Stream On: the fall and rise of Tony Soprano
‘The Sopranos’ was widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential television drama series of all time. ‘The Many Saints of Newark’ is its prequel.
During its six-season run, 1999’s The Sopranos—widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential television drama series of all time—was honored with 21 Primetime Emmy Awards, five Golden Globe Awards, and two Peabody Awards, among many others. The Many Saints of Newark is the 2021 feature film prequel to the groundbreaking drama series.
/Amazon /Streaming /🍅92%🍿96% /Trailer /1999 /TVMA
David Chase, an executive producer of Northern Exposure, struggled with panic attacks and clinical depression as a teenager, something he dealt with into adulthood. In 1999 he created The Sopranos, which he initially conceived as a feature film about “a mobster in therapy having problems with his mother.” Chase’s own mother, as he recounted in The Sopranos: The Complete Book, was a “passive-aggressive drama queen” and a “nervous woman who dominated any situation she was in by being so needy and always on the verge of hysteria.”
Enter Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), the capomandamento (“capo,” or boss) of the fictional northern New Jersey DiMeo crime family. The Sopranos, about the career, personal family and psychoanalysis of Tony, was a six-season epic TV series, carefully written with about as many allegories as Moby-Dick.
Tony is smart, charming—and subject to panic attacks. After suffering one too many and passing out in his back yard in an exclusive neighborhood in the one of the wealthiest counties in New Jersey (he commutes to Newark to hang out with his crew in Satriale’s Pork Store), he seeks out a psychoanalyst, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Goodfellas, along with 26 other Sopranos cast members).
Tony's upbringing—with his father's and uncle’s (Dominic Chianese, The Godfather Part II) influence looming large on his development as a gangster, but more that of Tony's mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand, Homicide: Life on the Street), who is vengeful, narcissistic, and possibly psychopathic—are the background for Tony’s psychoanalysis. Along with Tony’s day-to-day in “waste management” (a no-show job with a sanitation company provides him with reportable income) which he talks about vaguely to Melfi—such as running down an HMO employee who owes him money (with his car), ordering the murder of a rival waste-management organization against whom Tony’s is bidding for a contract, and firebombing a friend’s restaurant so his Uncle Junior can’t do a hit there; in other words “another day at the office” for Tony.
The Sopranos has been credited with starting the “Second Golden Age of Television.” The series won all kinds of awards, including Peabody Awards, 21 Primetime Emmys, and five Golden Globes. It’s been the subject of critical analysis and controversy (wait until you see the final episode!). 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
/Amazon /Streaming /🍅71%🍿59% /Trailer /2021 /R
Back in the day, after film school, Chase had had the idea of making a film about four white people living around Newark, New Jersey, who joined the National Guard to avoid being drafted to the Vietnam War only to be sent to the 1967 Newark riots.
After The Sopranos, Chase had been against the idea of making a film sequel to it, given star James Gandolfini's death in 2013, but he became interested again in Newark and Chase’s own family ties to the city. “The thing that interested me most was Tony's boyhood. I was interested in exploring that” in a prequel, Chase told IndieWire.
—In 1967, a young Tony Soprano (William Ludwig; James Gandolfini’s son Michael plays teenaged Tony) travels with his father’s associate Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola), to welcome home Dickie's father, “Hollywood Dick” Moltisanti (Ray Liotta, another Goodfellas veteran), and his new Italian bride. Moltisanti is a soldier in the DiMeo crime family, along with Tony’s father Johnny Soprano (Jon Bernthal, Sicario), his uncle Junior (Corey Stoll, Midnight in Paris), and Silvio Dante, Paulie Walnuts, and Pussy Bonpensiero, characters we’ve come to know, save Johnny, in The Sopranos.
After a black taxi driver is assaulted and robbed by white police officers, riots break out in Newark. At a carnival, Johnny and Junior are arrested for engaging in violence during the riots (which we had seen in a Sopranos flashback). Johnny is sentenced to four years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon, and Dick Moltisanti, who crosses a line or two in his own family, tries to do the right thing by young Tony.
Fascinating for fans of The Sopranos, including me (but perhaps not so much for those who haven’t seen it—59% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes), The Many Saints of Newark is a solid gangster movie that spends a little time focused on young Tony (“Moltisante” means “many saints” in Italian), although we do see his influences, and also the answers to two pressing concerns raised on The Sopranos; that is, how one of the main characters of The Many Saints actually died and who ordered it; and, was that a wig on Silvio’s head (Steven van Zandt) in The Sopranos?
Pete Hummers is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to earn fees by linking Amazon.com and affiliate sites. This adds nothing to Amazon's prices. This column originally appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.