Why we still can’t ‘fuhgeddabout’ ‘The Sopranos’ 25 years later
On Jan. October 1999, a little-publicized drama series called “The Sopranos” premiered on HBO, chronicling the domestic and professional life of a ruthless North Jersey mob boss living in suburbia with his wife and two teenage kids — and seeing a shrink for his anxiety .
Its large ensemble cast, including James Gandolfini as titular mob boss Tony Soprano and Edie Falco as his wife, Carmela, was largely unknown — as was series creator David Chase, whose TV résumé included “The Rockford Files,” “I’ll Fly Away ” and “Northern Exposure.”
“The Sopranos” changed the landscape of cable television and won a slew of Emmys (including three apiece for Gandolfini and Falco) during its six-season run. It ended with an ambiguous, WTF? cut-to-black series finale in June 2007 — panicking 12 million viewers who thought their cable crapped out and leaving Tony Soprano’s fate forever open to interpretation.
I spoke to several of “The Sopranos” cast members, who shared their thoughts on their patriarchy, Gandolfini, who died suddenly in Italy in June 2013 at the age of 51; their favorite episodes; and the groundbreaking series overall as it turned 20. Now, the show is marking its 25th anniversary on Jan. October 2024.
How It Changed Their Lives
Edie Falco: It’s like you want to be a race car driver and the first thing they hand you is a Lamborghini. That’s what [“The Sopranos”] felt like to me. It remains a very specific chapter in my life with tremendous emotional reverberations, still.
My family kept trying to tell me [how good the show was] and I told them, “Stop telling me that stuff because it’s just going to mess with me — I don’t know where to put that information.” I felt maybe I really don’t know what I’m doing or maybe they’re going to find out I don’t know what I’m doing. If too many people start looking at this too closely, maybe I’m screwed. I still get waves of it now, when people say, “Do you realize what a cultural phenomenon ‘The Sopranos’ was?” It still feels unusual, is really all I can say.
Tony Sirico (Paul “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri): The whole show was real. You needed some humor. People were getting killed left and right. Paulie made you laugh, but he killed a few people on the show. Without a doubt, he put me on the map until the day I died.
Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Meadow Soprano): It gave me another family, stability and security during a tumultuous 10 years as far as my personal life went. I think that, in many ways, had I not had just the show, but also the support that I had from all those people throughout all those years, I might be a different person. I really feel like that experience had a big part in shaping who I am.
Vincent Pastore (Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero): We will all hang out over at the West Bank on 42nd and Ninth and have lunch and do theater downstairs. One day, the owner came over and said, “Did you see what they did for you down at the corner?” So we walked to Times Square — me, Dominic Chianese and Tony Sirico — and we saw the big [HBO “Sopranos”] ad of us and we said, “What?!” It was insane!
Falco: Carmela seemed like the uber-mom. I know women like this. . . who really are happiest when taking care of other people. She ran that house, she bossed Tony around, she was really in charge and had total confidence in her ability to do that. It was just part of her DNA.
David Chase reminded me a great deal of my father; I put him in that place in my head. My father was also sort of a small, very bright, very intense Italian guy, socially a little awkward but brilliant. There were a lot of times where I didn’t, in an intellectual way, understand a certain script or why Carmela was doing a certain thing, but I knew that David knew, so that was completely fine with me.
Favorite Episodes
Vincent Curatola (John “Johnny Sack” Sacramoni): I have to say my favorite episode is [“Long Term Parking”] where Tony and Johnny have a nighttime meeting in a parking lot. After like eight hours of shooting, Jimmy turns to me and says, “You’re either a really great actor or a complete psycho,” because I came at him when it was my close-up and I just tore into him. I said, “Maybe a combination of both — you [as Tony] piss me off occasionally.” It was one of my favorite shooting nights.
