The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  20 Cody, best known as the Native American brave crying a single tear over roadside littering in 1970s “Keep America Beautiful” public service announcements was, in fact, Italian American, just as James Caan is Jewish, a fact that gives pause to Godfather obsessive Silvio when he’s reminded of it.

  21 One of the hitmen is played by Richard Bright, who was Michael Corleone’s top henchman Al Neri in all three Godfather films. (The scene even mentions the hitmen taking out a character named Tommy Neri, Al’s nephew in the Godfather books.)

  22 There’s a fourth, largely unrelated storyline involving the Soprano and Kupferberg families intermingling without realizing their connection, though it’s ultimately about Elliot helping Melfi work through her ongoing feelings of powerlessness about her rape.

  23 Giovanni Gilberti on Rizzoli & Isles, Michael Ambruso on Scandal, and Rafael McCall on Teen Wolf, among other credits.

  24 The choice of store does not seem coincidental, given the marriage that dominates so much of the episode.

  25 As often happens, Junior is distracted by minutiae: in this case, the official courtroom artist’s unflattering sketch, which earns Junior’s glower next time they’re in court.

  26 The scene leads into a reprise of “My Rifle, My Pony and Me,” which Tony previously watched Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson sing in a scene from the classic Western Rio Bravo during the season four premiere. Not exactly Gary Cooper, but John Wayne did play the lead.

  27 Gandolfini is great at everything asked of him as Tony, but he’s always particularly striking in scenes like this, where Tony is alone—or at least not interacting with other people—and simply being in the moment. This scene also features one of the show’s great closing shots, an image lit and framed like an Old Masters painting, with intimations of the Garden of Eden and Jesus in the manger.

  28 Jean-Philippe even tears out Artie’s midlife crisis earring.

  29 Backdoor pilots are TV episodes that introduce new characters in the hope of building spin-offs around them. The NCIS characters debuted this way on JAG, for instance, and one of David Chase’s final Rockford Files episodes was an unsuccessful backdoor pilot for a drama about Jersey wiseguys, including a boss named Tony. (For more on that, see the interview about season one.)

  30 An ABC courtroom drama from Steven Bochco that was a precursor to intensely-serialized cable shows like this, devoting its entire first season to a single case. Ratings were low, though—in part because network viewers weren’t yet conditioned to watch every episode of a series—and the second season not only featured shorter story arcs, but swapped out leading man Daniel Benazali for Anthony LaPaglia, who if things had gone a bit differently, might have been otherwise occupied at the time playing Tony on a Fox network version of The Sopranos.

  31 In his quest to help Nucci make friends at Green Grove, Paulie has to send his cousin Little Paulie Germani (Carl Capotorto) and Benny to beat up the son of one of the more popular residents, as once again this peaceful little retirement community inspires Mob violence.

  32 Played one of Howard Hesseman’s students, theater-crazed Maria Borges, on the ’80s sitcom Head of the Class.

  33 Spending time around Cousin Brian is paying off, as she knows to invest slightly less than $10,000 at each brokerage firm to prevent the IRS from taking notice.

  34 To help facilitate what initially seems like a scam, Tony reaches out to Svetlana, who is still delightfully confident and unfiltered, dismissing Janice as a “boring woman” when their paths cross again.

  35 Joe Pantoliano won the drama supporting actor award at the 2003 Emmys, the first Sopranos actor other than Falco or Gandolfini to be so honored, submitting “Whoever Did This” as one of his two episodes. Surprisingly, the other one was “Christopher,” though this may have been an attempt to show the range of his performance. (Or because he thought the voters would laugh at the vibrator scene.) Whatever the reason, “Whoever Did This” was clearly enough, even though Joey Pants spends half the episode as a corpse.

  36 A few links between Tracee and Pie-O-My, via “University”: Silvio refers to Tracee as “a thoroughbred,” Tony tells another Bing girl that “I wanna show you where the horse bit me,” and Tracee tells Tony that her mother held her hand over the stove when she was a girl; she and the horse both got burned.

  37 At one point, Tony pins Ralphie against the wall in almost exactly the same fashion he does earlier in the hospital after Ralphie starts cursing out his ex-wife. In nearly every moment they are together, you can tell, Tony would very much like to put his hands on this guy and do what comes naturally to him.

