Everyone has their own favourite episode of their favourite TV show, but it’s always interesting when the people responsible for small-screen classics reveal their own picks. However, The Sopranos creator David Chase was caught up in whether or not it was the strength of a single instalment or the sheer power of James Gandolfini’s performance that decided on his own.
As a landmark in episodic storytelling that ushered in television’s new ‘Golden Age’, The Sopranos is still spoken of in reverential tones more than 15 years on from a finale that split opinion straight down the middle at the time and continues to generate intense debate to this day. That’s only a small barometer of its legacy, though, with the HBO classic becoming a byword for greatness that’s never too far from the forefront of the conversation when the time comes to name the single finest series ever made.
Gandolfini may have anchored the entirety of its six-season and 86-episode run as the tortured, troubled, and fearsome patriarch of the titular family. Still, The Sopranos was very much an ensemble piece. Thanks to a combination of razor-sharp writing, immaculate casting, and pitch-perfect performances, every single member of the recurring cast was a standout in their respective role, even if it was Tony acting as the glue that held everything together.
With that in mind, when Chase was tasked to decide upon Gandolfini’s greatest-ever episodes, he found himself torn between whether it was down to the quality of what unfolded around him or the actor’s powerhouse performance. Speaking to The Huffington Post, the showrunner was torn between ‘Join the Club’ and ‘Mayham’, although it did come with a rhetorical quandary: “Because you also think, is it him in the episode, or is it the episode?”
Regardless, the pair stand out as two of the best individual offerings The Sopranos had to offer, and it’s clear where Chase’s priorities lie, considering they aired back-to-back. In season 6’s ‘Join the Club’, Tony finds himself in an induced coma after being shot, with a large stretch of the story being occupied by an extended dream sequence and his experiences in a purgatory-like existence where he lives as Kevin Finnerty, an optics salesman from Arizona.
In its follow-up ‘Mayham’, Tony remains trapped in his own subconscious, and the marriage of ambitious, unusual storytelling to Gandolfini’s towering work has etched them firmly into Chase’s brain as the cream of his crop. “I began to think to think we could take creative risks,” he admitted, but not without the inherent danger that “we wouldn’t be able to pull it off.”
“I don’t mean that the audience would like it or not like it, just that we wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Those California episodes are like that,” the showrunner explained. A producer had once told him that doing a TV show at Universal was like making a pancake. “Except when you burn one, you have to eat it. I became less and less concerned about having to eat the burnt ones as time went on.”
They pulled it off, of course, and as a result, the second and third episodes of the final season are celebrated by the creator of The Sopranos as the pinnacle of what its leading man brought to the show.
