To Susan Olds, Mark Di Ionno, Wally Stroby,
Rosemary Parrillo, Anne-Marie Cottone,
Jenifer Braun, Steve Hedgpeth, and the rest
of the gang from the glorious ’90s heyday of
the Star-Ledger features section.
Love,
Kid & Genius
Contents
THE FOREWORD
You Get What You Pay For
THE INTRODUCTION
It Goes On and On and On and On
THE RECAPS
Season One
Woke Up This Morning
S1/E1
“Pilot”
A Boy’s Best Friend
S1/E2
“46 Long”
Protocol
S1/E3
“Denial, Anger, Acceptance”
The Casual Violence
S1/E4
“Meadowlands”
The True Face
S1/E5
“College”
Like a Mandolin
S1/E6
“Pax Soprana”
White Rabbit
S1/E7
“Down Neck”
Spring Cleaning
S1/E8
“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti”
The Devil He Knows
S1/E9
“Boca”
Mystery Box
S1/E10
“A Hit Is a Hit”
The Other Forever
S1/E11
“Nobody Knows Anything”
Tiny Tears
S1/E12
“Isabella”
Skyscraper Windows
S1/E13
“I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano”
Season Two
A Very Good Year
S2/E1
“Guy Walks into a Psychiatrist’s Office”
Pot Meets Kettle
S2/E2
“Do Not Resuscitate”
Old School
S2/E3
“Toodle-Fucking-Oo”
Con te Partirò
S2/E4
“Commendatori”
Total Control
S2/E5
“Big Girls Don’t Cry”
This Game’s Not for You
S2/E6
“The Happy Wanderer”
God the Father
S2/E7
“D-Girl”
The Last of the Arugula Rabe
S2/E8
“Full Leather Jacket”
The Admiral Piper
S2/E9
“From Where to Eternity”
The Scorpion
S2/E10
“Bust Out”
Alexithymia
S2/E11
“House Arrest”
Pine Cones
S2/E12
“The Knight in White Satin Armor”
Temple of Knowledge
S2/E13
“Funhouse”
Season Three
The Sausage Factory
S3/E1
“Mr. Ruggerio’s Neighborhood”
Miles to Go
S3/E2
“Proshai, Livushska”
The Hair Apparent
S3/E3
“Fortunate Son”
Attack Dog
S3/E4
“Employee of the Month”
Witness Protection
S3/E5
“Another Toothpick”
Work-Related Accident
S3/E6
“University”
Blood Money
S3/E7
“Second Opinion”
Early Retirement
S3/E8
“He Is Risen”
Each Child Is Special
S3/E9
“The Telltale Moozadell”
Ho Fuckin’ Ho
S3/E10
“. . . To Save Us All from Satan’s Power”
Rasputin
S3/E11
“Pine Barrens”
A Mofo
S3/E12
“Amour Fou”
The Garbage Business
S3/E13
“Army of One”
Season Four
The Halfback of Notre Dame
S4/E1
“For All Debts Public and Private”
Mr. Mob Boss
S4/E2
“No Show”
Reservations
S4/E3
“Christopher”
All of Her
S4/E4
“The Weight”
My Rifle, My Pony, and Me
S4/E5
“Pie-O-My”
Reflections
S4/E6
“Everybody Hurts”
All the Girls in New Jersey
S4/E7
“Watching Too Much Television”
The Boss’s Wife
S4/E8
“Mergers and Acquisitions”
Straight Arrow
S4/E9
“Whoever Did This”
Intervention
S4/E10
“The Strong, Silent Type”
Versales
S4/E11
“Calling All Cars”
Meeting’s Over
S4/E12
“Eloise”
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Mook?
S4/E13
“Whitecaps”
Season Five
Class of 2004
S5/E1
“Two Tonys”
Tony Uncle Al
S5/E2
“Rat Pack”
Small Strokes
S5/E3
“Where’s Johnny?”
Steamrollers
S5/E4
“All Happy Families”
Telephone
S5/E5
“Irregular Around the Margins”
Fish Out of Water
S5/E6
“Sentimental Education”
Happy Birthday, Mister President
S5/E7
“In Camelot”
Truce and Consequences
S5/E8
“Marco Polo”
Arch-Nemesis
S5/E9
“Unidentified Black Males”
On the Farm
S5/E10
“Cold Cuts”
Three Times a Lady
S5/E11
“The Test Dream”
Take Off and Drive
S5/E12
“Long Term Parking”
Glad Tidings
S5/E13
“All Due Respect”
Season Six
The Noose
S6/E1
“Members Only”
Heating Systems
S6/E2
“Join the Club”
Complicit
S6/E3
“Mayham”
Kung Fu
S6/E4
“The Fleshy Part of the Thigh”
Jackals
S6/E5
“Mr. & Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request . . .”