  38 Eggs, more than oranges, are frequently a harbinger of death on The Sopranos.

  39 Breaking Bad—by far the best of the many antihero dramas that appeared in the wake of this one—famously elongated this even further by devoting two of its first three episodes to corpse disposal, and today the matter of getting rid of inconvenient bodies is among the most common tropes in TV drama.

  40 Pantoliano went bald at an early age, but spent most of the early years of his career wearing convincing hairpieces on-screen. (The trick is that, unlike some other Hollywood toupee enthusiasts, he only wore them in character, not everyday life.) As a result, many Sopranos fans were just as surprised as Christopher to realize that was a rug.

  41 Earthy character actor, best known for his starring roles in Canadian art house puzzlers like The Adjuster, Exotica, and Crash (no, the other one), as well as The Thin Red Line and Shutter Island and Let Me In. Somebody should’ve cast him as Robert De Niro’s son by now.

  42 Earlier in the episode, Tony orders the painting of himself and Pie-O-My destroyed, because it makes him too heartsick to look at it. Cheapskate Paulie knows a nice piece of free art when he sees it, but becomes so unnerved with the thought of the Tony in the painting watching him that he has it retouched so the boss is now costumed like Napoleon. He’s trying to make Tony look European at the same time a visitor from the Continent is occupying the thoughts of Mrs. Soprano.

  43 For a woman who was established early in season one as having an affinity for chaste romances like The Remains of the Day, Carmela’s entirely nonphysical affair with Furio is beyond perfect, as if she’d stepped into a romance novel she wrote herself.

  44 Season two’s “Full Leather Jacket” is the shortest, at forty-three minutes. “Calling All Cars,” in comparison, is forty-seven minutes. Season four’s finale, “Whitecaps,” is the longest at seventy-five minutes.

  45 This wording nearly matches what AJ told Meadow in season three’s “Proshai, Livushka” when she tried to help him explicate the Robert Frost poem and he got impatient with her.

  46 While Carmela is raising a stink about Billy Budd, Tony is at his most genial and charming with Finn, Meadow, and her roommates: a sharp and deliberate contrast to how he behaved around Noah Tannenbaum in season three.

  47 “So, what, no fuckin’ ziti now?” could never be topped as the quintessential AJ moment, but his sheer joy at at ripping out a noisy fart in mid-conversation with Meadow—then declaring, “Ah, dude! Meeting’s over!”—comes amazingly close.

  48 This revelation comes moments before a priceless bit where Paulie, Nucci, Minn, and Cookie—old and cheap, the lot of them—systematically clean out every free item (sugar packets, rolls, etc.) left on the table at the restaurant where they dined after seeing The Producers on Broadway.

  49 For all the extreme violence served up in the first four seasons, Paulie’s crime of opportunity here ranks with the show’s most shocking acts, partly because the circumstances are so pathetic (he’s feeling professionally homeless, and freaking out about money), but mostly because Minn is entirely harmless and a civilian. The Sopranos periodically steps up the awfulness in this way—as if to force viewers to understand the magnitude of the human monsters who populate a series they can’t stop watching, and what it says about them that they’d rationalize such acts away on psychological or dramatic grounds, in order to keep experiencin
g all the pleasurable bits.

  50 When Carmela presents Valentina’s broken nail as what she thinks is proof he had sex with Svetlana, James Gandolfini makes a meal out of the brief moment where Tony starts to defend himself, then realizes there is no version of the story that makes her less angry.

  51 This pivotal phone call by itself nearly justifies the existence of the largely forgettable “Watching Too Much Television,” since it’s Tony’s ending beatdown of Zellman, and Zellman and Irina’s ensuing breakup, that piles the last straw on Carmela’s back. “The Weight,” meanwhile, was more effective on its own, but it takes on even more power as Tony suggests here that Johnny has never forgiven Carmine for not backing him up on the vendetta against Ralphie over the mole joke.

  52 That being said, this is the fourth time in a row that the final stretch of a season of The Sopranos has pivoted on a powerful contest of wills between a man and a woman. There was Livia and Tony in season one, Janice and Richie in season two, Tony and Gloria in season three, and now Tony and Carmela, the battle royale.

