A dive back into The Sopranos
New book includes interviews with series creator David Chase
The world of TV now “barely resembles the one into which Tony Soprano’s SUV rumbled back in1999,” critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall write in The Sopranos Sessions.
“All the aspects of the series that once startled viewers have become accepted: serialization; narrative and moral ambiguity; anti-heroes or villains as main characters; beauty for its own sake.”
The book, being published to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the show’s premiere, includes highly detailed recaps of each episode; several interviews the two authors conducted with the series creator, David Chase; a debate about the much-discussed final moment of the final episode; and writings by Seitz and Sepinwall that were published in the Star-Ledger, the New Jersey newspaper, when The Sopranos originally aired.
Below, Seitz, the television critic for New York magazine, and Sepinwall, the chief television critic for Rolling Stone, talk about the show’s ambiguous finale, the nature of Chase’s recollections and more.
When did you first get the idea to write this book?
Matt Zoller Seitz: I’m the creative director of the Split Screens Festival and, in our first year, 2017, we gave an award to David Chase. The event went well and he was so lively and entertaining. With the 20th anniversary coming up, it seemed like a good time. And Alan was the person I wanted to do it with, since we had done so much about the show and had written together before.
Alan Sepinwall: It seemed like a good excuse to get together and nostalgic because of the time we had spent together at the Star-Ledger. A lot of things we’ve written about wouldn’t exist without this one show. The anniversary definitely forced our hand and gave us an excuse to do it and I’m glad it did, because I’m not sure when I would have rewatched the whole series and, wow, is it a great show.
What’s the most surprising thing you learned while writing it? Sepinwall: We knew we were going to be talking to David Chase about the show and that we were going to cover everything. And we kept asking ourselves: Is he going to say anything about the ending? We were strategizing and strategizing, knowing it would come up in the seventh of eight interviews we were doing. But in the sixth, I randomly asked him a question about preparing for the end and he said, “Well, I had that death scene in mind for years before,” and I didn’t want to say anything because I was afraid he was going to take it back. And Matt plunged in and said, “David, do you realize you just said ‘death scene?’ ” I don’t know if we have a definitive answer, because I don’t think that scene lends itself to one, but we talked much more about his intentions behind it than I ever thought David would do.
Seitz: We didn’t get him to admit Tony died or anything like that. He was saying that the original intention was to have intimations that Tony died, but he moved away from that to something more philosophical in nature. But David would talk about things being intentional without really being intentional. I asked him: is it possible that a lifetime of consuming gangster films where heroes die at the end left a flavour? And he said, “That’s possible.” In what way is the book you wrote different from the book you set out to write?
Seitz: We fought to include samples of writing we did while we were at the Star-Ledger. I wanted some of that stuff to be preserved because a lot of it’s not available online. But also to give you a sense of how we were thinking about the show when it was new and there was nothing else like it.
We ended up breaking it up so that the stuff related to James Gandolfini was in its own section, and that made the book feel very sad and melancholy at the end. It leaves you with a sense of finality. Tony may or may not have died, but the guy who played Tony did and that feels like the end.
Sepinwall: I get very nerdy and detail-oriented. And I was going to ask Chase a lot of detailed questions: why did this happen? Why did that? Tell me about this or that back story. But he often didn’t remember or wasn’t interested in going into the details. It became much more talking about the feeling behind things. There’s definitely trivia in there. But a lot of it is just David Chase discussing his own creative instincts and how much comes from his gut, and I think that became a lot more interesting than the nerdy stuff I was focused on when we started.
Seitz: I was surprised and moved by some of David’s recollections of his adolescence and childhood in New Jersey. There are some almost lyrical reminiscences in those parts of the interview. Persuade someone to read The Sopranos Sessions in 50 words or less.
Seitz: You get to put the show on the couch and be Dr. Melfi. Sepinwall: You have an excuse to revisit one of the greatest and most influential shows ever made. And you get a really dramatic peek behind the curtain of the man who made it and all those decisions, including the ending that you’re still arguing about 10 years later.
This interview has been condensed and edited.