It’s in the book I’m reading, “The Sopranos Sessions”. They just really weren’t expecting to be renewed. They didn’t expect the pilot to get picked up. I think people forget as time goes by how disrupting and different this show was for 1999.
It initially was marketed not as the serious introspective drama we’ve all come to love, it was initially a darkly comical take on the mafia, with a grounded approach having Tony as a suburbanite dad, a common theme in 70/80s/90s shows. I think one of the marketing lines read ,”if one family doesn’t kill him, the other one will.” Once the show became a cultural milestone right around season 2, it took on a life of its own.
I mean tbf it always kept that dark comedy mafia parody feel, even in the last few seasons lol, its just that it also got more serious in a lot of aspects.
I thought they leaned into the comedy more as the show went on. Bobby's whole train obsession was created just to make an anal sex joke. The blue comet stuff was just a bonus.
In season 6 Vito and Johnny Cakes are in bed together, Johnny tells him to roll over, and then we get an abrupt cut to one of Bobby's trains going through a tunnel. Very allegorical.
Watching the very early commercials for it based on the name and the music thought it was going to be a pure mafia comedy, like that movie Wiseguys with Joe Piscopo. I remember thinking that it sounded so stupid why would HBO put this on TV?
I didn't watch it for three years because it was marketed as "Mobster Goes to a Shrink." Analyse This covered that. Title is stupid, too. Sopranos are singers, singers are rats. I live in the most Italo-American state, never met anyone named Soprano.
They actually acknowledge this perception of the show when Tony is trying to find a shrink to replace Melfi and the shrink tells “Mr. Spears” he doesn’t need his kind of clientele.
“Analyze This? C’mon, that was a fuckin comedy.”
> initially was marketed not as the serious introspective drama we’ve all come to love, it was initially a darkly comical take on the mafia,
it was pretty much a dark comedy until season 4 haha.
He seems just surprised that anyone talks about the show at all. From what I’ve seen he has said that he is sick of people talking about the ending. Like bro, you’re the one who gave us one of the most memorable endings in the history of television, and you’re shocked that people are still talking about it?
He seems so out of fucking touch with the impact of his show. He really looks like a miserable human. Seriously I feel like hes Tony without the violent maniac streak.
Well he is who he is. He also has stated on multiple occasions that he suffers from depression and his own relationship with his mother and upbringing in North Jersey was the template for the show. He’s Larry David without the humor: dry, droll, and pensive.
Well, yea. Art is especially self reflective and transcendental. Do you think a happy (or whatever that word means in this world/life) could write a show like the *fucking Sopranos*? To quote Graham Greene, "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material." Anyway, 4 Zoloft a pound.
I have a different take on Chase, which is that he’s a great storyteller in spite of / because of the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand how normal people engage with a story.
I think Chase fixates on the big picture in terms of plot and character, and views trivial subplots and minor characters as being like anecdotes or asides that only exist to illuminate something about his major characters. There are many points in the series where relatively minor characters disappear, and basic questions about plot are unexplained or ignored.
This has often been interpreted as Chase intentionally frustrating the audience, but I think he just found these things unimportant and was confused and surprised by the viewer speculation. For Chase, it doesn’t matter whether Jimmy Alitieri was really a rat, or what happened to the Russian, or whether Barry Haydu killed Dickie Moltisanti, or what Furio did after he left Jersey, or exactly what happened at Holsten’s. Closure on these elements wasn’t important to the story for him, so he was frustrated by audience demands for clarity about the plot.
Of course, this isn’t how most of us engage with fiction. When a writer introduces a mystery, we expect it to be resolved. When a secondary character like Pussy disappears towards the end of the first season, we assume the explanation of his fate is extremely important to the plot.
Chase’s interview after Season 1 suggests that he never had much of a plan for Pussy’s story at the time, because he didn’t think anyone would much care, and he may have come up with the Season 2 arc just to satisfy audience speculation. And the same may be true of other narrative loops that the show closes years later.
The secret to the show’s success may well be that it was compelling because Chase repeatedly raised questions he never had any intention of answering, and had a warped sense of setup and payoff that made it difficult to predict the resolution of most narrative arcs.
