Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos

Excellent documentary on the greatest TV drama series ever made. 10/10

A documentary on the TV series The Sopranos: it's origins and development, making of the pilot, Season 1 and subsequent seasons, how the main characters were cast, the creative and filming processes and the public response. Told largely through interviews with creator/showrunner David Chase.

The Sopranos is, for me, the greatest TV drama series of all time: a fantastic combination of family drama, crime drama and general human drama, a perfect mix of character engagement, clever plot and action. This documentary, directed by renowned documentary-maker Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief, The Looming Tower, amongst others), expertly captures the development of the series and the creative processes behind it. David Chase's history is also examined - this has a large bearing on the many of the themes and plots in The Sopranos.

The casting decisions are very interesting and demonstrate how a perfect person for a part can be found and a career made simply by chance. The number of unsuccessful interviewees and why they didn't succeed (and, for some, how this possibly turned out to be a good thing as they ended up in another, more iconic, role) is also quite illuminating.

We also see the other end of the character/actor arc, as characters, and thus actors, are written out of the series. This was quite poignant in some cases.

Highly engaging as we experience the highs and lows with David Chase and some of the cast and crew.

A must-see for Sopranos fans and for anyone who likes to see how high-quality entertainment is produced.

If you are like me and can't get enough of the Sopranos this is a really great two part documentary. This conversation with David Chase and the world of the hit HBO Show in the year of the 25th Anniversary is worth watching. There is great footage from the history of the show and a ton of behind the scenes footage from the making of it. There are conversations with HBO Executives, Cast Members, Writers, and people related to the show. I loved the audition footage. The documentary takes the viewer on the journey from concept to creation and more. This is a good documentary and doesn't suffer from the disease of being too long, which many documentaries do.

Alex Gibney has been behind some good documentaries, and The Sopranos is - yes - one of the greatest shows ever made, if not the greatest show ever made. So expectations for something like Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos are allowed to be high, especially given this clocks in at a beefy 160 minutes (it's technically a miniseries, but it's comprised of two "episodes" that both released at the same time, so it's easy to watch as one big movie, effectively).

There is so much to say about The Sopranos, so I feel this could've been an actual miniseries. More could've been covered, but it's a little strange that with what they chose to cover, there was still a bit of repetition. It exists in a strange and flabby middle ground between being a tight two-hour movie and being a multi-hour TV series. Honestly, they could've quite comfortably spent an hour on each season, and made the whole thing 7-ish hours long, a little like The Beatles Anthology miniseries, which spends 60 to 70 minutes per year The Beatles were around, on average.

To get one more complaint out of the way, Wise Guy makes a terrible first impression. The editing feels like it's trying to speedrun the background info on Chase's pre-Sopranos life, and the result is awkward.

Actually, another (minor) complaint. Wise Guy brings up some fairly tired things I feel have been talked about to death regarding The Sopranos, but maybe that's because I've probably spent as much time reading about The Sopranos and watching videos about it than I have spent watching the show (and I've seen it three times, front to back).

But this is generally quite good, especially once you get past that awkward opening. The behind-the-scenes footage is valuable, and the doc's at its best when it focuses on Chase and his relationship with James Gandolfini. Something 80 to 90 minutes long completely focused on that would've been remarkable, but it's still compelling as presented here.

It's a good documentary on a great show. It's hard to imagine any fans of the show not getting at least a little out of it.

As a devoted fan of 'The Sopranos' - my all-time favorite show - I thought there wasn't much left for me to discover. But HBO's new two part documentary 'Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos' offers fresh insight, focusing primarily on the mastermind behind the series, David Chase, especially in its first half. Chase (1945) is a compelling figure: intelligent, introspective, and a natural storyteller. Director Alex Gibney ('Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson', 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room') places Chase in a metaphorical psychiatrist's chair, allowing him to speak candidly about his upbringing, his eccentric mother, dreams, death, and how these themes shaped 'The Sopranos'. Chase recalls his time in college down south, which he disliked, though he was exposed to European cinema by directors like Godard, Bergman, and Fellini. "I saw '8½', and I don't think I understood it, but it blew my mind", he reflects. This experience ignited his desire to become a filmmaker, leading him to study at Stanford's film school. The documentary even shows part of his student film - a gangster story with an attempted Godard flair, which is amusing in its ambition. While Chase's destiny wasn't in film directing, he found his calling in television. He worked on successful shows like 'The Rockford Files' and 'Northern Exposure', but his true breakthrough came when HBO greenlit 'The Sopranos' in 1998. The series became a cultural phenomenon, and Chase infused it with deeply personal elements, including therapy sessions and his tumultuous relationship with his mother. Other talented writers like Robin Green and Terence Winter also contributed significantly to the show's depth. In 'The Offer', a recent series about the making of 'The Godfather', we learn that Coppola saw the film as a commentary on capitalism. Similarly, 'The Sopranos' carries an underlying critique of America's decline. As Chase puts it, "Americans have gotten so materialistic and selfish that it made a mob boss sick." That vision, combined with Chase's storytelling genius, is part of what makes 'The Sopranos' so enduringly powerful.

I'm a huge Sopranos fan. I had many questions about the talent searches, the writers, and how all of the series would come together. David Chase has always struck me as aloof, but my opinion now is that he's direct and poignant. He's. Never going to cow-tow to convention, and won't bend to social pressure. That certainly shows in the final scene. When the screen went black, I was stunned, but after thought I understood what the director wanted; for people to have their own ending. I felt the same way when No Country for Old Men ended. It didn't end in a wrapped bow. Which was fine. Life doesn't work out with a pretty bow all the time, so why should every movie? Anyway, the Wise Guy was really interesting and I'm happy to have closure 😊