Deep in the Valley
S6/E6
“Live Free or Die”
The Haves and Have-Nots
S6/E7
“Luxury Lounge”
Imitations of Life
S6/E8
“Johnny Cakes”
A Pair of Socks
S6/E9
“The Ride”
The Totality of Vito
S6/E10
“Moe ’N Joe”
City of Lights
S6/E11
“Cold Stones”
Least She’s Catholic
S6/E12
�
�Kaisha”
Season Seven
Boardwalk Hotel
S7/E1
“Soprano Home Movies”
Spinning Wheels
S7/E2
“Stage 5”
Take Me Home, Country Road
S7/E3
“Remember When”
A Pebble in a Lake
S7/E4
“Chasing It”
Hellfighters
S7/E5
“Walk Like a Man”
Comfort’s End
S7/E6
“Kennedy and Heidi”
They Are the Bus
S7/E7
“The Second Coming”
Leadbelly
S7/E8
“The Blue Comet”
No Encore
S7/E9
“Made in America”
THE DEBATE
Don’t Stop Believin’ You Know Exactly What Happened at the End of The Sopranos
THE DAVID CHASE SESSIONS
Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Bonus: “Pine Barrens”
THE MORGUE
THE EULOGIES
Acknowledgments
The Foreword:
You Get What You Pay For
Before 2002, I had seen exactly one episode of The Sopranos, a chance encounter in an upstate New York motel room. I liked what I saw, but I had been raised by thrifty parents with a long list of things one should never pay for, and “premium cable” was at the top. Never mind basic cable; television was meant to be free. So in 1999, I watched that one episode, then let The Sopranos go. Three years and three critically acclaimed seasons later, all I knew was that Tony Soprano once took his daughter on a college visit and things did not go as planned.
Then I decided to buy a house with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, who happened to be making his own HBO show, The Wire. (In fact, he was so busy filming that I was alone on moving day; let’s not revisit that old grudge.) Our new house had green laminate kitchen counters, just like Carmela Soprano’s. More thrillingly, we had an HBO subscription and a nice cache of free DVDs. So when oral surgery sidelined me for a couple of days in spring 2002, I made myself a cheese soufflé and started my first binge watch, although that term was not yet mainstream. My hope was that The Sopranos would distract me from my pain until I could fall asleep.
I knew very little sleep over the next three days.
Like millions before me, I was hooked, showing up every Sunday night for the “three” seasons that aired over the next five years. (Like the writers of this book and David Chase himself, I count them as four seasons.) After it ended in 2007, I rewatched the series in full at least six times.
Serial dramas are now commonplace, yet few equal The Sopranos. One can watch it start to finish with enormous satisfaction, yet also enjoy single episodes with almost no context. Toward the end of my father’s life, when his memory was failing, he happily watched the bowdlerized episodes on A&E the way his father had once watched Perry Mason. No matter that he couldn’t remember the larger plot arcs; the individual shows never failed to entertain him.
I credit this quality to Chase’s years on relatively traditional Hollywood fare, like The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure. He has an incomparable short-game/long-game approach to making television. There is a form in fiction that many claim, but few actually deliver: connected short stories in which the whole transcends the parts. The Sopranos works that way. Episodes we think are one-offs still carry important pieces of the story; plot-heavy installments can be enjoyed in isolation.
Consider “Pine Barrens.” It may feel like a “bottle episode,” but the animosity between Paulie and Chris will surface again and again—their secrets from that day endure. Or take “College,” my first taste—as Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall tell us in this book, the episode where “The Sopranos became The Sopranos”—which makes the counterintuitive choice to have Tony in Maine while Carmela entertains the parish priest back in New Jersey. You can’t subvert a genre until you understand it. Chase and his writers clearly knew all the ins and outs of Mafia movies, but they also recognized that their characters would, too. These wise guys were not only in on the joke—they made jokes.
Eventually, I became a little bit of a Sopranos obsessive. That might sound like an oxymoron, but when you read this book, you realize that there are levels of Sopranos obsessiveness. The trivia I so proudly identified during rewatches—Look, there’s Joseph Gannascoli, who will later play Vito Spatafore, as a civilian-schmo day player in season one—are nothing compared to the details that Sepinwall and Seitz have mined here.
Speaking of our guides—while I have a vivid memory of my first Sopranos encounter, I am less clear when I started to read Alan and Matt’s work, but I know it goes back more than a decade. It was probably through their excellent commentary on and recaps of The Wire. But I have continued reading them because of their intelligent overall enthusiasm for television. I love television. I have always loved television. Even as a child, I knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the snobby woman on The Dick Van Dyke Show who, upon meeting Rob Petrie, trilled, “Oh, I don’t own a television machine.” The number of good television critics in place when The Sopranos first aired is a testimony to newspapers (which I also love). But I think Alan and Matt are particularly exceptional in their approach to this groundbreaking show. It’s hard to imagine that anyone has thought this long and hard about these episodes, unless it’s David Chase, his writers, and the late James Gandolfini.