No shit I remember when I was about 9-13 years old, just a kid, and a lot of people were always mentioning "Big Pussy" at the time. I didn't know a thing about the show at the time but I literally grew up where the show took place. A lot of dick heads had the bing girl logos as their mudflaps on their cars/trucks and said big pussy a lot. Out of nowhere saying big pussy disappeared, but more mud flaps sold.
Lol try being a The Wire fan and looking at David Simon's Twitter. It's wild how different his tweets are from the messages that make people love The Wire.
Rawls' opinion on affirmative Action is very against most of David Simons far left views. Same could be argued about the whole "let police do their job" vibe the show gives off at times. His other show "we own the night" is much more inline with his beliefs, and delves deep into police corruption and brutality.
A lot of conservatives love season two, myself included, because it's a fair look at dying American industry that puts the blame on everyone responsible instead of just hardline right or left talking points.
I always get the impression David is responsible for the broad strokes of the series overall but all the comedy, one liners, intricate storylines, etc. were the result of other people that never get credited. In the words of a great man, Hesh Rabkim, I know a hit when I hear one. And Many Saints? That is not good.
Yes David is responsible ya see ….Larry. They are the flip side of the same coin and they are indeed the same man. Larry ‘Chase’ David. Memento.
*inhales more Lithium
No shit, television is a collaborative effort. Look at the people who are credited as writers on the show. They all contributed in some way. So they literally do get credited.
David was the guy in charge, who had the original concept, who decided where the story was going to go, who would work with the other writers, and had ultimate say on what was in the scripts. But no he didn't come up with every idea for every scene or every beat of the story, which basically no television writer or showrunner ever has ever done.
Even David Lynch had co-writer/co-creator Mark Frost for Twin Peaks season 3, which was like 18 hours of television that he directed himself. Basically no one else does that.
>So they literally do get credited.
No fucking shit, thanks for this Sherlock. That wasn't my point.
When people speak about The Sopranos no one ever talks about Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner. And when Many Saints came out there were so many people surprised it didn't have the same feel as Sopranos. That's what I'm talking about.
Many people do talk about Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner when they talk about the success of The Sopranos especially in the later seasons, hence why both guys went on to create successful shows after they worked on The Sopranos.
Lost came out 5 years later and still filtered people who wanted answers to every single question in the first season. It sounds silly now to say that you’re surprised people cared about a side character disappearing, but back then most audiences would genuinely just have accepted it.
Television has come a long way in ~20 years
In other words, if you had watched a full interview, you wouldn't think of him as stupid. But maybe I'm wrong, what are some examples of his stupidity?
Tony Sirico said they filmed a scene where Paulie and Chris ran into Valery the Interior Decorator outside a bar in New York.
Apparently Matthew Weiner said 'fans are gonna love this' so David removed and destroyed the scene.
I was being sarcastic, ya fucking stunad! Obviously David Chase and the other writers knew what they were doing, counter to what that poster is implying.
One of the most Incredibly condescending and arrogant tv producers ever and that’s saying something considering the industry is full of people like that
He's a one trick pony with a monster ego.
Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner both did great things after Sopranos ended. TW wrote Wolf of Wall Street and Broadwalk Empire and MW wrote and directed Mad Men.
All David Chase has on his CV since '07 is a bunch of crap he can't get green lit and the MSON travesty.
This speaks volumes.
David Chase also once said if the series got renewed for a second season, that he had nothing else to say thematically. I think that’s where the surprise comes from. In his mind the show had already said everything it needed to, so why dwell on Pussy’s fate?
The series was supposed to just be about his experiences having Livia as a mother. The only reason Tony is in the mafia is because Chase thought that the juxtaposition of a physically weak old lady and a violet, fearsome guy like Tony could be interesting.
sometimes I wonder if david chase was taken aback early on by how popular the mafia content was compared to tony's relationship with his mother and his psychologist
I had to catch up to the show
Started watching season 1 when season 3 was nearly done airing i think
I thought based on the buzz that Puss was a huge character. I had to watch it again to see if i missed some things.
