CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 06/15/07

Television Gets Made:
The Legacy of The Sopranos

By jason davis

Eight years after New Jersey mobster Tony Soprano wandered into a psychiatrist's office, his therapy is over and so is one of the most revolutionary pieces of television in the history of the medium. As The Sopranos cuts to black, CS Weekly looks back at how creator David Chase and associates changed TV.

After 86 episodes, The Sopranos concluded its mob-led assault on television's status quo by maintaining its own status quo for the series' final episode. To unravel this seeming conundrum, a viewer need only look at the ultimate installment of any other long-running series wherein the powers that be pull out all the stops to deliver a memorable spectacle that wraps up an epic run in one last hurrah. Series creator David Chase did exactly the opposite by delivering a typical episode for his groundbreaking HBO show's swan song. The Sopranos was always about family, and so it remained in a finale that illustrated how little had really changed since the pilot aired in 1999. Sure, New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) developed as a character over the seasons, but he was still as a much a man torn between his loyalty to both his conventional family and his crime family as he was at the series' outset. Indeed, this consistency is part of the series' and Chase's contribution to television history because if The Sopranos was about anything, it was about undermining audience expectations.

"A mob boss walks into a psychiatrist's office…" Sounds like the set-up to a joke, and it very well might have been had Fox bought The Sopranos as a sitcom when Chase pitched it thus in the mid-'90s (the notion did form the comedic basis of the 1999 Peter Tolan, Harold Ramis, and Kenneth Lonergan screenplay Analyze This). With HBO's purchase of the property, the tone of the series was allowed to be something a little more nebulous than that of a network series. Shows like Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks had explored the dramatic contrast created by colliding the hilarious with the melancholy, but Chase and company took the conceit to a whole new level, allowing the entire gamut of dramatic tones to coexist in world that was both comedy and tragedy. Tony could be bonding with his daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) on a college scouting trip one moment and brutally garroting a wiseguy turncoat the next. Family gatherings were just as unpredictable, with Tony's good-natured kidding of his brother-in-law Bobby Baccalierri (Steven R. Schirripa) escalating to a full-scale fistfight that demolishes a vacation home and leaves the boss questioning his pugilistic prowess.

Such questions were at the heart of a series suffused with psychiatry. Whereas typical television fare would see a visit to the shrink as an opportunity to offload character exposition, The Sopranos used Tony's visits to Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Loraine Bracco) as an opportunity to pose more questions than answers. Therapy sessions would often avoid introspection in favor of meditation with Tony mourning the loss of Gary Cooper's strong silent type or lamenting his son's existential outlook on life. Rarely willing to take responsibility for his problems, Tony would blame his domineering mother Livia (Nancy Marchand), his addled uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), or his drug-addicted "nephew" Christopher (Michael Imperioli) as the arbiters of stress in his life. Such avoidance of culpability was key to Tony's character and consistent with a criminal lifestyle spent dodging the consequences of his illicit actions.

As innovations go, Tony's inherent criminality stretched the bounds of the television protagonist to unheard-of limits. While no shortage of TV leads have stepped over the line into moral gray areas in shows like NYPD Blue and The Practice, The Sopranos starred an unequivocal villain. A catalog of Tony's crimes committed only in front of the audience would stun a District Attorney into a catatonic state without even considering the acts perpetrated with fellow mobsters or documented by the FBI's Organized Crime department. That the show presents this monster as a family man who loves his wife, cherishes his kids, and prays to God, while never letting the viewer forget he's a murdering thug glutted with the wealth of ruined lives, is a testament to Chase and company's uncompromised portrayal of their characters. Judgment is left to the viewer, and the writers trust their audience to draw their own conclusions. Such an idea flies in the face of a medium that too often feels the need to spoon-feed the viewer a story. The Sopranos offers no pat answers to the questions it provokes and asks as much of its audience as it gives in determining the nature of its protagonist and the meaning of its stories.

While most stories are content to begin in medias res, few will intentionally end as such. The final scene of The Sopranos, abruptly cutting to black in the middle of the action, is the apotheosis of this writing staff's penchant for loose threads. Like life, the story of The Sopranos is seldom tidy and things are not necessarily resolved at the end of an episode, season, or even the series itself. Neopolitan hitman Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio) disappeared after nearly murdering Tony. Similarly unresolved was the case of the seemingly invulnerable Russian who led Soprano soldiers Chris Moltisanti and Paul Gaultieri (Tony Sirico) on merry chase through the frozen New Jersey Pine Barrens, only to vanish without a trace, demonstrating that some of the show's best episodes leave more than a little to the imagination. Did the Russian merely curl up and die in the snow and bleed to death from his wounds? Did he escape back to civilization and spend the rest of the series planning to kill his two Italian assailants? Was he a metaphysical force of nature that transcended the laws of reality?

