Creator David Chase — and four creators of 21st century dramas — discuss how the HBO series transformed television and inspired the next generation
In the most important scene of the first season of The Sopranos — arguably the most important scene of television of the last 25 years, if not much longer — Mob boss Tony Soprano stalks and murders Febby Petrulio, a former wiseguy who testified against friends of Tony’s and then went into hiding.
What would have happened, I asked Sopranos creator David Chase recently, if he had pitched the same idea 25 years before that, back when he was a young writer on The Rockford Files, a hit NBC drama starring James Garner as a wisecracking private detective? Jim Rockford had done time in prison, after all; maybe there was a fellow who wronged him badly enough to deserve being garrotted with piano wire? How, I wondered, would the executives at NBC in the mid-Seventies have reacted?
“Well, they would say, ‘You’re joking,’” Chase suggested. “And if we said no, we weren’t joking, then they would say, ‘Clearly we can’t do that, and certainly Garner isn’t going to want to do that. And when you walk out that door, you’re fired. You need psychiatric help.’ And they would mean it.”
The Rockford Files wasn’t that kind of show, and the world of television in 1974 has so little resemblance to the one that birthed The Sopranos — let alone to how TV looks today thanks to Chase’s work — as to practically be a different medium.
On January 19, it will be 25 years since The Sopranos debuted. A lot of people have said over the last quarter century that the series fundamentally changed television. This is such a big statement that it can be hard to get across exactly what that means. So for this silver anniversary, let’s try it a new way, with Chase himself talking about what life was like for him as a TV writer in the decades leading up to his masterpiece, and how different that job wound up being; and then with creators of four 21st century series that got to be born into the world The Sopranos recreated.
Rockford was a great job for Chase. Its co-creator, Stephen J. Cannell, was the Seventies equivalent of a prestige TV producer today. It had an all-time TV star in Garner. And it was considered the best of that decade’s wave of detective dramas, even winning the drama series Emmy in 1978. And Cannell, Chase, and their colleagues also understood exactly what was expected of them, and what wasn’t. Even if Chase had the Febby idea in the mid-Seventies, he would never have wasted time mentioning it in the writers room, let alone telling NBC about it. The goal was to make television that was easy to follow, featuring likable characters. You could do that at a very high level, as the Rockford team often did, but it wasn’t usually meant to be art.
There were, of course, exceptions in every era, like The Defenders, The Singing Detective, Hill Street Blues, or Twin Peaks, among others. But that was for the most part how television had operated for decades before, and would for decades after. In the mid-Nineties, Shawn Ryan was a writer on Nash Bridges, a popular, amiable CBS cop show starring Don Johnson and Cheech Marin. “There was a real emphasis on quantity: ‘How much can we make?’” he recalls. “We filmed Nash Bridges in seven business days. So there was a bit of an assembly line aspect.” There was room to tinker with the formula, but not much. “You were trying to do things that felt different, but also felt the same? That it’s in the realm of what the show is, but it’s a slightly different situation.”
And, of course, there were the network notes. Every broadcaster has its own censor department — referred to euphemistically as “broadcast standards and practices” — concerned about what characters could do or say, and what the audience should be allowed to see.
“We got tons of broadcast standards notes [on Rockford], all the time,” says Chase. “It was very cute, because our broadcast standards guy wrote porno. We had to put up with him.”
Still, Chase was lucky, and continued to get to swim in the deeper end of the network swimming pool. In the early Nineties, he worked on a pair of acclaimed Emmy winners: CBS’ quirky small-town Alaska saga Northern Exposure, and I’ll Fly Away, an NBC drama set in the Deep South during the civil rights movement. The experience on the latter in particular helped sour him on a medium he had once loved.
“I didn’t hate television,” he insists. “As a younger person, I watched a lot of TV. As I got to work in it, I hated the meetings. The meetings were awful. What they wanted from the whole thing, what they expected was just disgusting.”
With I’ll Fly Away, Chase and the show’s creators wanted to focus on the civil rights stories, and how awful it was to be Black in that part of the world at that moment in time. NBC executives, though, preferred the series’ warmer, more nostalgic side, particularly scenes where a Black housekeeper was tender with the white children she was taking care of.
“NBC put promos on the air with Louis Armstrong’s ‘What a Wonderful World,’” Chase recalls, still incredulous. “Really? For a Black woman in 1963, in an unnamed Alabama, ‘What a Wonderful World?’ What the fuck are you talking about?!”
“[Network TV] was like writing with handcuffs on,” agrees Terence Winter, who spent the mid-late Nineties writing for gentle comedies and family shows, before joining The Sopranos staff for the second season. ”You couldn’t really tell the stories that felt real. Everything was put through a filter of inoffensiveness, and dumbing down.”
“Those network executives had a knack,” says Chase. “They would cook the vitamins out of anything. By the time you got the string beans, they were flabby, overcooked, tasteless, with no salt. They always cooked the vitamins — and got you to participate in that. And they had flawless instincts for taking out the very thing that made the story worth doing. Whether it was right there right out front, or whether it was oblique. They always knew that, whatever you loved, they weren’t doing it for that reason. They would go after what a writer was excited about. So in I’ll Fly Away, for example, as writers, we were excited about these sociopolitical stories. But they liked, ‘Poor kid and his crazy mother.’ I think they were afraid of that show, also, because of the racial thing. But they bought it and put it on the air in the first place.”
Chase had tried leaving the TV business before, but kept taking jobs, even though his expectations for them were low. “Television is a machine!” he says. “It’s a box. Anything great could come over it, but nothing was coming over it that was any good.”