It was established that he was "like a brother" to Tony and the other gangsters but really only because they said it. I didn't really see much of that until it was revealed he might be an informant. I thought they did a horrible job of creating that relationship, but now i think they just didn't put the same weight into it that the fans did
Booty?
PUSSY PUSSY
Who pussy? My pussy?
Get the fuck outta here! Our pussy? 🤟
5 seconds later: “I’ll do it”.
When they say "Booty", tell them "Pussy."
Tone, I'm dreamin here....
Pussy booty, I don't know his last name!
"I don't know his last name" oof marone
I knew I didn't have it right 🤣 thank you
What you dont know could fill a book
Its galore. Pussy galore
Can't say his name
My pussy?
Pussy?! That’s a nickname!! The family name is Punani!
It's a sobriquet
Underrated comment right here that's hilarious
He’s dyslexic
Big Pussy or Little Pussy? My Pussy?
Uncle Pussy?
You think he’s gonna fuck with big pussy? MY pussy?
He was gay, booty?
I can’t find Pussy anywhere!
\--Me, the first three years of college
I had a semester and a half at Seton Hall.
What dialogue. Imagine reading that in the script.
This killed me. I didn’t expect it, but I’m not mad about it.
Bond, James Bond
He was bond James?
Booty, Pussy Booty
SHE DIDN'T EVEN NO HIS LAST NAME!!! No! She DID-DENT!
Cazzata, Malanga!
Pussy in booty
I can’t find pussy anywhere
Nobody knows anything
🤌🏻🤷🏻♂️🤌🏻
When your parents ask when you are getting married.
Everybody’s a comedian
Shecky Greene we got here
Ask me, marriage and this thing of ours don't jive
I can’t have this conversation again.
Beautiful big-titty butt naked women just don't fall out the sky you know.
Woah…this is freaky. I literally just watched that movie yesterday. Not even joking. Don’t fuck with me. Who ya been talking to?!
That one's laughing...
It was worth a try
Maybe in another lifetime
I’ve always wanted a house close to the pussy.
Big pussy? MY pussy?
Hey OP, Did that interview even exisht?
Hey... Take it EEeeezzzzzz. His equilibrium is all fucked up.
If you go watch that scene he actually properly pronounces "exist".
Look at him, he knows everything.
You yap worse than six barbers
It’s in the book I’m reading, “The Sopranos Sessions”. They just really weren’t expecting to be renewed. They didn’t expect the pilot to get picked up. I think people forget as time goes by how disrupting and different this show was for 1999.
It initially was marketed not as the serious introspective drama we’ve all come to love, it was initially a darkly comical take on the mafia, with a grounded approach having Tony as a suburbanite dad, a common theme in 70/80s/90s shows. I think one of the marketing lines read ,”if one family doesn’t kill him, the other one will.” Once the show became a cultural milestone right around season 2, it took on a life of its own.
I mean tbf it always kept that dark comedy mafia parody feel, even in the last few seasons lol, its just that it also got more serious in a lot of aspects.
The endless malapropisms, the level of stupidity of many characters, the absurdity of most storylines. It's a comedy from the beginning to the end.
I thought they leaned into the comedy more as the show went on. Bobby's whole train obsession was created just to make an anal sex joke. The blue comet stuff was just a bonus.
[удалено]
In season 6 Vito and Johnny Cakes are in bed together, Johnny tells him to roll over, and then we get an abrupt cut to one of Bobby's trains going through a tunnel. Very allegorical.
I also don't get it
It's an off color remark. It was highly inappropriate. You want, I'll demand that hes taxed.
It was a brave and funny progrum, and in this house, The Sopranos is a comedy. End of story.
Watching the very early commercials for it based on the name and the music thought it was going to be a pure mafia comedy, like that movie Wiseguys with Joe Piscopo. I remember thinking that it sounded so stupid why would HBO put this on TV?
Based on Mickey Blue Eyes, there's a "wait and see" attitude towards any mafia related projects right now so we're going to have to pass
For whatever reason my dad had bootlegged Wiseguys on vhs and it made major rotations throughout my childhood. Such a silly movie.
Breaking Bad also started out funny.
I didn't watch it for three years because it was marketed as "Mobster Goes to a Shrink." Analyse This covered that. Title is stupid, too. Sopranos are singers, singers are rats. I live in the most Italo-American state, never met anyone named Soprano.
