Wise Guy- David Chase And The Sopranos Miniseri... Apr 2026
The first fifteen minutes cover the infamous “College” episode (Season 1, Episode 5), where Tony kills a rat while taking Meadow to tour colleges. Chase admits he thought the episode would get him fired. Instead, it won Emmys. But the cost, he argues, was that the show became a cipher. People loved the violence. They loved Paulie Walnuts’ one-liners. They missed the point.
Through reenactments (a risky choice for Gibney, but rendered here with a dreamlike, almost Lynchian filter), we see the origins of Livia Soprano. Chase admits, for the first time on camera, that his mother once told him, “I wish you were never born.” He says it casually, then looks away. “But she made great manicotti,” he adds. The room laughs. It is the laugh of survivors.
But the most moving segment is reserved for James Gandolfini, who died in 2013. Gibney has access to unreleased behind-the-scenes footage from the final season. In it, Gandolfini is not acting. He is sitting alone in the Bada Bing! set, in the dark, smoking a cigarette. He looks exhausted. Chase’s voice cracks as he describes their final conversation. “He said, ‘Dave, I don’t know who I am without this guy.’ I said, ‘Jim, you’re a father. You’re a husband. You’re an actor.’ He just shook his head. He knew something I didn’t.”
Chase leans forward. He has the posture of a prosecutor. “The point is that you root for him. You, the viewer, are the problem. Not me. You. You sit there eating pizza while a man suffocates his nephew’s informant with a garrote, and you think, ‘Well, Ralphie was a jerk anyway.’ That is the sickness. That is America.” Wise Guy- David Chase and The Sopranos Miniseri...
The documentary then pivots to the show’s infamous ending—the cut to black at Holsten’s diner. For thirty minutes, Gibney deconstructs it with the precision of a bomb squad. He interviews fans, critics, and cast members. Steven Van Zandt (Silvio Dante) admits he threw his remote at the TV. Edie Falco (Carmela) says she understood it immediately: “It’s the only way it could end. Because death doesn’t give you a crescendo. It gives you nothing.”
He pauses. A car honks on the street. “I wanted to be them. Then I wanted to kill them. So I wrote them. And now they’re all dead. The actors, the real guys, the whole world they lived in. It’s just a show now. That’s all it ever was.”
Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos airs on HBO in the fall. It is not a celebration. It is a wake. And you are invited to bring your own gabagool. The first fifteen minutes cover the infamous “College”
This is the core revelation of Part One: The Sopranos was not a show about the mafia. It was a show about depression that used the mafia as a Trojan horse. Gibney interviews Lorraine Bracco, who recalls reading the pilot script and thinking, “This is a woman treating a bear.” James Gandolfini’s audition tape is shown—the full, unedited three minutes. It is staggering. Gandolfini, then a character actor with a hangdog face, transforms in real time. He starts the scene as a sad, tired man. By the end, he has smashed a lamp and is weeping. Chase’s voiceover: “I knew him. I knew that guy. He was every uncle I ever had, if they’d been given a license to kill.” The second half, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” is where Gibney turns the lens on the legacy. And it is here that the documentary becomes genuinely destabilizing. We expect a victory lap. Instead, we get an autopsy.
In the end, Wise Guy is not about a TV show. It is about the price of looking into the abyss. And David Chase, like his creation, stared so long that the abyss stared back. The only difference? Tony had a gun. Chase had a pen. And somehow, the pen was more dangerous.
That voice belongs to David Chase. He is 78 now. The anger is still there—the coiled, suburban, Italian-Catholic rage that birthed the greatest television drama of all time—but it has mellowed into something resembling rueful wisdom. For two decades, Chase has been asked the same questions: Was Tony a good man? Did he die in Holsten’s? Is the whole thing just a long joke about Americans being full of shit? He has answered them with the patience of a man pulling teeth. Now, in Wise Guy , he doesn’t so much answer as he does excavate. But the cost, he argues, was that the show became a cipher
Gibney challenges him: “Was the point that Tony is a monster?”
Chace stares at the document. “They wanted Goodfellas ,” he says. “I wanted The Lost Weekend with guns.”