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Home , 46 Long, Chase (House episode), David Chase, Northern Exposure, NYPD Blue (season 1), NYPD Blue (season 2)

David Chase, , and Television Creativity

David Lavery and Robert J. Thompson

Bonnie: Livia, ever hear the old Italian saying my aunts used: col tempo la foglia, di gelso divena seta. Carmela: What does that mean, Bonnie? Bonnie: Time and patience change the mulberry leaf to silk. From “” on The Sopranos, written by

David Chase’s mulberry leaves were many, his patience extraordinary, his creative achievement decades in the making. A precocious child, a devotee of Freud in high school, where he authored a blasphemous story in which “somebody spies the Apostles sneaking Jesus’ body out of the tomb, right before they go ‘Oh, my God, he’s resurrected.’” Chase longed as a young man to be a filmmaker or perhaps a rock and roll musician. An English major in (first at Wake Forest, later at ), like contemporaries and near‐ contemporaries Francis Ford Coppola, , and George Lucas, Chase then went on to attend film school—at Stanford. The for The Sopranos, however, would not be written until he served twenty seven reluctant years in television, beginning as a writer in 1971. Despite a distaste for network television he makes no effort to hide (“I loathe and despise almost every second of it”), money had kept Chase in the industry, writing, and eventually producing, for such sundry series as The Night Stalker (1974‐ 75), (1976‐80), I’ll Fly Away (1991‐1992, (1993‐ 95), and directing an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985‐86), but he also turned down many other opportunities as well. Though greatly admired by bigger names like Rockford creator Stephen J. Cannell and , he remained largely anonymous in a still mostly authorless medium. Off the Minnesota Strip (1980), a made‐for‐television movie he wrote, did earn him an Emmy, and he still remembers proudly the ambitious Almost Grown (November 1988 to February 1989), a short‐ lived series about the sixties and seventies making use of a rock and roll soundtrack and extensive flashbacks that gave him his first opportunity to create and produce

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his own show. But he continued to write movie scripts that never got made and to dream of leaving television for feature filmmaking. Chase recalls how exciting the early 70s were to him as an aspiring filmmaker, an era in which “movies were starting to be called ‘film’” and were beginning to be taken seriously as art, and non‐Hollywood models from Europe and Japan inspired in Chase and his generation new conceptions of the medium. A screening of Fellini’s 8½ at Wake Forest in the ‘60s left a lasting impression. (Fellini, Chase observes, inspired him to incorporate Italian themes into his stories.) The films of Polanski and Buñuel would not be forgotten. Chase began to dream about making “personal” films that did not seem to have been mass‐produced. TV, on the other hand, “ruined the movies,” or so Chase believed. Though he admits to loving television as a kid,” the affair didn’t last. “I fell out of love with TV probably after went off the air [1967]. And then when I had my first network meeting, that didn’t help” . Chase virtually ignored TV in the sixties and seventies except for an addiction he calls “absurd” to Medical Center (1969‐76) and an infatuation with I Spy (1965‐68), a series whose writing (especially in its last two seasons) he greatly admired . “I hated everything that corporate America had to offer,” Chase tells Allen Rucker. “I considered network TV to be propaganda for the corporate state—the programming not only the commercials. I’m not a Marxist and I never was very radical, but that’s what I considered it to be. To some extent, I still do. . . .” Even a quality series like Northern Exposure, a show he wrote for in its final two seasons, was for Chase “propaganda for the corporate state. . . . it was ramming home every week the message that ‘life is nothing but great.’ ‘Americans are great’ and ‘heartfelt emotion and sharing conquers everything.’” It should not surprise us that Chase thinks of himself as “The first counterculture . . . person in hour drama” . He has remained an in‐ renegade. “I think it is a sad commentary on the last two decades of television,” Stephen J. Cannell writes, “that this man, who was well known to all the networks for almost twenty‐five years, could not get his fresh, totally unique ideas past the guardians of our public airwaves (read network

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executives here). Instead of The Sopranos, we more often got mindless clones of last year’s semi‐hits, while David made his living running other people’s shows, unable to sell his own.” How he did finally manage to sell his own is a story often told. Chase has again and again insisted that “luck” was perhaps the major contributing factor, and a cursory cataloguing of the extraordinary and diverse components that contributed to the making of The Sopranos would seem to confirm the observation.

Each and every one of the following ingredients had to be added to the mix in order for The Sopranos‐as‐we‐know‐it to come into existence.

 The faith of Lloyd Braun of Brillstein‐Grey Productions—the company that had developed The Larry Sanders Show for HBO—that Chase “had a great series inside,” which led Chase to begin reconsidering and reconfiguring for television ideas that had long been on the back burner.

 Chase’s long‐time obsession with gangster films. He was a great admirer of William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931) when he first saw it, terrified, at the age of eight or nine, and a fan of television’s The Untouchables (1959‐63), which he watched with his father. At Stanford he even made a student . The Rise and Fall of Bug Manousos, Chase recalls, “was about alienation. It was about a guy driven crazy by the cheesiness, sanctimoniousness, and fakery of American society. He was frustrated—he shotgunned his TV set. And what got to him were the commercials, the astronauts, and the fact that white bread Nixonians ruled America. . . . And he dreamed of becoming a gangster, an old‐fashioned gangster in a pin‐ striped suit, and he got his wish. He got killed in the end, but the film was poorly thought out.” The state of the post‐Godfather, post‐ gangster genre at the time of The Sopranos’ germination left Chase nowhere to go except “into the family” , ground which proved to be fertile indeed.

