Martin Scorsese has an extremely granular and nuanced knowledge of cinema, having studied practically every movie made after 1920. He is just as effusive in his praise for Alain Resnais’ 1961 tone poem Last Year at Marianbad as he is for Ti West’s 2022 period gore-fest Pearl, and he always seems open to new creators who appear on the scene.
As a staunch defender of cinema as an art form, Scorsese has spoken out against mega-budget Hollywood superhero movies that pass through endless rounds of focus groups and algorithms before making it to the theatre. When it comes to filmmakers creating their own unique cinematic visions, however, he is usually open-minded, no matter how far the results stray from the type of movies he makes.
There is one notable exception, though. In a 2019 interview with Sight and Sound, the Goodfellas director revealed that he could barely sit through a single episode of one of the most prestigious television series ever made, explaining that he just didn’t think it was authentic.
“I think I only saw one episode of The Sopranos,” he said, “Because I can’t identify with that generation of the underworld. They live in New Jersey with the big houses? I don’t get it. They use language – four-letter words – in front of their daughters, at the dinner table? I don’t get that. I just didn’t grow up that way.”
On the face of it, this admission is difficult to comprehend. Scorsese has returned to the world of mobsters and their families again and again throughout his career, demonstrating the same interest in the psychology of the characters as David Chase did in his beloved show. In fact, you’d be justified in assuming that The Sopranos was Scorsese’s favourite series of all time.
However, the director has good reason to be nit-picky about the subject matter. Growing up in Queens, Scorsese saw the daily lives of mobsters firsthand, even saying once that the boys in his neighbourhood either aspired to be gangsters or priests. For him, there was a moral code to the Mob, one built into the rigorous structures of family under the Catholic church. In that regard, The Sopranos just didn’t ring true for him.
It isn’t just a bias against television, either. Scorsese was directing one-off episodes of television long before it became a prestigious career move for critically acclaimed filmmakers. He’s also produced many more and even co-created the Emmy-nominated 2016 series Vinyl with Mick Jagger and Rich Cohen.
Ultimately, Scorsese’s dislike of Chase’s 21-time Emmy-winning show likely has more to do with a generational divide than a qualitative one. Although the two creators are only three years apart in age, Scorsese’s mobster movies are heavily influenced by his own childhood experiences in the 1940s and ‘50s, while The Sopranos takes a decidedly modern take to the criminal underworld.
There is also the distinct possibility that if he had stuck with the series, he would have fallen just as hard for it as countless critics and audience members did before him. If he had made it to the second episode of The Sopranos, he would have discovered that there was a fictionalised version of him in the show. And if he’d continued to the end of the series, he would have recognised 27 of the actors as having appeared in Goodfellas. In other words, there are just too many crossovers between his work and the series to imagine that he’d be able to resist its allure if he’d spent more time with it.
