'Wise Guy: David Chase and "The Sopranos" ' is single best portrait of classic series (2024)

Long after their creation, we tend to think of pop cultural monuments as just "there" — permanent, inevitable, affixed, as if the universe itself had willed them into existence instead of their individual creators. Because they have become so much a part of us, we can't imagine a world without them — like "Star Wars" or "The Godfather" or (for that matter) "The Sopranos."

Launched 25 years ago, "The Sopranos" went on to change the way we watched TV, and what we watched. It brought literary ambitions to a medium that didn't know from "literary" (nor wanted to), then launched the TV revolution that continues to this day. All these years later, nothing on TV could seem more permanent (or inevitable). In fact, itremains a hit on Max to this day.

In an oral history of both the show and the creator that launches Saturday at 8 p.m. on HBO (and streaming on Max)— "Wise Guy: David Chase and 'The Sopranos' " — the veteran documentary producerAlex Gibney, wants to know why, and in the process, has given viewers the single best portrait of this seriesto date. Filled with dozens of original interviews, clips, and the myriad (also fun) details that went into the making of a TV classic, this is also probably the most complete film they're ever likely to get on the subject, too.

But after four hours, you will be left with the sense that nothing about "The Sopranos" was inevitable. In fact, the series that wrapped the most celebrated run in TV history on June 10, 2007, almost never even happened at all. Before launch, showrunner and creator Chase was ready to bail on TV to write spec scriptsfor the big screen. An unknown JamesGandolfini was a last-minute Hail Mary choice for the lead role. After every major commercial network had passed on the script, HBO still took the better part of a year before deciding to move forward. Until then, most of the cast (including Edie Falco) never thought the show would ever get on the air.

If not quite an accident, "The Sopranos" was happenstance and serendipity. "Everyone told me I had to write something about my mother," Chase tells Gibney. Improbably, he would write one about mothers and mobsters.

"The Sopranos": A difficult birth

Indeed, "The Sopranos" was the first "auteur" series of the modern TV era. Unlike every other commercial TV show at the time, it had bypassed the traditional TV front office interference, or those executive "notes," revised scripts, rewrites, test screenings, and thousand other little cuts that could (and often did) turn a once-promising idea into a pile of pablum re-engineered for mass consumption.

By then, HBO had seen promising results with a mostly hands-off approach during the production process ("The Larry Sanders Show"). But "The Sopranos" was still a risk, and the reason was that "auteur."

Rejected everywhere, Chase had arrived at the network dispirited and defeated but even HBO could see some of the potential problems with his proposed show. Chase wanted no violence in his mobster pilot, though he did want to kill off the mother character by the end of it — Livia Soprano, played by an incandescent Nancy Marchand, who persuaded Chase to keep her character alive on the show through the first season because she'd be dead before long anyway. (Suffering from lung cancer at the time, Marchand actually made it through two seasons before her death at the age of 71 in 2000.)

The matter of psychiatry was also tricky, or counterintuitive. Wise guys weren't supposed to take Prozac. They certainly weren't supposed to talk to shrinks about panic attacks brought on by a flock of migratory ducks. But the network executives in charge of this decision — Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss, both interviewed here — shrewdly came around to the idea that this show wasn't really about the New Jersey mob at all. It was, however, all about a New Jersey native named David Chase instead.

David Chase goes on the couch

To fully understand "The Sopranos" is to understand Chase, and vice versa, so for "Wise Guy," Gibney came up here with a conceit in which he would function as therapist and Chase as his "patient." Both facing each other in an office reconfigured to look exactly like Jennifer Melfi's (Lorraine Bracco) where so many pivotal "Sopranos" moments unfolded.

At first, Chase chaffs at the silly gimmick ("I'm talking too much") but soon warms to the idea and like any good therapist, Gibney mostly listens. What emerges from this four-hour long "session" is a portrait of the artist as much as the show, and by the end, both have merged as one.

If the show became darker by the sixth (and final) season, that's because Gandolfini — struggling with alcohol, work pressure, celebrity — had become darker, Chase says.

Gibney presses: "Did you see elements of yourself in Tony [Soprano]?"

Chase: "Towards the end, I began to think we had merged in some strange way ..."

Atrue Jersey guy

Who, then, was the man who changed TV? Born Aug. 22, 1945, in Mount Vernon, Chase was third-generation Italian — from Abruzzo, midway up the Boot. When he was a kid his parents moved to Clifton, New Jersey, then, a few miles west off Route 46, to North Caldwell. Norma and Enrico (Henry) Chase were unhappy and visited their misery upon their only child. Per "Wise Guy," he grew up depressed, insecure, and suffered from panic attacks. He was also smart, bookish and a cinephile before he even knew what a cinephile was.

In time — or long after film school at Stanford — his lodestars had become Fellini and the French New Wave, alongside other cinematic tricksters whoscrambled the audience's expectations, or forced moviegoers to confront their own inner demons, much as Chase had confronted his through therapy.

At first, his professional attainments were modest or at best inauspicious — script work a soft-core p*rn movie, then a soft-corn p*rn vampire one. He later got a writer's job on a TV set, and would spend the next few decades on various other sets as a writer — for the most part unhappy years because those gigs meant writing stuff others told him to write. Bit by bit, or show by show, Chase learned to hate TV.

"The Sopranos" would be his revenge. "It was about money and death," he says. "They're related somehow, and capitalism in the raw sense was TV, which is the instrument that capitalism used to sell. ... Everything in America is for sale, and the comic part of ['The Sopranos'] for me is that America had gotten so materialistic and selfish that it made a mob boss sick."

"Wise Guy" also explores the creative process of the series in some detail. Chase comes around to the conclusion — as other writers on the show had — that it had become "toxic" toward the end of the run. Terence Winter, one of Chase's key production partners on the series, recalled that Chase would "write out fully-fleshed story beats" on a white board, then come back later from a nap and "erase" everything. Chase also began to reject other writers' ideas, and recalls, "I sometimes got very angry because no one was coming up with anything [and] maybe that's because I said 'no' to everything."

Wrapping up "The Sopranos"

By the end of the Season 5 in 2004, Chase says Albrecht suggested that he begin to think of ways to end the series; Chase indicates here that money was a reason why. HBO, he says, didn't want to give "The Sopranos" a seventh season because that would trigger big raises for the staff, and instead insisted on a split sixth season, or "season a" and "season b."

Neither Chase, Albrecht nor Strauss suggest here that the fade-to-black ending was tied to some sort of dispute between network and showrunner, but the thought may occur to some viewers: Maybe Tony died, maybe Tony didn't, but either way, HBO didn't get the wrapit thought it would get.

After watching "Wise Guy," you are free to add this to the pile of theories about the most debated, now celebrated, finale in TV series history. However, Alik Sakharov — "The Sopranos'" esteemed director of photography — suggests an even more plausible one: "If you end it, it will end, but if you have a philosophical ending like this one, the show will go on forever, because no one will figure it out. You will always have something left to resolve. And how do you resolve that? By watching the show again and again."