Wise Guy: David Chase And The Sopranos digs into the show that changed the game

David Chase is a funny guy. He made arguably the greatest TV show of all time but hated television (to the point that, before The Sopranos was picked up, he was planning to ditch the medium altogether to write feature scripts on spec). And his series had inarguably the greatest line about nostalgia ever written (“Remember when is the lowest form of conversation”), yet here he is, remembering when all over the place in Alex Gibney’s new two-part HBO doc Wise Guy: David Chase And The Sopranos. “I really regret the amount of fucking verbiage from this morning,” he vents to Gibney, sitting across from him in the same office that Dr. Melfi tempered Tony over The Sopranos’ six remarkable seasons (a bit on-the-nose, sure, but it works). “Seriously, I don’t know about this.”  

Like with The Sopranos—and more specifically, the titular anti-hero at the center of it—Wise Guy makes the case that everything goes back to his mother. Chase’s mom was the inspiration for him to write the project (which was treated as a film before ballooning into a TV show), the reason he started therapy (where, to quote the writer, “I was getting a new mother—that’s what Tony was doing”), the hovering presence he was always trying to escape (he left New Jersey for the West Coast on the night of his wedding, a move encouraged by concerned family members), the cause of a household dynamic he couldn’t shake (“they were just not happy people,” he says of his parents), and such a singularly frustrating figure that Livia Soprano, Tony’s black hole of a mom, was the toughest role to cast (eventually, it went to the great Nancy Marchand).  

But for as much as Wise Guy is bookended by Chase and explores, especially in part one, his life (with Super-8 childhood videos spliced with similar scenes from The Sopranos, and the creator reflecting on having his mind blown by Jean-Luc Godard and Federico Fellini and his ambition to be a filmmaker cemented by an acid trip), the documentary gives equal weight to the legacy and making of the show itself. If you’re a big fan of The Sopranos—and if you aren’t, what gives?—watching a young Michael Imperioli audition (who initially scoffed at the idea, incorrectly thinking, “[Chase is] not even Italian—what does he know?”), a mob of 14,000 people descend on an open casting in a New Jersey town, James Gandolfini making faces and funny sounds to throw off Lorraine Bracco during an intense scene, and Terence Winter describing the grueling but inspiring writing process has a certain behind-the-scenes thrill.  

And the same can be said of the trivia-night tidbits dropped throughout, of which there are many, including Tony Sirico (TV’s most unintentionally hilarious presence), who did his own hair and makeup, refusing to have his ’do messed up during the filming of “Pine Barrens,” or Drea de Matteo detailing one of the hardest scenes to watch in TV history, saying Chase told her, “I’m gonna shoot this two ways—I’m gonna shoot it where you get away and I’m gonna shoot it where they kill you, and no one’s gonna know how it ends until it airs.” 

But the unavoidably tragic piece of this puzzle, which a large section of part two is dedicated to, is James Galdolfini. And the doc, really just by showing the work, acts a a stark reminder that he was a generational talent, right up there with Philip Seymour Hoffman, who would pass away a year after him, or any actor from any era, really. It feels cliche at this point to type out “there has never been a performance like this on TV,” but there really hasn’t, and Wise Guy addresses Galdolfini’s demons and production drama without letting them overshadow that masterful performance or try to get too much in his head. As Chase plainly puts it: “He said he had to go to places that were destructive to him and painful to him.” (To the project’s credit, only people who made The Sopranos are interviewed.)  

The other unavoidable piece here is the show’s cut-to-black finale, which, if you know anything about Chase—or, honestly, appreciate what this show was doing for all of those years—is addressed just how you’d expect. Although the creator does explain that, when writing it, he was thinking about the nature of the universe—or, to quote the last scene’s needle drop, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” that “the movie never ends / it goes on and on and on and on.” And fittingly, Wise Guy will probably prompt you to embark on yet another rewatch.