  Season Five

  “TWO TONYS”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 1

  WRITTEN BY TERENCE WINTER AND DAVID CHASE

  DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN

  Class of 2004

  “Lotta changes since you went away, huh?” —Uncle Junior

  “Two Tonys” begins in what feels like a postapocalyptic version of its own turf. We’re in the Soprano backyard in North Caldwell, only the house seems abandoned: the lawn is covered with leaves, the grill is uncovered, and there’s a puddle gathering in the pool cover reflecting an empty, lonely home. The Star-Ledger is still down at the end of the driveway, but no one’s bothering to get it; instead, Meadow1 runs over it in her car on the way to pick up AJ.

  It’s the same place, but different. The same show but different, too. Season five gets into Mob business quickly, brings Dr. Melfi back into the picture, and even gives us another subplot about Christopher and Paulie resenting each other. But Tony and Carmela’s marriage, however flawed and phony it could be, was a major series foundation. Without it, Tony’s life feels less sturdy.

  Once the family separation has been reestablished—along with ancillary details like Janice and Bobby now being married (and taking over as hosts of the family’s Sunday night dinners)—“Two Tonys” sets up a series of Family reunions, with a TV news report2 about “the Class of 2004,” a collection of wiseguys incarcerated in the ’80s just being released. The focus is on four of them: Feech LaManna (Robert Loggia3), the legendary old-school gangster who ran the card game Tony and Jackie Aprile robbed as young men to get noticed; Tony’s cousin, Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi4); New York underboss Angelo Garepe (Joe Santos5); and New York captain Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent6). Feech makes an instant impression, strutting around the kitchen of Uncle Junior (who’s back under house arrest after his mistrial) in an undershirt, with Loggia snarling out every insult and old story at the top of his lungs. Angelo has a more low-key introduction, explaining at a country club lunch with Tony, Johnny, and Carmine that he and Tony B were close friends in prison, but the scene’s importance escalates when Carmine suffers a stroke that leaves the leadership of New York up for grabs.

  The title “Two Tonys” suggests we’re about to see the cousins get together, but Blundetto and Leotardo only appear in news footage. Instead, the title refers to a theory Tony proposes to Dr. Melfi, as part of his misguided attempt to seduce her now that he’s not in a marital relationship with Carmela, nor a therapeutic one with her. “Forget about the way that Tony Soprano makes his way in this world,” he tells her. “That’s just to feed his children. There’s two Tony Sopranos. You’ve never seen the other one.”

  Like a lot of what Tony says, this is self-serving nonsense. There may be multiple sides to Tony Soprano, but they’re all him, and Melfi has seen most of them. A glimpse of the Barbra Streisand–Nick Nolte movie The Prince of Tides at Valentina’s apartment convinces him to finally act on the feelings he’s had for years.7 It’s not just emotional transference between doctor and patient—Melfi has a sex dream about Tony after he sends her flowers and asks her to dinner—but Melfi is neither unethical nor a dummy, so she declines. Whichever Tony claims to be standing in front of her, he’s unused to taking no for an answer, especially for something he’s desired for this long. And Melfi realizes she can only penetrate her patient’s thick skull by being as blunt as possible:

  “You’re not a truthful person,” she tells him. “You’re not respectful of women. You’re not really respectful of people. . . . You take what you want from them by force or the threat of force. I couldn’t live like that. I couldn’t bear witness to violence.”

  Whatever the nature of Melfi’s attraction, it’s nothing more than an impulse, and unlike almost everyone else on the show, she puts her values over her impulses, even when it triggers an outburst. She calls Tony out for who he really is and accurately describes what their romance would be like, in a way that runs parallel to another fissure in the Paulie–Christopher friendship.

  Their first scene this season finds them at the Bing, telling Patsy and Vito the story of “Pine Barrens” like it’s an old joke, and not the nearly fatal disaster it was.8 But even that genial moment deteriorates when Chris (rightly) blames Paulie for the whole incident, and soon they’re back to their usual resentments: Paulie hates that Chrissie is Tony’s pet, and Chris hates that Paulie still treats him like low man on the totem pole, sticking him with the enormous dinner check whenever they go out with other wiseguys. It’s never been a healthy relationship—none of the Family relationships are, because they’re all ultimately about making the most money possible—but the two of them can usually suppress their awareness of that. Here, it comes bursting out again until Chris sticks Paulie with one check, and Paulie sticks him with an even bigger one in Atlantic City, and when the waiter protests Chris’ microscopic tip, they wind up killing him—and turning that into the newest fiasco to laugh about and bond over, at least until the next fight. It’s as if they’re acting out Melfi’s entire speech to Tony, and not caring because they can always pretend to like each other again.

