‘Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos’ Got Us Fans All Teary-Eyed and Nostalgic Once Again

Alex Gibney dissects one of the best TV shows ever made and the people behind it

The Sopranos is ever-green. I mean that both as a long-time fan and as a TV critic. To this day, dozens of articles come out discussing different aspects and themes of the series, and thousands of conversations take place between those who have watched it (whether for the first or the 20^th time). I bet you right now, someone somewhere is talking about Tony Soprano at this very moment. So this new documentary about the game-changing man and his ground-breaking creation inevitably takes us on a retrospective ride to make you relive its sublime power once again.

In its little less than three-hour runtime across two feature-length episodes, we embrace many of our beloved The Sopranos people (behind and before the camera), sharing anecdotes, observations, behind-the-scenes moments, and most of all, feelings. And those feelings always get me.

Starting with the mandatory biopic stuff that Wise Guy opens with regarding its subject’s life, background, and work drives home a poignant point that many of us already knew: David Chase’s career was pretty uninteresting before and after The Sopranos. I don’t mean that as a meanspirited or belittling comment — I love the man to death with all of his quirks and prickly attitude. Chase grew up an everyday guy with a messy Italian family, leading an average life until he got a chance to make a creatively rich and pioneering masterpiece. The first half of Part I shows us that in detail like many similar docs do, but the real good stuff begins with the raw auditions by actors who didn't get the role they went for.

James Gandolfini’s isn’t among them for a reason. Instead, we watch many of his co-stars who tried for his role to highlight the immense difference he made as the final and only Tony Soprano. Naively, I didn’t expect to get emotional (even though I balled my eyes out on the tribute documentary to Gandolfini at least ten times before), but when he became the anchor of the picture — for being the humble, beloved, kind man he was — I turned into a goddamn wreck.

After 25 years, there’s still an inexplicable appeal in watching this gentle teddy bear of a man who was capable of playing such a vile and brutal gangster on screen. I guess this differs with every fan, but you need to understand that seeing him in The Sopranos for the first time as a teenager in the aughts, we (meaning my childhood friends and I) thought he was the perfect embodiment of masculinity, respect, and vulnerability. To us, he was cool and tough and funny and scary, but also someone with a heart — a conscience, as Chase points out at one point.

There were a million ways to connect with him on an emotional level. That had a lot to do with how Chase wrote the character, but Gandolfini’s nuanced, layered portrayal of him was what really sealed the deal. It felt like we knew Tony even if we barely had anything in common with him (growing up in a small town in Hungary was as far from the New Jersey gangsters as possible). I haven’t entirely understood why was that the case at such a young age, but the older I got and the more I watched the show, the clearer it’s become.

Many of us were Tony in some way. Sometimes, we embraced his worldview, kindness, nostalgic sentimentality, and other times shared his rage, selfishness, and neuroticism. For me, there was a personal component that played into it as well: Gandolfini’s earnest grin and sad eyes resembled my late grandfather. He was a huge, spitfire of a man, too, and when he smiled at you (which wasn't often), it cut to your core. He loved me immensely but didn’t always know how to express it — something that Tony struggled with frequently as well.

In the documentary James Gandolfini: Tribute to a Friend, Michael Imperioli (who played Christopher Moltisanti) said that shooting The Sopranos was like hanging out with your best friends every day. The show mirrored that feeling. The romanticized view of being a mobster — which we were already familiar with after Goodfellas and Casino — was essentially wishful freedom that many men longed for. Just hanging with your buddies all the time, not a care in the world, joking, teasing, having a blast. Doesn’t that sound like a happy childhood? You know, with the exception that you occasionally have to beat up, threaten, blackmail, and kill a few people. Tools of the trade, I guess. Documentarian/director Alex Gibney captures that bond between the cast flawlessly but doesn't shy away from asking the uncomfortable questions that shine a light on the difficult times that came with making a hit like The Sopranos.

That’s where the HBO documentary provides more insight than what we’ve seen before. One of the most poignant ones is how the show's success affected Gandolfini in reality. Through interviews with co-stars, writers, and HBO representatives, Gibney delves into the toxic, dark side of what playing the patriarch meant to the actor. That it often drove him mad to the point where he developed a drinking and drug problem. That he walked out of his own intervention or that he shoved and attacked disrespectful paparazzis. These instances are all the more absorbing because he wasn't like Tony in real life at all, but ended up embodying harmful characteristics as the role grew bigger with him each year.

Wise Guy also lets us in on the creative process (from the writers' and directors' perspective besides the actors’), which emphasizes that Chase wasn’t easy to work with. He doesn’t have a problem admitting that here. Yet the true gem of the extensive interview with him comes from his willingness to reflect on mistakes and explain why he was so strict with writers when it came to introducing fresh ideas (which he often borrowed from his crew’s lives). At 79, he’s still the same disgruntled and neurotic guy he’s always been, incapable of enjoying the moment no matter how great it is, but now he seems to have found closure and peace within himself in a way that wasn’t apparent before.

The best gift of the documentary, above anything else, is how it encapsulates the show’s cultural relevance and legacy in one intimate moment. Besides highlighting The Sopranos' influence and how it propelled television into a new era, we get to see Chase give a eulogy at Gandolfini’s funeral and talk about his heritage as an Italian-American. In his speech, he mentions a specific scene they shot during a humid and hot summer in New Jersey. As he describes the sequence with Gandolfini (which Gibney shows us simultaneously), he reminisces about his family memories and suddenly breaks down crying. It’s not a pivotal scene but one filled with a quiet, familial sentiment that clearly meant a lot to Chase on a personal level. It made him proud of who he was and reassured him that he was in the right place doing exactly what he was supposed to do.

It's rare when a TV show can evoke such a profound, deeply private memory. I believe The Sopranos did that to millions of people repeatedly (regardless of class, race, or gender) all over the world. There are dozens of reasons it’s regarded as one of the best television series ever made, but if I had to pick out one to justify why it holds up tremendously to this day, I’d say it’s because it made us feel and relive something we thought will never happen again. Wise Guy manages to break down why that is and how it all came together — and how The Sopranos became ever-green.

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Since it’s spooky month, last week I reviewed Peacock’s fun teen horror series, Hysteria!, for Den of Geek.