(Credit: HBO)
Sun 28 September 2025 16:35, UK
The US television network HBO had been alive and kicking since the 1970s, but it took 1999’s The Sopranos to turn the premium service into a household brand.
Routinely celebrated as one of the greatest TV dramas of all time, series creator David Chase’s crime series practically kicked off the 21st-century run of acclaimed small-screen endeavours, increasingly offering a smart and sophisticated storytelling that cinema slowly seemed to eschew in the bloated age of superhero bludgeoning and exhausting universe franchises.
Starring James Gandolfini as New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano, Chase approached the well-trodden crime genre but dared to peer deeper into the psychology, as well as explore the everyday mundanities he’s burdened with, be it the criminal underworld or inside the home. Rising through the ranks as a capo until standing as the de facto head of the DiMeo family, Soprano’s ruthless manoeuvring and capacity for violence are also confounded by panic attacks and bouts of depression, forming the key narrative anchorage in the series with Soprano’s many visits to his psychiatrist, Dr Jennifer Melfi.
Growing up in an Italian-American family in the same state, such a profile wasn’t hard for Chase to realise. As well as drawing from the real-life cases of Ruggiero Boiardo’s activity with the Genovese family and Vinnie Palermo’s North Jersey operations heading the DeCavalcante faction, Chase cast his mind back straight to his own family dynamic, pouring the fraught relationship he harboured with his mother into Soprano’s maternal hang-ups.
“I want to tell a story about this particular man,” Chase told Salon shortly after the series’ debut. “I want to tell the story about the reality of being a mobster—or what I perceive to be the reality of life in organised crime. They aren’t shooting each other every day. They sit around eating baked ziti and betting and figuring out who owes who money. Occasionally, violence breaks out—more often than it does in the banking world, perhaps”.
Yet, Chase was always a filmmaker at heart. While forging a successful career in the television industry, already counting several Emmy Awards and nominations behind him, The Sopranos was originally envisaged as a movie, with one of Hollywood’s most lauded performers mooted for the starring role. “I planned to have Robert De Niro […] and Anne Bancroft as his mother,” he told The New York Times in 2019. “But I was signing with a new agency and they said mob comedies were dead, so I should forget about that. As it turned out, they had missed their mark”.
It’s as good a choice as any. Fresh off Goodfellas, when Chase was conceiving his crime project, De Niro held a serious Hollywood mob pedigree, yet the previous decade’s run of eclectic roles across Midnight Run’s cop caper to Falling in Love’s sentimentality flexed a dextrous CV that would have fit the role’s emotional complexity perfectly. The Goodfellas connection would endure across The Sopranos’ tenure, with Lorraine Bracco, Michael Imperioli, Frank Vincent, and even director Martin Scorsese, among 20-odd key roles and cameos cast due to the show’s veneration of the 1990 classic.
De Niro would eventually star as a mobster visiting his shrink in the Billy Crystal comedy Analyze This, as well as star in a slew of average movies across the 2000s that wouldn’t touch the critical acclaim of The Sopranos. Chase would eventually push his mob gem into the world of cinema, co-writing 2021’s The Many Saints of Newark prequel, exploring Soprano’s 1960s youth and portrayed by Gandolfini’s son, Michael.
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