Casa Nostra

There they all were. A wall of headshots, some favoring their characters—Christopher, Paulie, Big Pussy—and some, more startlingly, their actors. It was the first clue that the exhibition would return to a time—1997, let’s call it—before these were household faces. Edie Falco’s hair is down, flowing free of product; next to taut Carmela she is a flower child. James Gandolfini has enough hair for a side part! And who is that woman with gemlike eyes and the glamour of an opera star? Livia?!

Tucked into the Museum of the Moving Image’s narrow Amphitheater Gallery, the exhibition was a closed loop that kept coming back to two beginnings: to the entrance, those heraldic headshots; and to the pilot, the primal fabrication of that landscape long ripened in creator David Chase’s imagination. Convening location shots, concept drawings, photographs of the completed set, and episode clips, curator Barbara Miller aimed to show us how The Sopranos moved from pilot to series production. “It’s work,” she told Artnet News. “It’s not magic.”

Do you feel scolded? Suspend your worship; return to that precarious, aspirational year, 1997. Feel the disorientation the HBO execs must have felt watching that opening scene, which takes place in the least legible (for a mob show) of all the series’ spaces, Dr. Melfi’s office. Not even in her office but in her waiting room, with young Tony (we’ve snapped back to hindsight again: Young is the only word for him given what he will become, though it hardly fits Gandolfini even at thirty-five) squinting up at the hard, arty nipples of a Robert Graham sculpture. Funnily enough, though Chase and much of the writing team bonded more over mommy issues and past therapy experience than time spent in strip clubs, pork stores, or McMansions, this is the show’s only major setting modeled on no real location, crafted entirely in a studio—Manhattan’s Pier 40 for the pilot, Silvercup Studios in Long Island City thereafter. Three reference photographs used by designer Ed Pisoni feature some elements we see in the final set—round tables, ribbon windows—but swing starkly from hospital sterility to boardroom plushness. They lack the masterful indeterminacy of the office we see in the series premiere. Is its glossy leather and burnished wood meant to convey warmth? Or to hide the same clinical terror—“women in their wheelchairs, babbling like idiots”—Livia feels lurking behind a pair of shadowy double doors at Green Grove, the opulent “retirement community” Tony tours with her in that same episode? (Her Green Grove panic leads to his own second panic attack, forces him back to Melfi, back to the office he’d previously fled out of a distrust not unlike his mother’s.)

From Dr. Melfi’s office, via flashback to the day of Tony’s first collapse, we go to the Soprano family manse. Built and owned by Victor and Patti Recchia in North Caldwell (who listed it for $3.4 million in 2019), the 5,600-square-foot home was gaudy enough in the wild for pilot scenes to be shot there on location. Later, interiors would be re-created at Silvercup. A staircase with a builder-grade balustrade “in no classical style,” as Thomas de Monchaux described it in these pages (“Fifth Column,” NYRA #41), would be added to clash with the Italianate décor in the foyer and lead up to a cloistral catwalk under a vaulted ceiling. Scenic artist Michael Zansky would reproduce Pontormo’s Carmignano Visitation (ca. 1528) in Carm and Tony’s bedroom, just so the Virgin Mary, Elizabeth, and their two maids could be gauchely blocked by the bed’s arching marble headboard. In the premiere, however, it’s the exteriors that shine. The dense thicket of pines and evergreens, ashy blue-purple, dark and fresh green, out of which Tony’s beloved ducks burst into the pool, is frankly beautiful.