A burning question hangs over this enterprise: What about that finale? I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say that The Sopranos Sessions provided me with—oh dreaded word—closure. I watched “Made in America” alone, my husband thousands of miles away in South Africa, filming an HBO miniseries. (Please note the motif of HBO taking my husband away when I need him most.)
When the screen went black and the sound cut out, I was convinced there had been an outage. In May 1988, there was a power failure in Baltimore just before the Seinfeld finale that knocked out cable to thousands, so perhaps I was oversensitive to the likelihood of it recurring.
Once I realized the dead screen was intentional, I felt, well, mocked. I had logged serious time with The Sopranos. I had even attended the premiere for season four’s first two episodes, memorable because I sat in front of William Styron, who laughed heartily at the scene in which Adriana vomited so violently that her poodle ran for cover. I wasn’t some bloodthirsty mook cheering for more whackage. I was a serious, thoughtful fan who could recognize William Styron at Radio City Music Hall. I wanted and deserved a great ending, like the montage to “Thru and Thru” in “Funhouse,” the season two finale. By then I’d written seven books in a series of crime novels about a Baltimore PI, and I believed that if I ever chose to end my series, I would do it with a grand, reader-rewarding flourish. My feelings about the Sopranos finale joined a list of passionate grudges that includes the ’69 Super Bowl, the ’69 World Series, and the HBO executives who scheduled production of my husband’s latest show to coincide with my book tour.
In all seriousness, this book helped me heal. I now understand that Chase was in a dilemma not unlike L. Frank Baum, who wanted to stop writing about Oz—the original Oz, not the HBO one—but faced an insatiable appetite from young readers. At one point, Baum went so far as to make Oz invisible to the world and had Dorothy Gale, now a permanent resident, send a note: “You will hear nothing more about Oz, because we are now cut off forever from the world.” It didn’t work; Baum would write eight more Oz books, and other writers continued the series long after his death. “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in”—sound familiar?
How does one resolve the problematic story of Tony Soprano, a monster that millions welcomed into their homes for eight years
? It wasn’t Chase who made a fool of me, but Tony, who had done the same thing to Dr. Melfi. But unlike Dr. Melfi, I was never going to have the resolve and discipline to turn my back on him. The scene in Holsten’s, which had felt like such a fuck-you at the time, now seems like one of the more definitive endings in the history of television. The Sopranos deserved no less.
It also deserves no less than this thoughtful, engrossing compendium of recaps, facts, trivia, and analysis. When I heard that Alan and Matt were working on this book, I jokingly made one request: Would you please explain the thematic significance of “The Three Bells,” the 1950s song used in back-to-back episodes in season six? They did, and with more detail than I ever anticipated. (“The classic Eisenhower-era arrangement with its marzipan harmonizing is a musical time machine, immersing listeners not in actual 1950s America, but in white, middle-class America’s sentimental self-image of that time and place.”) Nothing gets by these guys. If the FBI had brought this level of exhaustive investigation to the Soprano Family itself, Tony would have been locked up by the end of season one. And wouldn’t we all be poorer for that?
Laura Lippman
Baltimore, Maryland
March 2018
The Introduction:
It Goes On and On and On and On
Guy walks into a psychiatrist’s office. He tells the psychiatrist he’s been having panic attacks and collapsing at work and home. “Lately,” he adds, “I’m gettin’ the feelin’ that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
Tough crowd. Who died?
I’ll tell you who. Guy takes his daughter on a college tour. Runs into a traitorous ex-friend and strangles him to death in broad daylight. While they’re away, his wife almost has sex with their priest but gives him a confession instead.
Thank you, try the onion rings . . . at Holsten’s ice cream parlor. Guy goes there to meet his family for dinner. He selects a Journey song from the jukebox and watches as his wife and son arrive, while his daughter parallel parks outside (forever). He looks around, the door opens, and . . .
Did the mic just cut out?
What, you want a punchline to that? Or was that the punchline—not only to the most cryptic, most divisive, most debated ending to a TV show ever made but to one of the best shows ever made, period?
These are all jokes, and they aren’t. First and foremost, they’re famous scenes from The Sopranos, a show whose brilliance lay in the fact that you were never quite sure how to take it, all the way through that ending that could mean one thing, or another—or both.
It all sounded like a big joke before anyone had seen it, partly because Analyze This, a movie comedy with the same basic premise—wiseguy enters therapy—was debuting a few months later. As the show’s hero, Tony Soprano, would later complain, that movie was a comedy. The Sopranos was strange, surprising, brutal and dark, and billed itself as a drama.
The Sopranos Sessions Page 1