They Pull You Back In

It was life imitating art imitating life imitating art. On surveillance tapes released last month, reputed members of New Jersey's DeCavalcante crime family gave The Sopranos creator David Chase the most authoritative, if unsettling, rave of his career. Amid friendly, allegedly racketeering banter, the suspects rhapsodized about the HBO Mafia drama's depth and realism, speculating (hoping?) that it was based on them. "Every show you watch, more and more you pick up somebody," enthused one alleged capo. "What characters!"

The two-Glocks-up review amuses Chase, a Mob-movie buff from childhood, but it doesn't shock him. "I knew that contemporary wiseguys were very much influenced by the Godfather films and watched them continuously," he notes. "That becomes kind of a strange loop." Thus, in the show, Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) cracks up his Mob buddies with an Al Pacino impersonation from the maligned Godfather III ("Just when I thought I was out--they pull me back in!"), while family chief Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) expresses a preference for The Godfather II over the original. What characters, indeed. Like their real-life analogs, they know how to live their lives because they've seen them written out onscreen by soft-handed civilians like Chase. (Memo to the DeCavalcantes, by the way: Sorry, but--and we mean no disrespect--Chase actually drew on a now defunct family from his youth.)

Emmy voters are not exactly like mafiosi--the Cosa Nostra places greater emphasis on giving people what they've got coming to them--but they too honored the series last year with 16 nominations, including a stunning four of the five slots for drama writing (Chase and James Manos Jr. won for the episode in which Tony takes time out from a college tour with his daughter to kill a Mob informer). The show won only four statuettes, but its dominance of the writing category was its most appropriate tribute. For all its crisp direction, impeccable casting and at least half a dozen standout performances, this is above all a writers' show.

Note the plural. Chase is the undisputed boss of The Sopranos, and its origins are highly personal. He says he based Tony Soprano's crafty, malevolent mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) on his own, now deceased mother. Yet this seamless series--more like a continuous movie--is the work of eight writers, including Chase, working from story arcs that he sketches each season. One of the writers, actor Michael Imperioli, not only is an accomplished screenwriter (Summer of Sam) but also plays a Soprano soldier who dreams of writing movies. Imperioli gave Chase a script on spec last season for the chance to write in "a writer's medium, rather than a director's... I felt like such a part of this world, writing for actors I knew." The team shares a gift for the fluid patter of Northeastern Italian Americans (like Chase, ancestral name DeCesare); Edie Falco, who won an Emmy as Tony's steely wife Carmela, says that on other projects, "I instinctively start rewriting my lines--which I'm sure writers hate .. [But] I have never, ever had to second-guess with The Sopranos."

Chase, a wry, soft-spoken man with the perpetually weary mien of a medieval abbot, reserves the second-guessing for himself. The first season's success and the second's hype create "self-induced" pressure. HBO has spent $10 million to promote the series. Chris Albrecht, HBO's president of original programming, says it is "an image-making, branding show" that is crucial to hooking and keeping subscribers. Add backlash-happy critics and, Chase frets, the follow-up must be judged either Godfather II or Godfather III.

In fact, the second season begins as richly as the last, but stranger and eerier. The first installment (Jan. 16, 9 p.m. E.T.) plays Sinatra's It Was a Very Good Year over an opening montage of the principals, which seems vain (yeah, we saw all those best-of-'99 lists too) until the irony reveals itself. For despite Tony's therapy-induced triumph last season--discovering that his own mother had manipulated his uncle into ordering a hit on him, he rose from depression to smite his enemies--it has been a very bad year indeed for Tony. His uncle is in jail and Livia is hospitalized, yet nothing is over, least of all the drama with that mafiosa Medea--though Tony says, "She's dead to me," to anyone who'll listen, as if to convince himself. Livia gets stronger the weaker her body grows, and has gained an ally--perhaps--in Tony's sister Pavarti, ne Janice (Aida Turturro), a free-spirited, canny "Vishnu-come-lately" who has blown in from Seattle to minister to Ma. Alienated from both his wife and his psychiatrist, Tony is filled with rage, self-medicating and without emotional support. Where last season ended like a gunshot, this one begins like a hangover. "Realizing [his mother] was his enemy is one thing," says writer and co-executive producer Robin Green. "Dealing with it is another."

Perhaps the series' greatest achievement is marrying art and psychiatry in a culture addicted to putting itself and its public figures on the couch. (Consider: Tony is a philandering, appetite-enslaved, compartmentalizing baby boomer from a dysfunctional family who longs for the executive power of his predecessors and has a daughter, Meadow, with a Woodstock-era name. Remind you of any world leader you know?) Chase's show reflects his experiences in therapy and his ambivalence about it. "It helped me when I was depressed, screwed up, didn't understand my own impulses," he says. "But Tony has put his finger on some of the weaknesses of psychiatry. You don't take a stand. Everything's relative. 'I killed 15 people today.' 'Well, how could it be otherwise, considering the mother you have?'" Yet Tony's therapist, Dr. Melfi (played with brilliant modulation by Lorraine Bracco), is no enabler. She's a surrogate narrator; her sessions clarify the story and muddle it, through Tony's alternating breakthroughs and self-deceptions. And, this season especially, she's an audience surrogate, an outsider torn between sympathy and disgust for Tony. When she asks, "How many more people have to die for your personal growth?" she impugns the self-absorption of a whole society.