslie, 93 Movie Channel, The, 10 MTV, 57 Museum of Modern Art. See MoMA Nascarella, Arthur, 86 National Broadcasting Co. See NBC NBC, 2, 4, 8, 9, 19, 20, 28, 40, 47, 91, 93 Netscape Navigator, 11 Nielsen Media Research, 15 9/11, 68 Pacino, Al, 21, 53 Pantoliano, Joe, 41 Passion of Anna, The (film), 41 Pastore, Vincent, 41

Pausa (film), 57 PBS, 68, 73 Peabody Awards, 4 Pierrot le Fou (film), 42 Pisoni, Edward, 70 Public Broadcasting Service. See PBS Public Enemy, The (film), 31–36, 39, 40, 46 Radio Corp. of America. See RCA Ramirez, Dania, 64 Randazzo, Steven, 52 Raphael, Sally Jessy, 74 RCA, 8 Remains of the Day, The (film), 67 Renzulli, Frank, 48 Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos, The (film), 27 Rosenblatt, Roger, 73, 74 Rossi, Tony Ray, 43 Ryan, Shawn, 93 Sakharov, Alik, 57, 87 Satcom, 8 Sauli, Daniel, 59 Scarface (film), 32 Schaffer, Alla Kliouka. See Kliouka Schaffer, Alla Schirripa, Steve, 59 Schulze, Paul, 66 Scorsese, Martin, 28, 39, 40, 41, 43 September 11 terrorist attacks. See 9/11 Se7en (film), 96 Shaw, Bob, 70 Shaw, Janet, 69–70 Showtime, 9, 10, 17, 20, 93 Shutes, Mark, 54 Sigler, Jamie-Lynn, 32 Silvercup Studios, 70, 80 Silverman, Ben, 93

Subject Index

La Belle et La Bête. See Belle et La Bête, La La Cosa Nostra. See Mafia Lada, Oksana, 45 La Dolce Vita. See Dolce Vita, La Landgraf, John, 92, 93 Landress, Ilene, 69 Lehrer, Jim, 73 Les Mistons. See Mistons, Les Levin, Gerald, 7 Lewinsky, Monica, 54 Little Caesar (film), 32 Lucchese crime family, 51 Lynch, David, 42–44

113

Subject Index

114

Simon, David, 92 Siravo, Joseph, 25 Sirico, Tony, 40 Smolanoff, Bruce, 95 Sopranos Family Cookbook, The (book), 16 Sopranos: Road to Respect, The (video game), 18 Spotlight, 10 Streep, Meryl, 21 Sutherland, Kiefer, 93

“Tweeter and the Monkey Man” (song), 51 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 87

Taucher, Dean, 70 “Thrilla in Manila” (boxing match), 8 Time/HBO, 10 Times-Mirror, 10 Time Warner, 18, 19, 93 TNT, 93 Traffic (film), 20 Truffaut, François, 47 Tully, Patrick, 32 Turner Network Television. See TNT Turturro, Aida, 34

Warner Amex, 10 Warshow, Robert, 82, 83, 88, 89 Weiner, Matt, 94 Wellman, William, 31 Winter, Terence, 48, 94 Wolcott, James, 70 WOR, 31 World Wide Web. See Internet Wright, Robert, 19

Universal TV, 28 USA Network, 93 Van Zandt, Steven, 44 Ventimiglia, John, 16 Viacom, 10 Vincent, Frank, 86

YouTube, 16

television series index

Television program titles are italicized; individual Sopranos episode titles are enclosed in quotation marks with the season and episode numbers provided in parentheses. For all other topics, see the Subject Index.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents, 28 “All Due Respect” (5:65), 64 All the Rivers Run, 9 Almost Grown, 2, 28 Angels in America, 21 “Army of One” (3:39), 98 “Big Girls Don’t Cry” (2:18), 62 Blue Bloods, 94 “Blue Comet, The” (6:85), 34, 37, 68, 84 Boardwalk Empire, 94 Brotherhood, 93 “Chasing It” (6:81), 64 “Cold Stone” (6:76), 64 “College” (1:5), 43, 45, 49, 67 “Commendatori” (2:17), 40 Crime Story, 40 Cybill, 92 Damages, 93 Deadwood, 88, 92 Dexter, 20 “Down Neck” (1:7), 25, 37, 60, 62,