 The idea, encouraged by , a writer on Almost Grown, and others (including his wife), of telling stories about his own ultra‐negative mother.

 Chase’s own long‐running therapy. Chase speaks revealingly of the great influence Alice Miller’s brilliant but deeply troubling Drama of the Gifted Child—a book that argues that many creative adults were abused children—

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had on his own mindset. He jokes that with The Sopranos all the money he has spent on therapy has finally begun to pay off.

 The conceit of a mobster seeing a psychiatrist, the series’ germinal idea, as Chase explained to :

The kernel of the joke, of the essential joke, was that life in America had gotten so savage, —basically selfish, that even a mob guy couldn’t take it any more. That was the essential joke, and he’s in therapy because what he sees upsets him so much, what he sees every day. . . . he and his guys were the ones who invented selfishness—they invented “me first”; they invented “it’s all about me”—and now he can’t take it because the rest of the country has surpassed him.

 The commissioning of the pilot for Fox, which would, of course, turn it down.

 Chase’s inclination never to purposely create comedy. Comedy just occurs, Chase believes, naturally accruing when a writer is faithful to things as they are. (Is it too much to say that The Sopranos is the funniest show since ?)

 The casting of virtually all the roles, mostly with New York‐based actors, especially as Tony—an epochal decision compared by some to having Marlon Brando play Stanley Kowalski in Elia Kazan’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951).

 The ducks, who come to hold such for Tony flown in from Rockford Files TV movie producer Juanita Bartlett’s own swimming pool.

 The family dynamics drawn from Chase’s own family—minus the cursing.

 The shopping‐around of the series to all the networks and its complete rejection.

 The opportune successful pitch to HBO, heavily committed at the time to the development of new, original series. Having the series on HBO permitted

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Chase to use nudity, violence, and profane language in ways that would have been impossible on network television, greatly facilitating its verisimilitude, but perhaps more importantly it enabled the uninterrupted‐by‐commercial construction of hour‐long narratives.

 HBO’s commitment to on‐location filming in New Jersey.

Luck was with David Chase, as well, when he and his production team decided against some other possibilities, all seriously considered, and all of which, in retrospect, would have been grave, if not fatal, mistakes.

 Making the main character a with an uneasy relationship with his mother.

 Having the whole series be told by Tony in flashbacks in Melfi’s office. About half of the pilot does make use of such a narrative technique, but the idea did not survive the pilot.

 Using a new song for each episode’s credit sequence. In a discussion of the opening credit sequence with Bogdanovich, Chase recalls that it had been his wish to use a different song every week and had protested unsuccessfully HBO’s insistence that Tony’s drive from New York to New Jersey always be choreographed to A5’s “.” He admits that he originally considered a single theme song—a staple of television program for decades—“bourgeois.”

 Killing off Tony’s mother, Livia, at the end of the first season. ’s superb performance convinced Chase and his collaborators to keep the character alive.

 Casting , ’s guitarist, who had never acted before, as Tony. “At the time,” Chase recalls, “I was seeing [The Sopranos] 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.”

 Not having Tony kill anyone on screen (as he does, for the first time, in “College,” garroting a mob traitor), fearing—as HBO itself very strongly did—that the audience might lose all sympathy for its main character.

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Though Chase is known as the “master cylinder” by the cast and crew of The Sopranos, it is important to remember that, like all filmic and televisual enterprises, the series is a collaborative effort. Chase has written or co‐written only eight of the thirty nine episodes so far produced, and he has directed only two episodes. As Chase is the first to acknowledge, The Sopranos has brought together a regular team of talented writers and directors, with occasional guest directors attracted by the show’s prestige. But, like many television producer/creators, Chase gets to do final revisions (uncredited) on almost all scripts and has participated in the editing of each and every episode.

Kelley | Sorkin | Fontana

Recently it has become fashionable for the creators of more ambitious TV series to take personal control over their shows’ authorship. David E. Kelley (, Ally McBeal), (), and (Oz), for example, are sometimes given screenwriting credit for nearly every episode of the programs they produce. Although this assures a greater degree of aesthetic continuity and allows a television series to exhibit the same kind of single vision that we associate with more traditional art forms, this method also invites the burnout of the auteur and the exhaustion of the narrative premise. David Chase, on the other hand, has returned to a more old fashioned way of delegating authorial duty, but with only episodes per year to make, he is able to do it much more efficiently. By retaining his role as the final rewriter of every Sopranos script, but farming out most of his episodes to other writers, Chase has chosen a dramaturgical model that may be the most effective one for telling artistically mature stories in a continuing series. The Sopranos is enriched by the subtly different voices that various writers bring to the series. Chase’s refusal to hog all of the scripts for himself provides a degree of multivalent complexity to the

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universe he has created. At the same time, Chase’s stewardship assures that the show takes advantage of the unique ability of a television series to tell stories that develop character and accrete detail over long periods of real and narrative time. The Sopranos is not so much a television novel written by a single author, as it is a collection of short stories written by a company of authors and unified by character, theme, and the careful control of a single editor. Chase’s model maximizes the potential of the serial form while protecting his show from becoming a traditional television serial.

