On David Chase, and Why the Sopranos is the Best TV Show in History

David Chase (b. 1945) turns 80 today. Which sounds young, if anything; the guy has been working in television for over 50 years.

My apologies in advance for the sheer conventionality of this post. I pride myself on the independence of my opinions, and the uniqueness of the topics I choose to write about. Probably no post I write will ever be so “mainstream” as this, putting aside the fact that it is 20, 25 years out of date. On the other hand, I also strive to be honest, and to bring something like objectivity to what I do. There are many occasions when it would be better personally and professionally to tack with the crowd but I have to go against because I see what I see (I’m looking at you, Lou Costello!) Also we caught the excellent two part doc Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos when it dropped a few months ago, and that makes this now-hoary subject somewhat more timely than it might otherwise be.

When The Sopranos (1999-2007) first launched a quarter century ago my first reaction was to roll my eyes. Hadn’t mobsters been done to death? The Coppola movies, the Scorsese movies, the everybody-else movies? Not only that, there was even a “mobster goes to a psychiatrist” comedy, Analyze This, with De Niro and Billy Crystal that came out at around the same time this show premiered. I even found the name of the main characters and the show kind of tired and basic. The Sopranos? It sounded to me like it was meant to evoke singing canaries, i.e. “snitches” in mob slang, or perhaps, ya know, castrati, men who sang like women because they had been gelded, a kind of heavy-handed metaphor. (It turns out that he took the name from some real-life people he knew, but I didn’t know that at the time). At all events, what could they do that would be new on this show? It turns out practically everything, but we’ll get to that.

As I native Rhode Islander who later lived in New Jersey and the Italian section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn for a decade, I have lived half my life in Italian-American country. I have no patience for anything inauthentic in representations of this culture. A casual observer can be forgiven for assuming Chase was either a WASP a laSalmon P. Chase, or Jewish, with Chase as an adopted surname. But it turns out that he was as Italian as it gets. His father Enrico “Henry” Chase was born in Providence, and was the biological son of Giuseppe “Joseph” Fusco and Teresa Melfi (whose name Chase paid tribute to on the show) and the legal son of a man named Giovanni DeCesare. (Teresa, the wife of Giovanni, got pregnant with their boarder Giuseppe, and ran off with him). Chase’s mother was Norma Bucco, also Italian, and also a name he used on the show. She chose the name Chase to distance David and his siblings from their legal father, whose surname was on their birth certificates. Chase was raised in the towns of Clifton and North Caldwell, New Jersey. His father ran a hardware store in nearby Verona.

Originally intending to be a musician (he played drums) Chase attended Wake-Forest University, then went to NYU Tisch, where he majored in film, and then Stanford, where he got his masters. His career as TV writer/producer seemed charmed. He began selling scripts and getting hired by producers almost immediately, and he worked for some of the most highly-regarded television programs of the day. The list includes Bill Bixby’s The Magician (1974), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974-75), Switch (1975-76), The Rockford Files (1976-79), the reboot of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1986), his own short-lived show Almost Grown (1988-89) with Tim Daly and Eve Gordon, I’ll Fly Away (1991-93), and Northern Exposure (1993-95).

By the end of the ’90s he’d won a couple of Emmys and been nominated for another half dozen. He’d worked for some of the most critically acclaimed shows going. He could now do a hard press for a passion project of his own. He decided to put everything he knew about life and writing into this one show about a New Jersey mob boss. What set it apart was (among other things) the element of autobiography. Like Tony Soprano, Chase had been prone to depression and panic attacks himself. He had hang-ups about his parents. He grew up in suburban New Jersey. And he knew people like the characters on the show, even though he wasn’t one of them.

He was also, I hope we have established, a brilliant writer. In fact, he was so elevated in his thinking that he had scorn for most television. He thought most tv producers and writers were idiots, and the stuff they turned out was crap. He cited David Lynch and The Twilight Zone as influences, and articulated his philosophy as follows: “Network television is all talk. I think there should be visuals on a show, some sense of mystery to it, connections that don’t add up. I think there should be dreams and music and dead air and stuff that goes nowhere. There should be, God forgive me, a little bit of poetry.” I could kiss him on the mouth for that. And while he acknowledges classics of the gangster genre in film and television as influences as well, he knew that he wanted to say more. He wanted to do a show that was about history, about culture, about the human mind, and about families. And he threaded all of those needles. This is why I call it the best television show of all time, over some pretty stiff competition, including shows created by guys who’d worked under him on The Sopranos, like Mad Men (Matthew Weiner) and Boardwalk Empire (Terence Winter). The Sopranos reminds me of Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians, and of the storytellers of the Italian Renaissance. It reaches for that kind of thing, and hits it. It transcends any mere genre. It’s by turns as hilarious as any sit-com, as heartbreaking as any tragedy, as appalling as a horror movie, as anthropologically interesting as a documentary or a piece of journalism. There is also a political aspect. Tony’s business is a metaphor for an America that is violent, corrupt, materialistic, and in decline. The people it matters to are fighting desperately for their lives, but there’s nothing they can do ultimately. The ambiguous ending of the series, infuriating to some, is to my mind, symptomatic of Chase’s genius.

