In “Inside the Episode,” writers and directors reflect on the making of their Emmy-winning episodes.
The death of Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo) on “The Sopranos” was quick. The build-up to it? Not so much.
As the fifth season of the HBO mob drama wound down in spring 2004, gossip magazines breathlessly devoted “will they/won’t they” ink from “inside sources” weighing in on whether the show would kill such a beloved character. (Not to mention the when, where, why and how of it all).
But in the season’s penultimate episode, written by Terence Winter and directed by Tim Van Patten, Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) took Adriana on a one-way drive into the woods. She’s lured into the car by a trumped-up story that her fiancé, Christopher (Michael Imperioli), had attempted suicide.
In reality, Christopher had chosen his other family and brought her up as being a rat for the FBI.
“From decades of TV, people expected that something will happen at the last minute and they’ll let her go,” Winter says of the build-up to the episode in the zeitgeist.
He reminds that, since the Season 1 episode “College” when a daddy-daughter road trip veers into a gruesome death, “Sopranos” never went by that playbook.
With Adriana, Winter says, “People still wanted to convince themselves, ‘Oh, she got away.’ They still wanted the happy ending.”
“There is no happy ending here. These are horrible people,” Winter says.
But “Long Term Parking” — which ran 20 years ago today — also resulted in another kind of “hit.” Winter, De Matteo and Imperioli all received Emmys for their work, the show picked up its first drama series win and Van Patten earned a directing nomination.
So how long was Adriana’s whack in the works? And how was it decided who would pull the trigger? Winter reflects on writing his Emmy-winning episode.
How soon into breaking the season did the writers room know that Adriana was going to die?
Once we started the storyline where Adriana was talking to the FBI, we knew inevitably that was not going to end well. We didn’t know when, and I think we avoided it for a really long time until it just became inevitable. As you build the season, obviously, you build toward a big dramatic conclusion. And we slowly started to realize that the most dramatic thing is the ending of that story.
[“Sopranos” creator] David [Chase] will usually come in at the beginning of the year with a broad strokes road map of where the season went. I’m gonna guess that was on the map toward the end of the year.
How was it decided that Sil would be the one to do it?
Silvio is the least threatening on the surface; the most reasonable and the friendliest. I mean, if Paulie Walnuts [Tony Sirico’s hot-headed henchman] called and said, “Hey, I want to take a ride with you,” you would automatically be suspicious.
Silvio is more of a consigliere. We’d already set up on the show that nobody lies better than him.
They drive for a while, with Silvio saying reassuring things. When do you think she knew what was going to happen to her?
It’s slowly starting to occur to her. I’m sure she’s hoping against hope that she’s wrong. But she’d be crazy to know these people all this time and not be thinking, “Is this going where I think it’s going?” Also, the more he keeps talking and being positive, it’s almost the worse it is because he’s protesting too much.
She’d told Christopher, “Let’s go; let’s run away.” And she thought there was a possibility of that happening. And then he saw [a poor] family at the gas station and that did it.
Just a funny aside. I specifically wrote that he saw a [poor] family and the husband had a mullet and [Christopher began to imagine], “Oh, my God, that’s us.” And, you know, we cast an actor with long hair and I said, “Are you willing to get a mullet?” He said, “Yeah, I’ll shave my head. I’ll do whatever you want.”
On the day of filming, one of our [production assistants] called me and said come to the hair trailer. Our person’s hair was cut the guy’s hair and it was not a mullet. … And he said, “I’m a hairdresser for years. This is a mullet.” I said, “Alright, so I’m not gonna argue with you.” I pulled a picture of Billy Ray Cyrus and said, “I want the full mullet.”
He called me later and goes, “As a hair person, I just felt like I couldn’t do that to another human being. It was such an ugly hairstyle.”
