The Sopranos Was a Film About a Man's Mother
The Sopranos began life as a film script about a mobster whose mother is trying to have him killed. Not a crime saga, not an epic about a family business. A man, and his mother, and the fact that she wants him dead. David Chase had spent a career writing network television and decided to write something personal, and what came out was that.
Everything people admire about the show is downstream of that one decision. It was never a show about the mob. The mob was how Chase got the network to let him write about his mother.
The version where nobody gets killed
Chase took the pilot to Fox first. The draft he handed over had no murder in it, because network television in the late nineties would not carry one. It went into development hell and stayed there. He shopped it around and the majors passed, wary of the tone.
Then he rewrote it and put a killing in, Christopher shooting a Czech, and that version sold to HBO. The most acclaimed drama in the history of the medium was commercially untouchable until somebody died in it, which is a joke the show itself would have made.
The therapy was not a gimmick
Put a mob boss on a couch and you have a sketch. Every network that passed presumably read it that way. What Chase did instead was refuse to let the therapy be a joke, or a plot device, or a redemption arc. Tony goes to Melfi for six seasons and gets meaningfully worse.
That refusal is the show's whole architecture. The audience is invited to want him to improve, given regular evidence that he might, and denied it every time. It works because Chase never once treats the therapy as ironic. Melfi is competent. The diagnosis is correct. The patient is simply not interested in being cured, and the show is honest enough to say so and keep saying it for eighty-six episodes.
The cheques
In 2003 the cast fought about money and nearly ended the series. Gandolfini sued HBO for breach of contract over a deal it had made with Chase. HBO countersued him for $100 million, on the reasoning that losing him would take the show down.
When it settled, Gandolfini wrote sixteen cheques for $33,000 each and handed them to his co-stars for the inconvenience. Five hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars of his own money, distributed to people who had waited while he fought.
Keep that beside the character. Tony Soprano's defining trait is that he takes, and dresses the taking up as loyalty, and the man playing him responded to a windfall by cutting the room in on it without being asked. The gap between those two facts is roughly the gap the whole series is built across.
Why he ends up on a shirt
The Tony Soprano tee puts him in the suit, staring dead ahead, flanked by the pool and the ducks. The ducks are the correct choice and anyone who has seen the pilot knows why. A dangerous man watches birds leave his swimming pool and it undoes him completely, and he does not have the equipment to explain to anyone why.
The show ran from January 1999 to June 2007 and every prestige drama since has been working in the room it built. Not because it was violent. Because it was the first one willing to let its main character be understood completely and not get better anyway.
Related: Tommy Shelby on the other side of the Atlantic, or the full catalogue.
More of the same seam in 12 Shirts for People Who Peaked in the Video Store.