  Carmela has already seen her relationship with Tony for what it was, and kicked him out of the house as a result, but he still hangs around, and even when he’s not there, he’s there. Following the separated-dad playbook, he lavishes gifts on AJ, including a noisy drum kit, hoping to buy the boy’s love and loyalty. No need: AJ already blames Carmela for the split. Children of divorce often judge custodial parents more harshly, even when their sins pale in comparison to their ex’s.

  To emphasize the current state of things in North Caldwell, a big furry symbol in the form of a black bear wanders into the backyard, terrifying AJ and only retreating when Carmela bangs some pots and pans. It’s not just that Tony is responsible for the black bear’s arrival, since the animal control officers explain the great beast was attracted to the bags of duck feed. It’s that Tony is the bear: the big, lumbering threat that hangs over this family, but is never so overt that anyone can justify taking a shot at it.

  The bear is bad news for Carmela, but good news for a paranoid Tony,9 who not only gets to use it as an excuse to have Benny and Little Paulie guard the house and keep tabs on who’s coming and going, but gets to play bear hunter himself as an outlet for the frustration and self-loathing he feels after Dr. Melfi’s final rejection. As he sits alone in the backyard at night, a lit stogie in one hand, an assault rifle in the other, looking more content than he has all hour at the thought that the bear might return, we are reminded that if there really are two Tonys, the truest Tony is the one who knows how to inflict pain, and enjoys doing it.

  Carmela can kick that Tony out of the house, but she can never be rid of him entirely.

  “RAT PACK”

  SEASON 5/EPISODE 2

  WRITTEN BY MATTHEW WEINER

  DIRECTED BY ALAN TAYLOR

  Tony Uncle Al

  “If things had g
one different way back when, who knows?” —Tony B

  Midway through “Rat Pack,” Tony delivers a speech to his beloved cousin, Tony Blundetto, who’s back in the world after two decades behind bars. When they were kids, our Tony explains, the two of them were like brothers, alike in so many ways, down to the name, that relatives differentiated them by referring to their fathers’ names: Tony Soprano was “Tony Uncle Johnny” and Tony Blundetto was “Tony Uncle Al.”

  Now, though, Tony Uncle Johnny is the boss of New Jersey, has two thriving kids (well, one thriving kid and AJ), and is master of all he surveys. Tony Uncle Al is a laundry truck driver studying to become a certified massage therapist while living in his mother’s basement—his marriage long over, his own daughter a runaway, a man so out of step that he wears a Miami Vice suit to his welcome home party and has “We Are the Champions” as his ringtone. When Tony gives an order, Tony B has to follow it, and when Tony Uncle Johnny calls in the middle of the night to ramble on about how difficult his seemingly fantastic life is, Tony Uncle Al has to listen.

  Yet “Rat Pack” refuses to portray the reunion in such stark terms. Despite their divergent fortunes since Tony B got arrested on a night that Tony didn’t, our Tony is trapped in the past almost as much as his cousin. Tony is also living in his mother’s house, albeit without Livia (who was sister to Tony B’s mom) around in person, but haunting him in spirit. He has gone back in time, and the return of Tony B is a bittersweet reminder of who he used to be, how much he’s suffered, and yet how lucky he’s been compared to his favorite cousin. We see Tony watching a scene from one of his beloved World War II documentaries,10 a tearful veteran explaining the tremendous guilt he carries: “All your life, you gotta remember what one guy did because he thought it was his job to do, and he took a shot for you.” For a narcissist like Tony, it would be easier to let go of his own guilt if Tony B had died; back in Tony’s life, he’s both a visible reminder of how their paths diverged, and a disappointment for insisting on staying straight and studying for his massage license rather than becoming point man for Tony’s used-airbag scam.