Of the principal cast members, to date, I have only written about Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) because he passed away a few years ago and has a really interesting background, and Frank Vincent, who was just on the show for a couple of seasons. I have also occasionally had recourse to name-drop the sizzling hot Drea de Mateo, who I went to NYU with. In the ’90s she was actually in a short movie with me (photo evidence here), and participated in play-readings of one of my early scripts. (See here.) Her most recent headlines have been about her support for Trump, unfortunately, but of course she does. He’s a gangster, after all. A couple of the other major cast members have become Facebook friends. I’m not sure how that came about. Maybe they like vaudeville.

James Gandolfini was a risky but inspired choice to play the lead Tony Soprano, the hub of the entire series. Gandolfini had a sort of lisp-like speech impediment that made him seem intrinsically comical, a quality not unlike that of Buddy Hackett. This catalyzed terrific comedy moments. But Gandolfini was also a terrific, serious actor, with a kind of simmering volcano perpetually bubbling underneath, and he was physically large, to an intimidating degree. These contradictory elements fueled moments of incredible power that were sometimes touching, sometimes terrifying. He was said to enhance his performance with method acting tricks, skipping sleep the night before, or drinking massive amounts of coffee, or walking around with a stone in his shoe. He also had problems with booze and cocaine, which resulted in absences from set, which he could get away with since he was a star, and which no doubt helped fuel on-set tension. So beloved was he by one and all that no one seems to hold it against him. His shocking death of a heart attack in 2013 has forever enshrined him in people’s memories, as though he were a Saint on a stained glass window.

Edie Falco, as Tony’s wife Carmella turned in what is to my mind the best television performance ever; there is a certain scene in a certain episode that really took me to the mountaintop, it was like she was doing Medea or Clytemnestra or something. It’s both to her credit and to Chase’s that Carmella is not just the zillionth long-suffering housewife role. In some sense, the show is about her journey more than it is Tony’s. Carmella is the passive beneficiary of a cruel system, but she is no less morally complicit. She tries to close her eyes and ears to the source of her comforts, but in time it becomes impossible.

Gandolfini and Falco both won multiple Emmys for their acting on the series. de Matteo took home an Emmy too, as did Michael Imperioli (whom we’ve watched grow from the half-wit kid “Spider” in Goodfellas to the middle-age sad sack in White Lotus, with Tony’s hot-headed nephew Christopher as the high point in between) and Joe Pantoliano as rival gangster Ralph, who somehow had a knack for being charming and loathsome at the same time. The other principals were Lorraine Bracco (against type but great) as Tony’s shrink Dr. Melfi; Dominic Chianese as Uncle Junior (who is still with us at age 94!); Vincent Pastore as the ill-fated Big Pussy; “Little Steven” Van Zandt from Springsteen’sE Street Band as Silvio, consigliere and manager of the Bada Bing; TV veteran Nancy Marchand, who casts a long shadow as Tony’s mom in the first season; and John Ventimiglia as restaurateur Artie Bucco, Tony’s “clean” friend, and several others. Some other well known actors who came in and out included the likes of Jerry Adler, Robert Loggia,Tony Darrow,Steve Buscemi, Anabella Sciorra, Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Bergen,Burt Young, et al.

2021 saw the release of a prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, set in the 1960s, with Michael Gandolfini (son of James) in the role of the younger Tony. The imperfections of this afterthought are not serious enough to spoil what came before, but they do put its excellence in sharp relief.

I highly recommend that 2024 documentary Wise Guy, which will enhance your appreciation of the reflective, philosophical sorcerer who made this miraculous tv series happen — a rare modern example of one man’s personal demons speaking to the public at large. You might also enjoy the six-part documentary series Shooting the Sopranos which was repackaged and rebranded for streaming in 2021, but originally produced under the title Sopranos Unauthorized: Shooting Sites Uncovered in 2002. The technical quality of the show is very rough and old-fashioned but it has lots of interesting out-takes, and candid footage, interviews, etc, and is hosted by minor cast member John Fiore. It almost looks like a pirate production, but I think it is wise of the producers and HBO to let it circulate out there. It only encourages hardcore fandom for their show, after all.

At present, David Chase is reported to be working on a horror movie. Shades of Innocent Blood?