The Sopranos Sessions

by Matt Zoller Seitz

  D: I think it was just to compare the upbringing of Meadow with the upbringing of Tracee, like Tracee’s mother burning her hand on a stove. It went back to this TV movie I had made called Off the Minnesota Strip,10 about teenage hookers from Minneapolis. I remember when I went out there, I began to see how to some that was about class. I wanted to compare Meadow’s soft upbringing with Tracee’s. Meadow thought her life was full of drama, but Tracee’s was really full of drama. I think I included Noah because he was such a soft guy, a decent man.

  M: I wonder if one of Tony’s main sources of guilt over Tracee is that he didn’t want want to hear about her problems.

  D: Tony never wants to hear about people’s problems, and that was a big one. I think he was aware, on some level, that he had one kind of daughter, and then there were lots of other daughters running around this country—strippers, prostitutes, the women that he preys on.

  A: After Tracee dies, Tony attacks Ralphie and Ralphie screams out, “I’m a made guy! You can’t do that!” We’ve seen Tony do that to made guys before. He stapled Mikey, he’s done a number of things. Did you have a sense of what the rules were and weren’t for somebody like Tony?

  D: It’s all horseshit. [Laughs] Ralphie was citing horseshit, and he knew it.

  It’s all about money. Didn’t we say there were monetary problems because they’d fallen out? That’s the reason Tony has to make good with him. Another deal with the devil.

  A: Rosalie, despite being a Mob wife, is one of the better human beings on the show.

  D: She is, yes. She was good.

  M: And Ralphie really is the devil.

  D: We did that whole scene [in season four’s “Whoever Did This”] with “Sympathy for the Devil,” where we quoted the lyrics, in the hospital and in the scene with the priest. That was a lot of fun.

  A: By the time we get to “Employee of the Month,” Melfi is looking to offload Tony to another therapist. Was there any concern in your mind of, “If she solves the panic attacks, why does he keep going to see her, and how do we maintain this relationship over the life of the show?”

  D: No. I thought by that time, he was in it. He was hooked on therapy, like so many people.

  M: What kind of progress do you think Tony thought he was making?

  D: “I bought my wife a nice fur hat, I’m not yelling as much, I’m a better listener.” I’m sure he thought all that. [Laughs]

  M: But not the deeper stuff that Melfi wants him to think about.

  D: No. These things would pertain to the deeper stuff, but if you’re a better listener, ergo, you’re a better person.

  M: You have a lot of characters on this show who are in therapy, or at least have occasional visits there, or who speak in the language of self-help. Sometimes even Paulie!

  D: That stuff is all around, that’s why. It’s all over the place. And Christopher’s “I gotta be a better friend to myself.” [Laughs] But it’s always self-justifying.

  A: Melfi sometimes turns out to be a better consigliere to Tony than Silvio. She’ll give him advice without realizing its context, like when she tells him to read The Art of War. How complicit do you feel she actually was?

  D: Not complicit. Or at least not consciously complicit.

  A: You talked before about how she made a deal with the devil to continue treating him.

  D: That’s the whole thing: “This is my patient.” When have you ever heard of a therapist yell at a client and say, “What are you doing? That’s terrible! You shouldn’t do that!” When have you ever heard them go that far? I think to therapists, the parents are automatically at fault—which they are! Everything results from parents’ mistakes. But they can’t help it most of the time.

  M: A lot of time the parents are just repeating the mistakes that were made [with] them.

  D: I guess it’s just that. You know—why is the world still a fucked-up place? It’s generation after generation after generation after generation.

  Session Four:

  “We were having troubles.”

  The Soprano marriage falls apart, Ralphie’s gotta go, and Silvio has thoughts about Columbus Day.

  ALAN: You came back after 9/11 had happened. How did 9/11 impact the show?

  DAVID: I think in ways we really don’t know. You know, we went to work every day at Silvercup Studios, and our windows were against the East River. We’d sit together each day looking at the skyline of Manhattan, and the World Trade Center was gone. There was a lot of tension. People would come in and be like, “Did you see the news today?” It was a lot like what we do now with Trump: “You hear what he said today?” It had a great impact on me.

  I’ve read people say that they saw the show grow darker and darker, and that Tony got worse and worse after that. I don’t agree with that, but I may be blind to it. But if it did, I think 9/11 had a lot to do with it. I think the direction of the country was getting darker and darker.

  MATT: Whose idea was it to end this season with, essentially, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? It’s really like a two-hander by the end of it.

  D: The impetus for [“Whitecaps”] was she had put up with too much of Tony’s misbehavior, and it had gone on too long for me to feel it was credible. At least for someone that intelligent. Couldn’t it have been that they had split up overnight or something, over a weekend? It just didn’t seem real. And I just felt that that story would have tremendous resonance.

  A: Across the whole season, you see the slow disintegration of the marriage that Tony doesn’t even notice. How did you figure out the elements you were going to use to make her realize she had to go?

  D: I don’t remember if I decided that the season should be about their breakup. I think I did. I tried to give each season a theme. Season one, Tony as a son, that was the theme. Then Tony as parent, then Tony as a husband. It went like that.