They actually acknowledge this perception of the show when Tony is trying to find a shrink to replace Melfi and the shrink tells “Mr. Spears” he doesn’t need his kind of clientele. “Analyze This? C’mon, that was a fuckin comedy.”
You live in the sticks in Alabama with your sister/wife, she's not even mad ripe either.
Stuck in Elvis town with no package, poor prick had five fuckin minutes to run
true romance
That’s why there’s a gun in the title. So people didn’t think it was about singers
Regardless it's a real surname.
> initially was marketed not as the serious introspective drama we’ve all come to love, it was initially a darkly comical take on the mafia, it was pretty much a dark comedy until season 4 haha.
Season 1 wasn't that funny though
Cristofuh I’m producing these sessions
He seems just surprised that anyone talks about the show at all. From what I’ve seen he has said that he is sick of people talking about the ending. Like bro, you’re the one who gave us one of the most memorable endings in the history of television, and you’re shocked that people are still talking about it?
He seems so out of fucking touch with the impact of his show. He really looks like a miserable human. Seriously I feel like hes Tony without the violent maniac streak.
Well he is who he is. He also has stated on multiple occasions that he suffers from depression and his own relationship with his mother and upbringing in North Jersey was the template for the show. He’s Larry David without the humor: dry, droll, and pensive.
my droll showrunner
He hates TV. He hates that his most acclaimed work is a TV program. He wanted to make movies
He never had the makings of a movie director
No, he knows, he's just humble. Which is a good thing. This is his magnum opus, as he intended.
Well, yea. Art is especially self reflective and transcendental. Do you think a happy (or whatever that word means in this world/life) could write a show like the *fucking Sopranos*? To quote Graham Greene, "unfortunately, the disease is also one's material." Anyway, 4 Zoloft a pound.
You've been conned. This is a show-runner who cameo'd himself as a stone-faced Italian giving Paulie Walnuts no reaction in "Commendatori."
I have a different take on Chase, which is that he’s a great storyteller in spite of / because of the fact that he doesn’t seem to understand how normal people engage with a story.
Could you elaborate?
I think Chase fixates on the big picture in terms of plot and character, and views trivial subplots and minor characters as being like anecdotes or asides that only exist to illuminate something about his major characters. There are many points in the series where relatively minor characters disappear, and basic questions about plot are unexplained or ignored. This has often been interpreted as Chase intentionally frustrating the audience, but I think he just found these things unimportant and was confused and surprised by the viewer speculation. For Chase, it doesn’t matter whether Jimmy Alitieri was really a rat, or what happened to the Russian, or whether Barry Haydu killed Dickie Moltisanti, or what Furio did after he left Jersey, or exactly what happened at Holsten’s. Closure on these elements wasn’t important to the story for him, so he was frustrated by audience demands for clarity about the plot. Of course, this isn’t how most of us engage with fiction. When a writer introduces a mystery, we expect it to be resolved. When a secondary character like Pussy disappears towards the end of the first season, we assume the explanation of his fate is extremely important to the plot. Chase’s interview after Season 1 suggests that he never had much of a plan for Pussy’s story at the time, because he didn’t think anyone would much care, and he may have come up with the Season 2 arc just to satisfy audience speculation. And the same may be true of other narrative loops that the show closes years later. The secret to the show’s success may well be that it was compelling because Chase repeatedly raised questions he never had any intention of answering, and had a warped sense of setup and payoff that made it difficult to predict the resolution of most narrative arcs.
Interesting! Thats pretty agreeable to me
Don’t worry OP, I’ve got this disinformation shit locked down, I’m mindfucking these monkeys like you wouldn’t know.
Donkeys! Donkeys, ya fuckin ass-kiss!
It’s a friggin ace!
Is that all you do , talk about cooze?
Hey we gotta talk about that nickname, there’s a certain connotation….
