The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  The more literal no-show and no-work jobs come into play with Christopher, temporarily promoted to run Paulie’s crew.12 Displeased with the decision are more senior mobster Patsy, and Silvio, who senses Tony’s using his nephew for duties and confidences once his purview as consigliere. Christopher’s out of his depth, approving Patsy’s plan to steal fiber-optic cable from the Esplanade job site and putting the much larger construction deal at risk, and turning to heroin again for emotional escape after Tony scolds him for it.13

  But the greatest damage Christopher causes is something he’s not even aware he’s done. By making a move on “Danielle” in Adriana’s view, he tears down the fake friendship Deborah Ciccerone14 has worked so hard to forge with Ade, thus forcing the FBI to get more direct and brutal: they pull Adriana off the street and threaten her with prison time on drug charges if she doesn’t actively cooperate.

  Adriana is in way over her head here (it doesn’t even occur to her to ask for a lawyer), and her response to the FBI’s threats—particularly Agent Harris pointing out the ramifications of having brought an undercover federal agent into Tony’s house—is to projectile-vomit across the table. She’s been no-working her relationship with Christopher for a long time, enjoying the fruits of his criminal labor without having to confront what he does and who gets hurt by it. Now she has no choice but to be present.

  No good can come of that.

  “CHRISTOPHER”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 3

  STORY BY MICHAEL IMPERIOLI AND MARIA LAURINO, TELEPLAY BY MICHAEL IMPERIOLI

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Reservations

  “Where the fuck is our self-esteem? That stuff doesn’t come from Columbus, or The Godfather, or Chef fuckin’ Boyardee.” —Tony

  Masterpieces can have flaws. The White Album has “Honey Pie.” The Godfather franchise has III.

  The Sopranos has “Christopher.”

  It is the nadir of the show’s fascination with Italian American representation and self-esteem—and of the show, period.

  Why does the hour—in which Silvio and the rest of the crew get offended by Native American protests of Columbus Day—stick out so glaringly, even compared to the show’s other anti-defamation episodes?

  For starters, it has nothing to do with season’s arc, nor with Mob work at all. Season one’s “Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti” is effective not only because it was the first time The Sopranos addressed defamation, but because Family business proceeded throughout. Here, save for the death of Bacala’s saintly wife Karen (Christine Pedi) in a traffic accident, and Johnny Sack learning about Ralphie’s “ninety-five-pound mole” joke regarding his wife Ginny (Denise Borino15)—neither of which have anything to do with anti-defamation (other than the fact that Karen was last seen attending a lecture on the topic at the church)—the entire episode could be deleted without impacting any future storylines.

  Second, it doesn’t do anything to deepen our understanding of the characters or the world of the show.16 “A Hit Is a Hit” is less successful overall than “Tennessee Moltisanti,” but it still illuminates Chris and Adriana’s relationship, contrasts the experiences of minorities in America, and has that great subplot with Tony at the country club. “Christopher” is a Silvio episode, but Silvio is a broad comic relief character, better on the periphery of scenes than their centerpiece. We learn nothing new about him, because the whole thing is played as a joke. Beyond that, Silvio’s strident defense of Italian culture comes out of nowhere. Paulie Walnuts, not Sil, was always the guy bemoaning cultural appropriation and sentimentalizing the old country. “Christopher” would have been better if Paulie were the central character, as originally planned, before Sirico’s back surgery forced a change.

  Michael Imperioli’s script has a few amusing flourishes, like the Indian casino being run by a “chief” who only barely qualifies for tribal membership, or Artie Bucco diving lamely into the back of a car after being hit with a Slushie when he helps counter a Native American protest. And the very final beat of the episode—Tony shrugs off Silvio’s latest argument in defense of cultural pride by reminding him they have to call Frankie Valli to pay off the favor the chief did for them, followed by the soundtrack blasting The Four Seasons’ “Dawn (Go Away)”—is a deft comic touch in an hour that’s otherwise working way too hard to beat a horse the series has long since killed,17 dumped in the Meadowlands, then dug up again and transported to upstate New York.