Indeed, the final episode, "Made in America," leaves its last scene entirely in the hands of the viewers. Backed by Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'", the scene finds Tony meeting his wife Carmella (Edie Falco) and kids—Meadow and A.J. (Robert Iler)—for dinner at a crowded restaurant. After ratcheting up the tension with skillful editing, the scene abruptly cuts to black. Was Tony whacked in retaliation for the murder of New York boss Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent)? Were some of the restaurant's patrons FBI agents preparing to bring the crime lord down with evidence from recently flipped Sopranos capo Carlo Gervasi (Arthur J. Nascarella)? Or, as the song implies, did everyone just go on with their lives? Any or all were up for grabs when the hour ended, and the ambiguity allowed the audience to tailor the program to their own personal taste.

Speaking of taste, has there ever been so much food on screen outside the confines of The Iron Chef? The Sopranos reveled in the minutia of everyday life. Though the show had its share of gun fights and chases, doubtless it'll best be remembered for those languid moments of dining in front of Satriale's Pork Store, in the back room of the Bada Bing strip club, and at the restaurant of Tony's childhood pal Artie Bucco (John Ventimiglia). If the scene wasn't about eating, it was likely delving into more prurient aspects of life—be it Soprano Capo Gigi Cestone's (John Fiore) death by constipation or Junior Soprano's sexual proclivities engendering the contempt of his crew. Chase and his writers deployed the same evenhandedness in capturing the banalities of daily life as they reserved for more dramatic moments of treachery and violence.

As for those dramatic moments, they were never accompanied by the standard alterna-pop music that pervades the soundtrack of your average show on the CW. The music of The Sopranos was another arena in which the series sought to lend verisimilitude to its world. Score was eschewed in favor of pop songs employed as source music throughout the show's run. Be it the latest single by Sting or the score to Martin Scorsese's The Departed, music was part of the characters' world and Chase's only concession to editorializing was the often wry choice of music playing out over the end credits. After Tony's soldiers takes out Junior Soprano's crew in the second season's "Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist's Office," the show closes with "Time is on My Side" by Irma Thomas—Tony's position is secure…for now. Later that year, Tony cleans up a murder perpetrated by his big sister Janice (Aida Turturo) in "Knight in White Satin Armor" and we get the Eurythmics' "I Saved the World Today"—a smug assessment of Tony's good deed.

In keeping with the aural elements of the series, one of The Sopranos most compelling contribution to screenwriting is its use of dialogue. Obviously, the latitude of pay cable allows for more colorful banter than on network counterparts, but Chase and company's real contribution to television dialogue is the inelegance of language uttered by Tony Soprano and his cohorts. The dialogue is riddled with poorly formed thoughts, malapropisms, and conversations that go nowhere. Hill Street Blues put a ragged edge on its characters' chatter and David E. Kelley perfected overlapping dialogue on The Practice and Ally McBeal, but The Sopranos takes the cannoli, so to speak. The epidemic of inarticulateness (to which only Dr. Melfi and Meadow Soprano are immune) keeps the characters constantly at arm's length from the audience. The viewer never fully appreciates what's going on in their heads because the window of self-expression is a greasy one blurred by incoherent grammar and limited vocabulary. As much as the dramatis personae are defined by their actions, they are obscured by their words. Bereft of the elevated speech issued by their network colleagues, the denizens of North Jersey are endeared to the audience by not sounding like they have the right response for every situation. The awkwardness and indelicateness of everyday conversation make the Sopranos and their associates real in a way that most TV characters never can be—a precept taken to heart by NBC's Friday Night Lights, where the teenaged football players tell jokes that aren't funny and fumble their words like a mud-slicked pigskin.

With Tony and friends gone from our screens, Sunday nights will never be the same. As with the passing of TV touchstones like I Love Lucy, All in the Family, and Moonlighting, The Sopranos leaves in its wake a TV landscape that looks nothing like it did eight years before. David Chase and his depressed mobster kicked the HBO revolution into high gear, establishing cable as the home of dramatic innovation and forcing the broadcast networks to up their game as well. Television simultaneously became both more realistic and more ambiguous, and if that's the inscription on Tony Soprano's tombstone, then it's worth all the blood on his hands.

Jason Davis is the DVD Manager for CS Weekly , a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

The Sopranos courtesy HBO

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