Many Saints of Newark director David Chase reveals why The Sopranos stands the test of time

The Sopranos has spiked in popularity with younger audiences embracing it like never before and creator David Chase thinks he knows why.

Even though the final episode of The Sopranos went to air more than 14 years ago, audiences around the world still can’t seem to get enough of Mob boss Tony Soprano and his motley crew of gangster associates.

Thanks to its ongoing presence on streaming platforms, the sprawling crime drama regarded by many as the greatest TV show ever created, never really went away but has enjoyed a resurgence in recent years both in viewers and in the cultural conversation.

Figures in the US revealed that the number of people bingeing the show skyrocketed during Covid-19 lockdowns last year, and anecdotal evidence suggested that younger audiences were also discovering it for the first time.

Last April, Sopranos stalwarts Michael Imperioli, who played Tony’s nephew Christopher, and Steve Schirripa, who played brother-in-law Bobby Baccalieri, launched a podcast called Talking Sopranos, taking fans behind the scenes and breaking down episodes.

The pair also toured Australia along with Vincent “Big Pussy” Pastore for a live show in 2019, the same year that SopranosCon launched in the US.

And after years of feverish anticipation and months of Covid-induced delays, prequel film The Many Saints of Newark finally opens in Australia this week.

Alessandro Nivola and David Chase working on a scene from the movie The Many Saints of Newark.

But ask creator David Chase the secret to the enduring success of The Sopranos, and he admits to being a bit perplexed.

“People ask me that all the time – and no one asks it more than me,” he says with a wry smile over a Zoom call from New York.

“I would like to say it’s because it’s that good, but you’re not supposed to talk that way.”

Chase says he was recently asked to talk about the show and his career at a US college and he admits he’s curious to dig deeper into just what it is about his darkly-funny, often bleak, 22-year-old creation, which won 21 Emmy Awards, five Golden Globes and two Peabodys over its six-season, 86 episode run, that younger audiences are connecting with.

“It has to be that these contemporary audiences identify with Tony,” he theorises of his violent, mentally troubled, ruthless, charismatic lead character so masterfully brought to life by the late, great James Gandolfini.

“Now what do they identify with? I think that they identify with someone who feels that the best is over, or that it’s all over. And they can identify with that emotion in a comedic way. I hope that’s what it is.

“I think the reason those younger audiences respond to this show is because whatever my contribution to it was, I never really grew up, I was and still am sarcastic, worried, and attuned to the absurdity of life. I believe in some ways I still behave and still feel like I am 21.”

The Sopranos is widely regarded as one of the greatest TV shows ever made.

It’s widely accepted that The Sopranos, with its complicated, morally ambiguous characters and sophisticated plot lines that sometimes ran for seasons, changed the face of television and ushered in a golden age for the medium.

But don’t ask Chase where he sees its influence in 2021: with the exception of news and a channel that specialises in old movies, he doesn’t really watch TV any more.

But Alan Taylor, who directed nine episodes of The Sopranos and returned to direct The Many Saints of Newark, says it came down to timing and the genius of its creator.

Having gone on to direct some of the shows that The Sopranos cleared a path for – including Mad Men, Boardwalk Empire and Game Of Thrones – Taylor says Chase’s creation broke the rules by being more cinematic than anything seen on the small screen before, and by “wrestling with big questions”.

“HBO took a chance on David Chase and The Sopranos and people saw what the medium of television could be capable of if you went in this direction where it was richer, deeper, more thematic and also more cinematic,” Taylor says.

“You have one foot in mainstream entertainment but the other foot is in a pretty sophisticated, cerebral, psychological stuff. David showed how it could be done and the technology and the market place was there to keep doing it and it became an explosion of other people who were inspired by that model.”

Alessandro Nivola as Dickie Moltosati in the Sopranos’ prequel movie The Many Saints of Newark.

Alessandro Nivola, who plays the lead character Dickie Moltosanti in the 1960s-set The Many Saints Of Newark, was just a few years into his professional acting career when the Sopranos first aired in 1999, but he says it changed the way that he and his fellow actors viewed television as legitimate career option.

“When I was growing up as an actor it was considered an admission of defeat if you took a role on a TV show because it meant you were giving up on your film career and putting your feet up and going to a 9-5 job,” he says.

“I remember the moment that the Sopranos hit, everybody was forced to completely reassess their understanding of what television could do and what kind of stories could be told and what kind of characters could be heroes.”

Chase says he never contemplated making a sequel to The Sopranos, partly because of the 2013 death of Gandolfini from a heart attack, but also because he says “that story was over”.

Taylor theorises that making a contemporary Sopranos would also mean Chase would have to definitively reveal whether Tony lived or died in the famously divisive, fade-to-black finale, something he has steadfastly refused to do.

Alessandro Nivola and Alan Taylro on the set of The Many Saints of Newark.

Chase says he instead set the gangster story of The Many Saints of Newark, which also features Gandolfini’s son Michael as a younger version of Tony, amid the 1967 race riots in the New Jersey city, partly to establish the film as a separate entity to the TV series, but also because he remembers them so vividly because he was living just a few miles away at the time.

The fact that America once again exploded with racial tension last year following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a policeman made Chase’s 2018 script look eerily prescient.

“That was amazing actually,” he says.

“Obviously people of colour would say ‘what, you were surprised that this is still going on?’. No, we knew it was still going on, that’s why we felt confident about writing what we did but we didn’t know it was going to explode. I mean nobody knew that. Nobody could have predicted what year America would finally vomit from what it had been doing.”

The Many Saints Of Newark opens in cinemas on Thursday. The Sopranos is streaming now on Foxtel.