“It just violated too many do’s and don’ts, even for pay cable,” writes Peter Biskind in his new book, “Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV.”
The impressive cast of"The Sopranos" included Tony Sirico , Steven Van Zandt, James Gandolfini, Michael Imperioli and Vincent Pastore.The ‘Talking Sopranos’ podcast is on tour in 2023. Here’s what to knowIt didn’t have the largest audience — its ratings were still dwarfed by network hits like “ER” and “Friends” —but it had cultural cachet.
But the series at the forefront of a golden age in television was chaos behind the scenes, with a depressed, vindictive creator; an alcoholic leading man with self-esteem issues; and a struggling cable company that invested its future in a show about, as star James Gandolfini once described it, “a bunch of fat guys from Jersey.
A native of Clifton, NJ, Chase grew up in an abusive household — his mother once threatened to blind him with a fork because he wanted a Hammond organ — and struggled with depression. When asked if he ever contemplated suicide as a teen, Chase answered, “Well, doesn’t everybody?” When he developed the pilot script for “The Sopranos,” his managers at Brillstein-Grey steered him towards the networks, where the real money was.They, too, were looking for that blueprint, the thing that’d set them apart from the network behemoths.He was “so sure it would never see the light of day that he was having conversations with the “X-Files” folks ,” writes Biskind.Despite an uncertain future, HBO was willing to gamble on The Sopranos as it was looking for a new show to set them apart.
The cable network was pleased enough that they gave Chase free reign, only censoring them once when the script called for Tony to murder a “rat,” long disappeared in the witness relocation program, that he stumbled across while taking his daughter on a college tour.But HBO wasn’t keen on their leading man, the face of the network at that point, being depicted as a cold-blooded murderer in just the first season.
It changed the entire landscape of TV as we know it, moving the goalposts of what was possible on the small screen. “’The Sopranos’ was the hammer that broke the glass ceiling for us,” says the network’s former CEO Albrecht, often cited as the architect of HBO’s golden age. “They wanted to see him go facedown in linguini, you know?” he says. “And I just thought, ‘God, you watched this guy for seven years and I know he’s a criminal. But don’t tell me you don’t love him in some way, don’t tell me you’re not on his side in some way. And now you want to see him killed?”
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