  Bacala’s subplot is promising, and proceeds logically from his sensitivity. Karen had only appeared once before (bringing Junior food in the season four premiere), but that episode and this one efficiently turn her into a saint worthy of worship. The tragedy ripples outward. Janice18 realizes that she wants nothing to do with a narcissistic pervert19 like Ralphie, who dumped poor Rosalie Aprile because he couldn’t take her perpetual mourning anymore. When he arrives at Livia’s house, Janice shoves him down the stairs.

  It’s a fine story in and of itself, and works nicely in parallel with the indignation of Johnny Sack—who, like Bobby, doesn’t step out on his wife—upon hearing about Ralphie’s joke. But that material is an oasis in a desert of familiar material about old ethnic grievances, and occasional jokes about Iron Eyes Cody.20

  When an exasperated Tony lays into Silvio in the episode’s final scene about how all of this self-pity should be beneath them, it’s hard not to feel like he’s speaking for every Sopranos viewer who just sat through this hour of stereotype-busting, hollow rhetoric, and wacky hijinks, and would prefer that Silvio take these complaints up with Frankie Valli, rather than making us listen to them again and again and again.

  “THE WEIGHT”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 4

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER

  DIRECTED BY JACK BENDER

  All of Her

  “To me, she’s beautiful—Rubenesque. That woman is my life. To think she’s being mocked?” —Johnny Sack

  Johnny Sack loves his wife.

  This should go without saying, as it does for most of the married wiseguys. But the love most of these men give their spouses is compromised at best, guaranteeing neither fidelity nor honesty. Mistresses are understood as part of the deal; as Gaby noted at the wake for Karen Baccalieri, the other wiseguys made fun of Bobby for not having a mistress.

  Bobby’s unwavering love for his own wife was seen as a weakness, even though it didn’t affect his work. But Johnny Sack’s devotion to Ginny becomes an enormous Family problem in “The Weight,” a black comic farce about stubborn pride, inappropriate humor, and how much one man is willing to endanger out of devotion to the woman he loves. It lacks the long build-up of “Cunnilingus and psychiatry brought us to this,” but it’s an effectively strange, scary, and very funny take on that old Corleone tune about keeping business and personal matters separate.

  One of the episode’s best running gags involves people like Junior and Carmine, who weren’t at the dinner in question, being asked what’s funny about the “ninety-five-pound mole” line to begin with. But even more potent is everyone’s bafflement at Johnny’s refusal to back down from his vendetta. Some of this is pig-headed pride—“We’re talking about my wife’s honor here!” he screams at Carmine, tellingly adding, “My honor!”—a quality even Tony can recognize. But nobody seem to understand why a man would risk business over an insult directed at his wife. Johnny takes things way too far—administering a harsh beating, and averting his own death and Ralphie’s only after discovering that Ginny has been stress-eating hidden junk food—but the impulse to defend the honor of the woman he adores is nobler than anything the wiseguys are used to seeing.

  The situation’s so far outside everyone’s comfort zone, in fact, that the episode takes a brief detour into the macabre, when Christopher and Silvio head to Rhode Island and hire three elderly retired hitmen to take care of Johnny, because no one in the Tri-State area can be trusted to handle it. The home they share is unsettling, gloomily lit, and filled with religious iconogra
phy. One is blind, one is on oxygen,21 and there’s a promise of Carvel birthday cake that Christopher—high and paranoid—has no interest in staying to sample. The show often plays Mob transactions for laughs, but rarely does the culture feel this bizarre.

  In the end, both hits are called off. Johnny and Ginny’s bond is somehow tighter, despite her lying, and he’s kept his behind-the-scenes, pro-Ginny vigilantism a secret from her. It’s a rare moment of pure spousal love on a show that suggests even non-Mob marriages are complicated at best. Johnny’s feelings for his wife effectively complement Bobby’s ongoing grief over Karen.