65, 83 “Employee of the Month” (3:28), 78–79 ER, 4, 52, 91, 93 “Fortunate Son” (3:29), 52, 63–64 “46 Long” (1:2), 52 Fugitive, The, 23 “Funhouse” (2:26), 33, 42, 98 Gangster Chronicles, The, 40 “Happy Wanderer, The” (2:19), 62–63 Hill Street Blues, 9, 22, 91, 92 “Hit Is a Hit, A” (1:10), 100 Homicide: Life on the Streets, 91, 92 “House Arrest” (2:24), 76–78, 96 House M.D., 20 Huff, 93 “I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano” (1:13), 34, 97 I’ll Fly Away, 2, 28–29

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Television Series Index

It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, 9–10 Jersey Shore, 56 “Join the Club” (6:67), 83 “Kaisha” (6:77), 64 “Kennedy and Heidi” (6:83), 84 Kingpin, 20 Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 28 Larry Sanders Show, The, 10, 29 “Long Term Parking” (5:64), 79–80. L Word, The, 93

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“Made in America” (6:86), 17, 18, 59, 62, 68, 84–89, 100 Mad Men, 20, 94 “Marco Polo” (5:60), 79 “Mayham” (6:68), 83 “Meadowlands” (1:4), 37, 44 “Members Only” (6:66), 83 Miami Vice, 47 Million Dollar Movie, 31 Monday Night Football, 28 Moonlight, 28 My So-Called Life, 91 Nip/Tuck, 93 “Nobody Knows Anything” (1:11), 54–55 Northern Exposure, 2, 29, 48 Not Necessarily the News, 9 NYPD Blue, 88, 91, 92 Off the Minnesota Strip, 28, 55 Oz, 12 “Pax Soprana” (1:6), 62 PBS NewsHour, 73 Picket Fences, 91 “Pilot” (1:1), 29–30, 38–39, 42–44,

53, 57, 65, 74–75, 95 “Pine Barrens” (3:37), 80–81 “Proshai, Livushka” (3:28), 32, 36, 46 Rescue Me, 93 Rockford Files, The, 2, 28 Scenes from a Marriage, 79 “Second Coming, The” (6:84), 42, 60, 65, 68, 84 Seven Minute Sopranos, 16 Sex and the City, 12 Shield, The, 20, 93 Simpsons, The, 42, 46 Six Feet Under, 12, 92 Sleeper Cell, 93 “Soprano Home Movies” (6:78), 95 Sopranos, The, aftereffects of, 19–22, 91–100; awards, 4–5; Catholicism and, 39, 41, 60, 66–68; characters modeled after Chase family members, 24–26, 37–39; conclusion of, 17, 18, 59, 62, 68, 82–89, 94, 100; corrupted American Dream in, 39, 58–61; dream imagery in, 41–46; ethnicities in, 61–64; fan loyalty, 14–18; gangster culture represented in, 51–54; gangster genre and, 31–36, 39–41, 87; geographical landscape in, 55–58, 96–97; “greenlighting” of, 48–49; humorous aspects, 16, 46–47, 74, 80–81; international appeal, 19, 71; “McMansions” of, 25, 69–70, 75, 79, 99; as a multi-genre series, 24, 73–81, 92, 94; novelistic qualities, 91, 94–95; proposed titles for, 30; psychological aspects, 34, 37,

Terry Fox Story, The, 9 “Toodle-Fucking-Oo” (2:16), 77 Tudors, The, 93

24, 93 Twin Peaks, 42, 44, 47 “Two Tonys” (5:53), 78 Untouchables, The, 23 “Walk Like a Man” (6:82), 64 Weeds, 93 West Wing, The, 93 “Whitecaps” (4:52), 79, 98 “Whoever Did This” (4:48), 41 Wire, The, 92 Wiseguy, 40

Television Series Index

41, 62–67, 74–79, 82–85, 97; as reflection of the times, 4, 53–55, 92, 96–97; September 11 terrorist attacks and, 68; The Simpsons and, 46; stylistic eclecticism of, 39–47, 94; tie-in products, 16–18 St. Elsewhere, 91 “Strong, Silent Type, The” (4:10), 97

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