Besides psychiatry, this wooded suburban setting is the show’s other great departure from the mafia genre. The Sopranos have made the trek northwest up Bloomfield Avenue (“Guinea Gulch,” Tony coins it in Season Six); they’ve ditched Newark’s gritty North Ward for the cul-de-sacs of North Caldwell, but this attainment is repeatedly experienced as a loss. Kali Yuga has descended before the series even starts. “The best is over,” Tony tells Dr. Melfi, then contradicts himself a second later: “My father never reached the heights like me.” Mahaffey, the first of the show’s innumerable debtor punching bags, hears the same insecurity as he’s being beaten to a pulp on the manicured lawn of an office park in Paramus. “You tell people I’m nothing,” Tony accuses, “compared to the people who used to run things.” As he continues to pinpoint for Dr. Melfi the stressors in his day, we proceed to the pork store, where he and his “associates” Paulie and Big Pussy sip espresso and conclude ruefully that the garbage business, too, is changing. But it’s the change of scenery that’s unmissable: brick shop fronts, weedy sunbaked sidewalks, treelessness! The old neighborhood, Newark at last. Best gabagool in the area, Sil pops up just to assure us; his wife makes him come down from the suburbs for it. And speaking of gabagool, the concept drawings for Satriale’s, based on the real pork store featured in the pilot, Centanni’s in Elizabeth, are so full of cartoonish character you can practically smell the stuff. One sketch even installs a garret above the meat market (for Nonna to hang her washing out of?). Chase studs his Newark with invented institutions: Caputo’s Live Poultry, which real estate agent Julianna Skiff (portrayed by Julianna Margulies) will one day acquire on behalf of Jamba Juice; Saint Elzear’s church (portrayed by Saint Patrick’s in Jersey City), which Tony’s grandfather and great-uncle, stone and marble workers, built when they came over from Avellino. (From “the poverty of the Mezzogiorno,” Meadow will sanctify it once she’s graduated from Columbia.) Late in the pilot, Tony presents Saint Elzear’s stained glass windows and Last Supper frieze to Meadow not as art but as workmanship our degraded, deskilled age is no longer capable of. His forebears “didn’t design it,” Chase carefully makes Tony say. “But they knew how to build it. Go out now and find me two guys who can put decent grout around your bathtub.”

Postindustrial decline is an easy bandwagon to jump on. “They live in New Jersey with the big houses?” Martin Scorsese scoffed when asked about The Sopranos. “They use language—four-letter words—in front of their daughters, at the dinner table? I don’t get that. I just didn’t grow up that way.” Tony didn’t either, Marty. No one misses the old days, the old neighborhood more than the suburban mobsters themselves. Seeing through their sentimentality—learning, for instance, that the husband Livia remembers as a “saint” once shot a bullet through her beehive hairdo—is half the pleasure of watching. (For millennials, at least. Younger viewers, coming of age during the pandemic, care less about the show’s intentional puncturing of its ancestry. It speaks to its own present, the late ’90s and early 2000s, and it speaks to ours. “A parable about a country in terminal decline,” The New York Times diagnosed in 2021, in response to the question “Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’?”)

At James Gandolfini’s funeral in 2013, six years after the show ended, Chase addressed a “memory-image” to the great actor. On a hot summer day of shooting, Jimmy, in character as Tony, sat in an aluminum beach chair with a wet handkerchief on his head. Chase recalled his own father, uncles, and Italian-born grandfather doing the same thing once upon a time, under the same Jersey sun. “It made me so proud of our heritage to see you do that,” he began to sob. Never mind that Tony is not sitting alone but with his cousin Tony Blundetto (Steve Buscemi), in a scene expressly designed to be a throwback to their younger days. Never mind that the episode will chip away at that past: At the heart of their friendship is a lie Tony can only reveal to Dr. Melfi. In Chase’s mind, the pure appearances survive the undercutting story. Wearing his wet hanky and his wifebeater, Jimmy/Tony drinks beer and watches a baseball game on a vintage rotary-knobbed TV rigged up by extension cord in the backyard of Livia’s house. It’s a two-story clapboard house, as humble as Scorsese could want, frequently portrayed with an American flag hanging from the shuttered second-floor window. On the lawn, near the stoop, the Virgin Mary stands in a grotto. The statue would be far too ethnic for the yard of Carmela, she who has no antiques yet deems her Roche Bobois–appointed home “traditional.” But here, just off Bloomfield Avenue, it’s just like old times.