NEWSWEEK: Let’s cut to good stuff: who gets bumped off in the new season? CHASE: I can’t tell you that, though Junior runs into health problems. I can say that Meadow winds up going to Columbia. Anthony Jr. is now 15, a freshman in high school, and he’s not the gullible little boy he was, not quite so easy to order around. To a certain extent, I think the season focuses on Tony and Carmela as parents, a little bit more of the impact of their lifestyle on their kids. As children become less innocent, they confront you more about who you are–no matter who you are.
What about the legal troubles Tony started to face last year? That will come into play more in the fourth season than the third. The reality of these cases is that they take years to bear fruit, even if a guy’s indicted. Anyway, so much of TV, and network television specifically, deals with lawyers and cops and courts. I don’t want that on this show. Wise-guys don’t all go to jail or get killed. In reality, they play cards and go to social clubs and pick up money. They do a lot less than we portray them doing.
Nancy Marchand had been very sick last season. Did you have any contingency plan? No, we didn’t want to think about it. We had bits and pieces of stuff we used from the first two years so we were able, in a very limited way, to deal with it. It’s not like some plot gimmick or big thing. We didn’t create a cliffhanger.
Will she continue to torture Tony from the grave? Suffice to say, her loss is felt. But we have to be careful about that. We don’t want to have a mob boss who’s haunted by his mother all the time–you don’t want him to be too much of a mama’s boy. She’s not going to haunt him. The influences that are there from his childhood are going to continue to play themselves out, and occasionally they’ll surface in therapy. Something will happen in his current life which will affect the dynamic going back to his childhood. Then we’ll see her in flashbacks.
The Museum of Modern Art just did a “Sopranos” retrospective. Home buyers have started asking real-estate agents for “Sopranos” houses. That kind of pop-culture fame must do a number on your head. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. It’s human nature that it does. But none of us ever expected anybody to watch the show. In the first season we thought maybe we’d get a cult following. We thought since we were having so much fun doing it, obviously it was going to be snatched away.
And now it will probably run forever. The fact is, I don’t know how long this thing will continue to attract viewers. There are so many pitfalls in series television. There are so many things about the structure itself that can lead you to creating s–t. The need to repeat yourself beyond the point of exhaustion, the fact that these are continuing characters and nothing really can happen to them. You’re boxed in in so many ways. I don’t want to see the show become the walking dead, a zombie of itself. I was the one who asked for the four-year cap.
Are you saying you want to quit after next year? That would be my choice.
HBO must be thrilled. They haven’t started the pressure yet.
Last year, officials in Essex County, N.J., refused to let you film there because they say “The Sopranos” perpetuates stereotypes about Italians. Does the criticism hurt? This is a story about America. Anybody who watches it with any degree of intelligence understands that right away. There’s a tremendous sense of ethnic entitlement from these people who complain. One of these guys in Jersey has some stupid award–I don’t even remember the name of it, but it’s for someone who’s a “traitor” to their national group. So I got the award. They also singled out Rudy Giuliani, who has done more to interfere with the activities of organized crime than almost anybody. What kind of thinking is that?
It’s hard to imagine anyone but James Gandolfini as Tony, but in fact you first wanted Steven Van Zandt, who plays Silvio, in that role. What would that have been like? At the time, I was seeing it more like a live-action “Simpsons.” It would have been a gangster show, but some of the more tortured aspects of Tony would probably have gone away. With Steven, it would have been a little broad. We would have played it more for laughs.
Do you care about the Emmys? The show has lost twice, and now it seems to be caught in a good guys vs. bad guys dynamic with “The West Wing.” “The Sopranos” is a show about outlaws. So you have to say to yourself, what do you expect? It’s a longstanding thing in Hollywood: people have to believe it’s good for you. But I think “The Sopranos” is very good for you. There’s a lot of morally and emotionally nourishing things in there. The show poses really hard questions about responsibility and even about what it’s like to be alive in this big, cold universe. But most people don’t want to be bothered with those questions. If Tony was a middle-level waste-management executive and was having that existential angst, people would say, what a f—ing baby, I can’t stand that show. How pretentious, how weepy. But we’ve even been given awards by psychiatric associations. Psychiatrists say they’ve got more men coming in. A surprising number of people seem to remember that their mother had tried to kill them.