When debuted in 1981, it catalyzed a widespread upgrade of the dramatic television series. The creative and commercial success of the show inspired two decades of programming that was more sophisticated, more complex—indeed better than what had gone before. But Hill Street Blues didn’t have much of an act to follow. It was introduced during one of the most arid periods in the history of the dramatic series, a form that had never really matured. Like Hill Street Blues, The Sopranos is another monumental work in the development of TV drama. While Hill Street Blues was responding to a television tradition that included such generic contemporaries as CHiPS and T.J. Hooker, however, The Sopranos attracted critical acclaim amidst a schedule rich with “quality” series like Law & Order, NYPD Blue, and The Practice. Judging by the number of magazine covers they inspired, two television shows seemed to dominate the American imagination, or at least the imaginations of entertainment writers, at the turn of the century: The Sopranos and Survivor. Both shows may have succeeded for some of the same reasons. After half a century of , and cop, lawyer, doctor and detective dramas, viewers may have been ready for something completely different. “Reality TV” and The Sopranos both provided this, though in very different ways. Survivor and the other shows in its genre offered “reality” through the use of non‐actors and the introduction of improvised and serendipitous dramatic action; The Sopranos offered reality through its extension of the palette of language and its

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break with some of the traditions of TV drama that tone down and clean up any subject matter. Perhaps it wasn’t just the ways in which The Sopranos was different from other TV that made it work, however. David Chase made two crucial decisions early in the development of the show. The decision to place into therapy allowed the viewer access to the interior psychic workings of the show’s lead character, thereby co‐opting the tools of written literature without resorting to the contrivances of narrators or soliloquies. More importantly, however, was Chase’s decision to merge the epic of the urban frontier that had been explored in and GoodFellas with the non‐epic of the suburban family that has been one of the basic units of entertainment TV from the very . What may have seemed a ludicrous generic oxymoron now seems to have been inevitable.

After publicly threatening to end the series after only four seasons, Chase agreed in the summer of 2001 to a fifth, but he has warned from the beginning that it should have a very limited run, and for good reasons:

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 shit. The need to repeat yourself beyond the point of exhaustion, the fact that there are continuing characters and nothing really can happen to them. You’re boxed 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. (Peyser) "The model for . . . gangster pictures . . .” Chase is well aware, “has always been The Rise and Fall of . . . . Our show doesn't have a rise and fall—it's like The Going Along of Tony Soprano. But we do know that he's involved in a lifestyle that's dangerous, illegal and dehumanizing. How long can that go on—realistically?" (quoted by Curtis). “Sometimes I call the show the Mir space station,” Chase told Newsweek. “It wasn’t designed to be up there for five years.” That he has now agreed to a longer run would seem to suggest, however, that he has envisioned new means to maintain the

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proper altitude, to prevent degradation of The Sopranos’ orbit and incineration in the atmosphere.

In his cynical and brilliant Bonfire of the Humanities: Television, Subliteracy, and Long‐Term Memory Loss, David Marc, one of the medium’s acutest scholars, observes:

The TV industry may in fact be full of wonderfully creative folks possessing the remarkable talents necessary to bring laughter, tears, and information to the great multitudes of their fellow citizens. But so far I haven’t bumped into any of that crowd, only dangerous gangsters who you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark corridor of power. (my emphasis)

Marc’s dark view of the industry to which he has devoted his life’s work is certainly one with which David Chase, another lifer who, in his estimation, had for three decades prior to The Sopranos not even risen to the rank of “street boss” in the business , would concur. But Chase, one of those “wonderfully creative folks” Marc evidently never met, will, should their post‐Sopranos paths now cross, have a thing or two to tell him about the nature of the gangster. Not all of them work to maintain television’s status quo. In the right hands, gangsters may even prove useful in subverting “everything that corporate America [has] to offer.” “Genius,” underground filmmaker James Broughton once said, “is not having enough talent to do it the way it has been done before.” Boredom, too, is a factor: “You get bored,” Chase has admitted, “and I don’t know if you can tell it from looking at The Sopranos, but I had just had it up to here with all the niceties of network television. I couldn’t take it anymore. And I don’t mean language and I don’t mean violence. I just mean storytelling, inventiveness, something that really could entertain and surprise people. I just couldn’t take it anymore.” Now that he has had his way, now that that “great television series” Lloyd Braun presciently sensed he had buried within has come out, what is to become of David Chase? Two more years of The Sopranos remain. Will he leverage his Sopranos fame in order to realize his long‐held dream of leaving TV for the movies? Chase, it should be noted, no longer thinks so highly of film as he once did. Or will he stay in

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television, despite his frequent insistence that he could never return to network TV, willing now to work in a medium transformed by his loathing of it?