  But the more striking contrast comes in the other major subplot,22 as Carmela’s interest in Furio goes from simmer to full boil when he invites her to dance at his housewarming party. Whether he means to seduce the boss’s wife or not, it’s working, thanks partly to Tony’s indifference. Furio is a poetic man of the earth who hangs on Carmela’s every word; Tony zones out during the meeting with Carmela’s financial planner cousin Brian (Matthew Del Negro23), and later complains it was boring. He takes Carmela so thoroughly for granted that he doesn’t even notice his smitten wife dancing right in front of him with a younger, more desirable man. This is dangerous territory for all involved. Tony’s feelings for his wife will never be as uncontaminated as Johnny’s are for Ginny. But if Johnny would go this far over a tasteless joke, how might Tony respond to finding out his wife is falling—hard—for a member of his own crew?

  In the fight over the Cousin Brian meeting, Tony accuses Carmela of equating love with money, and she throws the idea right back at him. Yet the charge sticks to both of them. Tony solves marital problems via lavish gifts, and Carmela usually accepts the gesture. When he gives her an expensive dress from Saks,24 she’s almost as excited by that as she is by his agreement to go along with Brian’s financial plan. It’s Tony providing emotional and material support at once—even he usually figures out when he needs to do both—and it briefly seems to extinguish the Furio brushfire. But then we hear the same Italian song that was playing at the housewarming. At first it seems like it’s playing in Carmela’s imagination, but it’s actually a CD that Furio loaned Meadow. And even after the music is turned off, it doesn’t go away. Carmela’s body is with one man. Her thoughts are with another.

  “PIE-O-MY”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 5

  WRITTEN BY ROBIN GREEN & MITCHELL BURGESS

  DIRECTED BY HENRY J. BRONCHTEIN

  My Rifle, My Pony, and Me

  “How’s our girl?” —Tony

  For all his enjoyment of ducks and other animal friends, Tony Soprano doesn’t keep a pet of his own. Early in “Pie-O-My,” Tony says he has never followed Hesh and others into horse ownership because “it’s an animal. It’s a commitment.” This could well be true. But the thing about being a wiseguy—and particularly about being the boss of a Family—is that you can enjoy the benefits of owning things without the commitment that would bind anyone else.

  If it’s not love at first sight between Tony and the episode’s eponymous race-horse, it’s love at first victory, particularly since Tony’s strategic advice helped it win. Ralphie owns the horse and pays all its expenses, but Tony very quickly acts like Pie-O-My belongs to him, taking bigger cuts of the winnings—originally offered out of friendship, to a man who has less than no desire to be Ralphie’s friend—all without having to spend a dime on the horse. Given Tony’s frequent preference for the company of animals to humans, it seems like his ideal relationship. By the time he goes to the stables in the middle of the night to sit with the ailing horse, it no longer feels like a burden, but a privilege. Tony usually gets what he wants: all he has to do is take it. So he takes Ralphie’s horse.

  Tony’s sly takeover is paralleled in a variety of subplots about other characters muscling in on a possession or role that’s not quite theirs. Carmela’s is both the most justified and least successful. She doesn’t want anything that isn’t hers, just more control over and information about family finances, and more security via the insurance trust she wants Tony to arrange with Cousin Brian. Tony refuses after his accountant warns him that he’d lose the money in a divorce. He also denies her the cash she wants to invest in a medical stock, not permitting her any bit of financial independence. He has kept her in this lifestyle, and that’s just how he would prefer she remain: kept. Even under better circumstances, she might be exasperated by him slipping out to tend to another man’s horse, but after Tony’s refusals? It’s hard to blame her for rejecting Tony’s explanations of how the horse now essentially belongs to him. (“It followed you home?”)

  Still, even if Tony infuriates her, Carmela’s position is stable compared to her sister-in-law, who staked all her hopes on a different beautiful (at heart) creature: Bobby Bacala, her latest key to unlocking the happiness she knows lurks somewhere inside her. Bobby’s house is revealed to be within binocular distance of Livia’s, the better for Janice to thwart women moving in on the Family’s most eligible bachelor. She claims one of Carmela’s lasagnas as her own to give to Bobby (and routes the chicken marsala from Mikey Palmice’s widow JoJo to Uncle Junior), and otherwise insinuates herself into Bobby’s life, pushing him to release Karen and grab hold of her.