  A: And season four is the marriage as a whole?

  D: Yes, you’re right.

  A: When I went back and rewatched “Watching Too Much Television,” which ends with Tony beating up Zellman, I remember the scene where he listened to the song and beat him up, but I forget that that’s the reason Irina places the phone call, because he humiliates Zellman, Zellman dumps Irina, Irina calls Carmela as revenge, bye-bye Tony. It’s a whole Rube Goldberg thing going on.

  D: Those two were incredible. That last scene where he punches the wall, they shot that at four o’clock in the morning. It was really great.

  A: You’ve talked about how Jim didn’t like accessing that part of himself. This is one of those times where Carmela’s in the room where it happens, on the receiving end of Tony’s rage. What was Edie’s demeanor over the course of filming that?

  D: She didn’t have any! [Laughs] No, she was just herself! I don’t remember her having an issue. Edie never gave anything away about how she felt about what she was doing.

  And Jim, even though he was Tony’s angry, fuming self—I don’t recall that he put up that much resistance to it because it involved Carmela, or it involved Edie, so he wasn’t going to fuck the scene up for her, you know what I mean? He was being a professional actor, and very generous. So, he knew that she had come prepared, and she was ready to do this, so I think he felt he had no choice.

  A: Where did the idea come from to use Furio as one of the wedges in the marriage?

  D: When Federico came to the show, he brought a certain vibe with him. He is an attractive guy, and he was coming up there every day to drive Tony, so it just seemed realistic.

  A: In this season, was there ever a point where she and Furio would consummate, or was it always going to be this frustrating, unrequited thing?

  D: I think it was going to consummate, but it seemed out of character, at least at that time in their lives. One thing we usually put into action was the fact that, if you step out on a guy like Tony, there’s the usual thing that would happen in that kind of relationship, and I think maybe she was afraid of it.

  A: For herself, Furio, or both?


  D: Good question. Really good question.

  M: You think Tony would’ve hurt her if she’d cheated on him, if he found out about it?

  D: Depending on the day, yeah, I think he would’ve slapped her around.

  M: You think Tony is capable of committing violence against his wife?

  D: I think so.

  A: Furio’s abrupt departure after he decides not to shove Tony into the helicopter rotor is often held up as one of the show’s more notable anticlimaxes. At any point, was there thought of having a direct conflict?

  D: It was never interesting to me. I never found it particularly interesting because of the [possibility of a] fight scene. It just seemed so expected, to have those two guys fight it out.

  M: The cliché of what the audience of a TV show would want would be, “Carmela sleeping with Furio and then a fight with Tony and Furio, maybe ending in Furio’s death,” and you didn’t do any of that.

  D: Because you know it’s going to end with Furio’s death! So what’s the point in going through all that?

  M: There’s a lot going on with relationships and marriages in this season. In addition to this thread with Furio and Carmela, obvious fractures begin to appear in the marriage as early as the first couple of episodes, and eventually, it all builds to “Whitecaps.” But you’ve got more tension between Artie Bucco and Charmaine, and you’ve got Bobby losing his wife, which I’d completely forgotten about.

  A: Which happens in “Christopher,” of all episodes!

  M: And that comes out of nowhere. I never in a million years would’ve thought something like that would happen on a show like this.

  D: Why is that?

  M: I’ve learned how to watch the show now, but at the time, I’d been mentally trained by other forms of TV to not expect it, especially the way it happens, with him finding out from a phone call. You mostly learn about their marriage through Janice over the next few episodes, which is also not something you expect. And with Ralphie, there’s a lot going on with him and Rosalie, and then with Janice. Both of them basically decide that he’s human garbage and they don’t want anything to do with him, and Janice physically kicks him down the stairs, which is pretty funny.

  A: And also, Christopher and Adriana. This is a huge season for the two of them.

  M: It’s like “the marriage season,” in a lot of ways.

  D: It was going to be about Tony and Carmela’s marriage, but until you mentioned it to me now, I never took stock of the fact that so many other marriages and relationships were center stage in season four.

  M: This, too, illuminates to me how much of this process is instinctive. I’m looking at this series like it’s a stained-glass window in a church, like, “Oh, look how nicely this fits with that,” and it turns out that you and a lot of other writers were independently pursuing your own strands, but somehow it all came together.

  D: What other writers?

  M: Well, you have other people in the room besides you, is what I mean.

  D: Yeah, yeah. But I have to say, they didn’t pursue strands on their own. The direction of the show was up to me. They executed it really well, but it wasn’t up to them to decide things like, “Should this be about marriage?” or “How should this scene in this episode turn out?” That wasn’t the way it went. It usually isn’t. The showrunner decides the architecture.

  M: Could we talk about that process? That’s something that I think would be illuminating to the readers. When you look at an episode of The Sopranos, you see “Written by David Chase and Terence Winter,” or “Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess.” What do those credits actually mean? Did they write the whole script? A piece of it? Is it a situation where you all work on it together and you say, “Okay, I’ll put your name on episode five?”