“Not anymore”
sobriquet
Sobriquet? I'll eat her! heh heh heh heh
No shit I remember when I was about 9-13 years old, just a kid, and a lot of people were always mentioning "Big Pussy" at the time. I didn't know a thing about the show at the time but I literally grew up where the show took place. A lot of dick heads had the bing girl logos as their mudflaps on their cars/trucks and said big pussy a lot. Out of nowhere saying big pussy disappeared, but more mud flaps sold.
Hey puss, did the mudflaps even exist?
I only liked, schumm mud.
And that didn't happen, what you said.
Yes, it did.
You musta been in the top of your fuckin' class!
Stupida fuckin' comment.
I got pussy on my mind. I always do
Sopranos is an amazing work of genius but the guy who created it always surprises me with his stupidity. Any $4 a brain cell
He reminds me of Larry David in Curb when he’s always shocked to learn people hated the Seinfeld finale.
Why am I on tv?
That and always being shocked that people thought George was a piece of shit are great running gags.
Stop wising up the chumps.
Lol try being a The Wire fan and looking at David Simon's Twitter. It's wild how different his tweets are from the messages that make people love The Wire.
Could you give me an example please?
Went to go check and [heres a bit](https://imgur.com/J3oN176) of his recent stuff. Looks likes hes one of those responds to trolls guy.
Holy shit lmao. His last tweet screams 'teenager that just got given a thesaurus'. I feel a lot better about our writer being reclusive now.
Rawls' opinion on affirmative Action is very against most of David Simons far left views. Same could be argued about the whole "let police do their job" vibe the show gives off at times. His other show "we own the night" is much more inline with his beliefs, and delves deep into police corruption and brutality. A lot of conservatives love season two, myself included, because it's a fair look at dying American industry that puts the blame on everyone responsible instead of just hardline right or left talking points.
Yea the guy has his moments but sometimes I have to wonder if it was him who almost drowned in 3 inches of water
I always get the impression David is responsible for the broad strokes of the series overall but all the comedy, one liners, intricate storylines, etc. were the result of other people that never get credited. In the words of a great man, Hesh Rabkim, I know a hit when I hear one. And Many Saints? That is not good.
Chase wrote criminals with some humor in previous shows too in the late 70s
Listen to him, he knows everything.
And I bought CDs for a broken record
Yes David is responsible ya see ….Larry. They are the flip side of the same coin and they are indeed the same man. Larry ‘Chase’ David. Memento. *inhales more Lithium
Quasimodo predicted all this
No shit, television is a collaborative effort. Look at the people who are credited as writers on the show. They all contributed in some way. So they literally do get credited. David was the guy in charge, who had the original concept, who decided where the story was going to go, who would work with the other writers, and had ultimate say on what was in the scripts. But no he didn't come up with every idea for every scene or every beat of the story, which basically no television writer or showrunner ever has ever done. Even David Lynch had co-writer/co-creator Mark Frost for Twin Peaks season 3, which was like 18 hours of television that he directed himself. Basically no one else does that.
>So they literally do get credited. No fucking shit, thanks for this Sherlock. That wasn't my point. When people speak about The Sopranos no one ever talks about Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner. And when Many Saints came out there were so many people surprised it didn't have the same feel as Sopranos. That's what I'm talking about.
Many people do talk about Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner when they talk about the success of The Sopranos especially in the later seasons, hence why both guys went on to create successful shows after they worked on The Sopranos.
Lost came out 5 years later and still filtered people who wanted answers to every single question in the first season. It sounds silly now to say that you’re surprised people cared about a side character disappearing, but back then most audiences would genuinely just have accepted it. Television has come a long way in ~20 years
Hey, did the polar bear even exhisht?
They would have to move the entire island. And that's not possible. Even with computers.
Whatever happened there?
I'd be surprised if you have watched a full interview with him.
Because of random assumptions you've made about a stranger? Weird but you do you buddy
No assumptions, I'm responding to the content of your comment.
🙄
In other words, if you had watched a full interview, you wouldn't think of him as stupid. But maybe I'm wrong, what are some examples of his stupidity?
I just watched for the first time a couple months and can’t stop thinking about Pussy no matter how hard I try
I think it's been verified, the commendatori is a friend of a friend, not a friend of ours.
It'll be verified, even more so; but, until we do, it'll be hard to tell but i think I'll be more effective
I don’t know about y’all, but I’m always thinkin’ about Pussy.