  The results are mixed: she can’t convince Bobby to eat Karen’s last baked ziti, but her pep talk gets him off the couch so he can threaten a shop steward to stop campaigning against Junior’s preferred candidate in an upcoming union election. It’s the first time we’ve seen Bobby as a gangster rather than a glorified Family mascot, and while it’s bad behavior on the whole—the shop steward decries the Mob’s twenty-five years of pension theft—Bobby needs to do this to stay in Junior’s good graces,25 and by extension Tony’s.

  Janice isn’t the only character spying on wiseguys. The hour opens with Adriana at the Crazy Horse, now taken over by Christopher and his colleagues in the same way Tony did Pie-O-My. The club was always meant to be a Mob front—Adriana’s playing manager and booking bands, thus feeling like Christopher believes in her talents, is just a fringe benefit of being another place to hold meetings, launder money, smuggle goods, and assault people in private—but when Adriana observes Furio beating up Giovanni Cogo, it’s as if she is seeing for the first time what kind of business, and man, she has gotten involved with.

  Adriana’s life has been doubly taken over: the FBI keeps pressuring her to squeal and stay out of prison. Even her case is reassigned without Ade’s say, as regular handler Deborah Ciccerone is replaced by Robyn Sanseverino (Karen Young), who has no shared history with Ade and offers no pretense of friendship. Sometimes Ade is smart enough to keep certain crimes a secret—like Giovanni’s beating—but then she’ll turn around and volunteer information about one of Patsy Parisi’s hustles, not understanding that giving even this minor bit of intel to the FBI would get her killed if the wrong people found out. She’s far out of her depth, and it’s hard to blame her when she shoots Christopher’s heroin as a temporary, heartbreaking escape. By dating Christopher, Adriana’s no less compromised than Carmela, Janice, or the other Mob wives and girlfriends, but she’s still a relative innocent, trapped because she didn’t know any better. (And because Meadow took the wrong lamp to school.)

  Still, the episode’s most striking tableau comes at the very end, with the titular horse, as Tony contentedly smokes a cigar and whispers reassurances to Pie-O-My as the rain falls outside and a goat wanders in.26 He seems more at peace here than in any scenes involving friends and family. He’s now responsible for the horse emotionally, if not financially, but his face says this is fine by him.27 This animal is just the thing he wanted, and he didn’t have to pay a dime to get her.

  “EVERYBODY HURTS”

  SEASON 4/EPISODE 6

  WRITTEN BY MICHAEL IMPERIOLI

  DIRECTED BY STEVE BUSCEMI

  Reflections

  “What the fuck am I, a toxic person or somethin’?” —Tony

  For a man in therapy as long as he’s been by “E
verybody Hurts,” Tony Soprano has a remarkable knack for avoiding introspection. Dr. Melfi can poke and prod, but when Tony is confronted with an unflattering aspect of himself, he changes the subject before he has to gaze too deeply upon it.

  Here he has no choice but to look in the metaphorical mirror—in the same hour where Artie and Christopher both stare at themselves in literal ones. The three of them, plus AJ, all end the episode displeased with what they see. The biggest development is Gloria Trillo’s suicide by hanging. Like so much else about season three’s denouement, it’s deliberately muted: Carmela sharing half-forgotten gossip with Tony about a woman she has no idea he knows. It’s not the death Patsy warned Gloria of, but it’s not cinematic, either, just sad. Tony seeks answers at Globe Motors and from Melfi, but isn’t satisfied by the idea that these tragedies rarely have one specific reason. This has to be his fault, and only his fault. Once he’s decided that, he can’t ignore the possibility that he inflicts only misery on his loved ones.

  Certainly the pressure of being, respectively, Tony’s protégé, and that protégé’s FBI cooperator and fiancée, has wrecked Christopher and Adriana. Their heroin use has gone from occasional to constant. Christopher is high and barely functional when Tony tells him he’s grooming him to take the Family into the twenty-first century. Our only other glimpse of Chris involves him staring into a mirror (after a junkie friend vomits in a toilet), as unhappy as Tony at seeing himself.