  D: You meet in the room and you break the story. That’s what we call it: “breaking the story.” [My wife] Denise and I would go away to our house in France, and I’d think about it for a couple of months, and then I’d talk to her about it to straighten it out in my head. She’d offer me ideas, or I’d see what made her laugh, or what didn’t. I’d come back with the whole season plotted out, and I had a big chart of one to thirteen. If the chart was here, it would say, “Tony.” I don’t remember what the Mob story was, so I’d figure that out first. I would write down, or plot out, the story of that for thirteen episodes. It started out with season one being “Tony vs. his mother.” There was only like three movements in that orchestral piece. As things went on, it got more and more complicated, so it wouldn’t be just one Tony story, there’d be like three Tony stories, a Chris story, two Carmela stories.

  M: You’re talking long-range plotting, not just within a single episode.

  D: Yes. I’d explain all that and write it down on the board, and pontificate about it. Then I’d say, “Okay, that’s what I got. Now we gotta figure out what episode one and two are.” We would touch on some of the things in that long form, but I can’t remember what the episodes were about—they were really about something else. Like, for example: let’s just take Tracee. I don’t think she was part of the long-term plan. That came about as we got to episode six in season three, and I said, “OK, what’s this going to be about?” We had the animosity between Tony and Ralphie, Meadow being her usual snarky self, we had all these elements. And from that came the story of Tracee. It didn’t come about until we were on it and actually had to write it.

  So, all the long-term stuff, most of that usually played out, but not in the detail I thought it would, because we’d come up with something else, or something would happen.

  The easiest one to understand is—remember the one where Feech took over that gardening business? That was a Terry Winter thing. Terry knew somebody who lived in Brooklyn with him—his cousin, I think—who got muscled out of his gardening business by a local wiseguy, so I said, “Let’s do that.” So that presented itself and we did it, but that was not in the long-form story arc.

  Anyway, once we decided to do that story—and I forget what else went with that—we’d have A, B and C stories: a Tony story or two, a Carmela story, a Christopher story. It would be like, Story A has seventeen beats, Story B has eleven beats—something like that. We cut the pieces of paper together, so each beat was a strip of paper, and we’d rearrange them and tape them together. It was very primitive. Then, when we had all that, after we’d culled it all together so there was like a four-page outline—is this making sense to you?

  M: Yes, it’s very illuminating. Please continue. I’m learning a lot.

  D: Okay, so we’d have the outline and then I’d say, “Terry, you take this one,” or I’d say, “You want to take this one?” Usually people just stood up and did their job, so the script would get written. Sometimes I think we’d split, like when things were getting rough at the end of the season, but not often.

  M: You mean split up an episode?

  D: Yeah, “You take the first part, I’ll take the second part.” Like in “Whitecaps,” Robin and Mitch started writing it, and I couldn’t get to it until they were almost finished, because of problems in post-production. I wrote my part of it, and then I did a lot of rewriting on the first part that they had done. So, in that case, it had all of our names on it.

  A: That’s something I noticed in season four: there’s a lot more scripts with five or six names on them, especially in the back half of the season. Were you just hitting a rough patch in terms of scheduling in that year more than others?

  D: No. I tried a thing where everybody got credit, but it didn’t really work out, because you have [Writers’ Guild of America] rules, where there has to be a tribunal every time credit is shared, and the members read the script and say who deserves credit for this and that.

  M: What are they trying to determine? What percentage was written by which person?

  D: Yeah. It’s important because of the residuals. If your name’s not on it, you don’t get any residuals. It becomes a real issue, and a not very pleasant one.

/>   M: Are there particular kinds of material that certain people in the writer’s room were known to be good at more than other things? With some people was it like, “Oh, this is hardcore Mob stuff, so it goes to this person,” or, “This is family/kid stuff, this goes to that person”?

  D: The only thing like that was that all hardcore Mob stuff and violence was Terry. He was really good at that. He’s really got a knack for that. And he was really good with Christopher and Paulie stories.

  M: And a lot of broad physical humor, like in “Pine Barrens”?

  D: Exactly.

  A: You’d already done three seasons of the show and been away for a while. Was the end of the series more on your mind at this point?

  D: No. I didn’t start to think about that until Chris Albrecht said to me, in season five, “You have to start thinking about how you want to end this.” Don’t forget, I come from an era of TV where, for drama shows, there were no finales. They were just cancelled and it was over. So I wasn’t really thinking about that at all. Once he said that, I really got into it.

  M: I’m always looking for foreshadowing, and there are a lot of things that feel like foreshadowing that may not be that.

  D: I was always surprised at how many things could be taken as foreshadowing! If we’re talking about something in episode two, or something in episode five that was foreshadowed in two, I was always amazed, with this particular show, at how much of that kind of thing there was! By the time you’re at five, it could seem like a foreshadow, or a post-shadow, of two!

  M: During my rewatch for this book, I noticed, as early as season three—I think it may even be in “University”—the first of several references to Ralphie “losing his head.”

  D: You know, it sounds kind of silly, but when stuff like that would happen, I would think, “This show is meant to be.” I would feel like, “I’m not organizing this; someone else is, or a greater power, a muse, is organizing it. How could this fall into my lap like this?”