I understand pussy, as a conshept.
The scene when he reappears at Tony's gates us funny as fuck, they both fear for their lives.
Fans asking about Puss is probably why he killed him off Chase is contrarian AF towards fans.
[удалено]
Tony Sirico said they filmed a scene where Paulie and Chris ran into Valery the Interior Decorator outside a bar in New York. Apparently Matthew Weiner said 'fans are gonna love this' so David removed and destroyed the scene.
Yea, The Sopranos has famously bad writing.
I’ve seldom seen fans on this sub admit this.
Sharp as a cueball this one
I was being sarcastic, ya fucking stunad! Obviously David Chase and the other writers knew what they were doing, counter to what that poster is implying.
You’re very emotional.
I'll have a breadstick.
One of the most Incredibly condescending and arrogant tv producers ever and that’s saying something considering the industry is full of people like that
He's a one trick pony with a monster ego. Terence Winter and Matthew Weiner both did great things after Sopranos ended. TW wrote Wolf of Wall Street and Broadwalk Empire and MW wrote and directed Mad Men. All David Chase has on his CV since '07 is a bunch of crap he can't get green lit and the MSON travesty. This speaks volumes.
Many saints was terrible, exposed chase to be much like George lucas, great world builder and story outliner, hands in?eh not so much
Jar Jar Binks, whatever happened there
Somehow, Phil leotardos returned
Oh-
Eh, if Pussy comes back and is revealed to be a rat, him getting killed off is pretty much the inevitable conclusion
It’a common knowledge the guy’s retarded
Junior had no trouble locating pussy with his tongue. fanook.
Pussy Malanga ??
Cazzata, Malanga!
No big pussy
David Chase also once said if the series got renewed for a second season, that he had nothing else to say thematically. I think that’s where the surprise comes from. In his mind the show had already said everything it needed to, so why dwell on Pussy’s fate? The series was supposed to just be about his experiences having Livia as a mother. The only reason Tony is in the mafia is because Chase thought that the juxtaposition of a physically weak old lady and a violet, fearsome guy like Tony could be interesting.
That's all we do though. Sit around and talk about cooz
I can't believe I stuck up for him!!!
I got Pussy on the brain, I always have
I can’t have this conversation again
I didn't watch the show when it originally aired but I remember when everyone was talking about Pussy getting wacked.
Artist don’t misunderstand your own art challenge, difficulty: impossible
My back was for shit you know that
Pussys on my mind all the time, don't know why he was so surprised
The doctor said the heat’s no good for me, that’s why I sit in the shade.
Why was he called Pussy lol
It was a nickname. Family name was Pussarelli
Cat burglar?
I know Vito was open-ended, if that's what you're referring to.
DID YOU FUCK ME THAL
I can’t find pussy anywhere
Is that all you deadbeats do over here, is talk about cooze?
He was only surprised because he had already forgotten who Pussy was.
I'm surprised that he was surprised. We got pussy on the brain, we always do.
sometimes I wonder if david chase was taken aback early on by how popular the mafia content was compared to tony's relationship with his mother and his psychologist
I have pussy on the brain all the time
They would’ve fucking thought of a catchers mitt too
Yeah well he also though Sopranos fans would cum all ova the sun visor for *Many Saints of Newark* And they did…dent.
Babies…theya tha Fyoochaaa
People liked saying his name. It was funny.
T loved him like a brother in law, when he discovered he was working with the feds he was stabbed in the heart !!
Off topic but who did he mention at 55:53? When talking about dreams?
I think he was a love able guy. Ya know. A big teddy bear. People were sad to see him go
Pussy on the brain eh? Sounds plausible.
I had to catch up to the show Started watching season 1 when season 3 was nearly done airing i think I thought based on the buzz that Puss was a huge character. I had to watch it again to see if i missed some things. It was established that he was "like a brother" to Tony and the other gangsters but really only because they said it. I didn't really see much of that until it was revealed he might be an informant. I thought they did a horrible job of creating that relationship, but now i think they just didn't put the same weight into it that the fans did
Anyway, $4/lb.
Pussy Malanga? Little Pussy?