Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Wise Guy: David Chase And The Sopranos’ On HBO, Where Chase Discusses His Life And How Much It Contributed To The Landmark Series

Wise Guy: David Chase And The Sopranos , directed by Alex Gibney, is essentially a two-and-a-half hour documentary split into two parts. The centerpiece of the documentary is Gibney interviewing David Chase, the creator and showrunner of The Sopranos , in a soundstage replica of Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s office. It’s where so many scenes took place between the psychiatrist, played by Lorraine Bracco and New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano, played by the late James Gandolfini, that it seemed like a fitting place for Gibney to probe the mind of the notoriously tight-lipped Chase.

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The Gist: Despite Chase’s discomfort about talking about his life, Gibney probes the writer about his upbringing in an Italian family in New Jersey, including his extremely difficult relationship with his mother. After Chase and his wife moved to California right after they got married (to get away from his mother), and Chase went to film school at Stanford, he started working for a studio that made cheap b-level horror films, and soon ended up writing for television. Some of the shows he wrote for include The Rockford Files, Northern Exposure and I’ll Fly Away.

Chase goes through the creation and evolution of The Sopranos , the first show he ever ran himself. Shockingly, he at first pitched it to lots of broadcast networks, but they all turned him down (Les Moonves of CBS wanted Chase to excise the therapy scenes in the pilot). But HBO, then with just a few original series, became interested, especially when Chase made the script grittier and more violent.

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We see the auditions for all the major characters, with some familiar faces trying out for the now-iconic roles filled by Gandolfini, Edie Falco (Carmella Soprano), Nancy Marchand (Livia Soprano) and others. A long examination of how Gandolfini was really the only person who could play Tony is shown, along with Chase’s eulogy at Gandolfini’s 2013 funeral. The pressures Chase was under to keep the series going are examined, as is the 2007 series finale’s infamous “black out” ending.

Gibney interviews most of the surviving stars, including Bracco, Falco, Michael Imperioli, Drea de Matteo, Steve Van Zandt and more. He also talks to director of photography Alik Sakharov, writer/producers Terence Winter, Frank Renzulli and Robin Green, as well as former HBO execs Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Gibney does a good job of making Wise Guy fit into the style of The Sopranos , and uses footage from the series to help illustrate points Chase or the other interviewees are making.

Performance Worth Watching: Chase is absolutely the draw here, and not just because the recollections of his life and what of it went into The Sopranos are fascinating, but the body language he displays during his interview with Gibney indicate a man who is deeply uncomfortable talking about himself.

Memorable Dialogue: Green recounts writing the first season of the show, with Chase telling her, “If this doesn’t work out, that’s it for me.” She’s incredulous at that statement because, “Forgive me, HBO, but it was an elephant graveyard” for original programming at the time. Another interesting piece of information from Chase is that “Marty Scorsese didn’t like the show. ‘I don’t get it, all these trees and shit,'” Chase quotes the director of Goodfellas saying.

Sex and Skin: Some nudity from show footage, but it’s mostly incidental.

Our Take: By centering Wise Guy on David Chase’s psyche, he puts the context of both the film and The Sopranos squarely on Chase’s shoulders. That includes the good and the bad; there is a segment where both Renzulli and Green discuss how demanding Chase was and how draining it could be to work for him, while also acknowledging that it was his vision and he wanted to get it right. Green was especially regretful at how her behavior fed into Chase’s needing to let her go, though some of the things she cited sounded like she was being micromanaged instead of treated with respect.

But, for the most part, Wise Guys does a good job of showing exactly why The Sopranos made the impact it did when it premiered in 1999, and just how much of himself Chase put into the characters and plots. It even makes some interesting choices when it comes to discussing the controversial finale, with the actors saying that they were as surprised about the blackout ending as everyone else.

Another interesting choice by Gibney is to literally speed through the biographical portion of the film. Chase’s recollections are highly edited and compressed, almost to the point of distraction. It’s important information, because it contributed so heavily to how Chase wrote the series, but Gibney knows that viewers wanted to hear more about the making of the show than anything else. Plus, it’s a good way to symbolize Chase’s overall discomfort with this portion of the interview.

Gibney doesn’t get to everyone in the cast that’s still with us, but he gets to the major players, and makes up for missing the rest by slipping in lots of archival interview footage of Gandolfini, Marchand and Tony Sirico. And of course, having Chase — or the “Master Cylinder,” as Falco calls him more than once — aboard gave the whole thing a resonance that a simple cast retrospective wouldn’t have had.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Wise Guy: David Chase And The Sopranos provides a lot of insight into what made Chase tick and what went into the creation of the landmark series.

Joel Keller ( @joelkeller ) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

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