Twenty-five years ago, in 1999, David Chase created one of the most iconic television series in history with The Sopranos. Not only did it make him rich and famous, but it turned its star, James Gandolfini, into one of the biggest names in the business. For several weeks a year over six seasons, millions of fans spent every Sunday night glued to HBO to see what would happen next, which often involved who would die next. In the new HBO docuseries, Wise Guy, out now, Chase talks about the beginnings of the series, which he first intended to be a feature film. None of the big TV networks were interested in this strange plot of a mob boss who had panic attacks and saw a therapist, but it got HBO’s attention when Chase made one significant change that caused the pieces to fall into place. Originally, no one died in The Sopranos pilot script. Once Chase added some actual murders, HBO was in.
‘The Sopranos’ Was a Way for David Chase To Write About His Mother
In Wise Guy, David Chase discusses how the initial idea for The Sopranos came to be. In 1988, he was working on a show called Almost Grown. While looking for writers, he met future Sopranos writer Robin Green at a restaurant. The two hit it off immediately when they began to talk about their mothers. Growing up, Chase’s mom was a cold woman who didn’t support his dreams or show him much affection. Robin told Chase he should write a show about his mother and a TV producer. Chase didn’t think much of the producer character, but he was intrigued when he turned him into a bad guy mobster. Chase thought about spinning this idea into a movie, admitting that he wanted to go big with his dream casting, saying, “I wanted to get De Niro and Anne Bancroft.”
Chase fleshed out the idea of a troubled monster who has to see a therapist because he’s having panic attacks. A major part of his problems involves his uncle and his mother, the latter of whom he has put in a nursing home. The two conspire to have the mobster son killed, and it’s the shrink who will help him through this realization. The film would end with the mobster suffocating his mom to death. Deciding to turn his feature into a TV pilot instead, David Chase took his script to the four major networks. No one was interested in the idea of a mob boss seeing a shrink, and Chase refused to change it, so the pitch died.
David Chase Decided To Add Murder to His Pilot Script for ‘The Sopranos’
After his mob boss series was rejected, David Chase continued to work in network TV even though his dream was to be a movie director. Chase kept writing feature film scripts, but none of those got made. That was disappointing for him, but he worked for several big TV series, like Bill Bixby’s The Magician, The Rockford Files, I’ll Fly Away, and Northern Exposure. Chase had a secure career, but he said, “You knew what the limits were.” Network TV had rules about what you could and couldn’t show, and even though writers tested them, they always lost.
David Chase was so stuck in the rules of network TV that his mob boss pilot had no actual murders in it! “The Sopranos was a mob show where nobody got killed,” he told Wise Guy, because he didn’t think a network would accept that. Then he got to thinking about those old black-and-white mobster movies of the 1930s, or Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather, and how important death and murder were to the plot. Chase questioned himself as to why he would ever leave that out of The Sopranos, so he rewrote his first script, putting some murders in there, and in 1997 decided to take his pitch to HBO. This was a major risk, and a downgrade in potential, because HBO was still mostly just a movie channel with only a few small series like The Larry Sanders Show and Oz. Because of this significant last-minute change though, HBO was interested.
In ‘The Sopranos,’ Death Is Part of the Story Without Being Glamorized
So, so many people die in The Sopranos. As the seasons went on, you knew that there was a good chance your favorite character was going to get whacked. Heck, for almost two decades, the biggest question from The Sopranos is: did Tony Soprano die in the finale when the screen cuts to black? Mob movies and TV shows thrive on violence because these are violent men. We need to see their lives threatened, and we need to see them actually be bad guys, but that doesn’t mean you start having everyone get shot up just because.
In Wise Guy, Chase admits that “it had to be integral to the narrative.” This point is proven by the fact that it takes until the fifth episode of Season 1, the episode “College,” for Tony Soprano to kill someone. Tony is the intimidating mob boss, and while we’ve seen him be scary, we’ve also mostly seen the side of him as a broken boy in a man’s body, living his life as a family man where his job is that of a mobster. In “College”, Tony is taking his teenage daughter, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Si