The idea for The Sopranos began as a potential movie script, because Chase still wanted out of TV and into film. Eventually, though, he found himself pitching it to the same broadcast network executives whom he blamed for cooking the vitamins out of things. At a meeting with CBS, he says then-network boss Leslie Moonves told him, “‘Look, I got no problem with the scamming, the robbing, the murder. But does he have to be depressed and go to a shrink?’” Fox executives claimed to be thrilled with the project, then ghosted him for months; finally, a mid-level exec called him to say, “‘I wanted to tell you, as a human being, that I really liked the script.’ Which basically meant ‘goodbye.’ But I always loved, ‘as a human being.’”
Over the course of trying and failing to sell a very un-broadcast show to broadcasters, a new path opened up: HBO was starting to make its own scripted drama series. And because the pay cable channel didn’t have advertisers, and because it was still so new in that area (only the prison drama Oz preceded Sopranos), executives there largely let Chase do what he wanted. When he had talked about the series elsewhere, industry veterans kept telling him that he would have to shoot the majority of it in Los Angeles, with brief trips to New Jersey each season to film some exterior scenes to create the illusion that everything was happening in the Garden State. Chase knew he had found the right home when, unprompted, HBO’s Chris Albrecht pointed to an early New Jersey reference in the script and asked, “‘Now, you’re really going to shoot there, right?’”
Chase had initially dreamed that HBO wouldn’t order The Sopranos to series, which might allow him to film a second hour on his own and take it to the Cannes Film Festival as a movie. But it turned out the TV business felt a lot less disgusting when he got to tell the kinds of stories he wanted to.
“I had the best job in Hollywood,” he says. “I had complete creative freedom. That’s why it was so good, if you want to say the show was good. Because they left us to our instincts.”
That reflected in the product immediately. “The day I saw the pilot of The Sopranos,” Terence Winter says, “I was practically trembling. It was so good, I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think I’d even finished finished watching it when I called my agent and said, ‘You’ve got to get me on the show.’”
Courtney Kemp, who would go on to create the Power crime franchise for Starz, was in grad school at the time. “I remember watching the pilot with my parents, and seeing [Tony and Christopher] beat the shit out of that dude. I was just thinking, YES! This is fucking awesome! To see somebody who didn’t have to be good.”
Over the course of making 86 episodes, Chase insists there were only two serious arguments with HBO: one about the title, the other about Tony murdering Febby Petrulio. The latter was a line TV shows weren’t supposed to cross, even in the Wild West of turn of the century pay cable. On the rare occasion when a protagonist killed someone in a situation where it wasn’t self-defense, the dead character was inevitably presented as a monster the world was better off without. Febby, on the other hand, was just some schmuck who supplemented his income from a travel agency by acting as a small-time drug dealer on the side. For Tony to strangle this guy in cold blood, entirely to make himself feel good, was shocking. That viewers not only accepted it, but grew to like the series more and more as it went on, all but set a torch to the unofficial rulebook that Chase, Ryan, Winter, and all their predecessors had to go by for the whole history of television up to that point.
Lee Sung Jin, who would go on to create this year’s acclaimed Netflix road rage satire Beef, was still in high school when Sopranos debuted, and didn’t get to watch it until after he finished college. As a serious television fan, he was blown away.
“I did not know television could be like that,” he says. “Sopranos just had it all, in a way that I don’t think a show blended so many different genres before. It’s technically this Mob show, but it was so funny, so dark, but very existential. It really made you reflect on the state of America, quite often. And these poignant themes of marriage, and family. It was like modern Shakespeare to me. I just found myself quoting lines all the time. And at the end of every season, you’re left trying to unpack everything you watched. They left so many things open [to interpretation]. I think we all as writers now try to copy that a lot of, like, Oh, it’s artistic to leave things for people to be thinking about and talking about well after the season is done.”
For Chase, all this freedom “was not a mental adjustment. I was a fish in water. It was so, so exciting — so artistically stimulating, creative, and fun.”
Early in his tenure at the show, Terence Winter was overflowing with pride when Chase asked him to get on a notes call with HBO and write down the concerns of the HBO executives. “I was like, Oh, this is great! It’s a big responsibility he’s trusting me with.” Winter dutifully wrote everything down, hung up the phone, and handed the paper to Chase — who promptly wadded it up into a ball and threw it in the trash, unread. “I thought, That’s how you take notes!”
In general, though, Chase got along famously with his new bosses. He and HBO executive Carolyn Strauss would have spirited disagreements from time to time — most notably regarding the show’s divisive ending — but, ”It was two people actually talking to each other.” And he tended to get his way. He wanted to send Tony’s wife Carmela to Paris for an episode in the sixth season, so she could be confronted with the notion that the world she thinks is everything is in fact so insignificant to the wider planet; HBO was wary of the expense, but agreed. Chase did elaborate dream sequences. He let some stories end anticlimactically because he didn’t want the audience to feel like they could predict what was coming. And he could trust his remarkable ensemble — the late, great, James Gandolfini most of all — to say a lot more with their faces than with dialogue. In one of his favorite scenes, Tony has an emotional breakdown while in the car listening to the song “Oh, Girl” by The Chi-Lites, and it’s left entirely to Gandolfini’s expressions to get across the complicated, at times conflicting, feelings he’s struggling with as the song continues.
How much of the show’s success, Chase asks rhetorically, was due to Gandolfini? “A lot. It’s not too easy to talk about, because it’s all about the emotion [of missing him]. But it’s a tremendous amount. There would have been no show. We wouldn’t be talking today. Another actor, that [scene] would not have gone so deep into your heart, or your brain, or your chest, or whatever. That says it all. And I believe he was sometimes smiling during that. Smiling lovingly while he was crying, or laughing at himself. I don’t know. It’s just too much to even quantify.”