Michael Imperioli thought The Sopranos pilot was just “okay”
The one and only Christopher Moltisanti wasn't so sure about the HBO series at first, and questioned if anyone would watch a show about mobsters
Aux News The Sopranos
Over fifteen years after its finale aired on HBO, David Henry Chase’s The Sopranos is widely lauded as one of the greatest narrative series of all time. But one of its most indelible stars—Michael Imperioli, who played mafia boss Tony Soprano’s protegé Christopher Moltisanti—never could have pictured that when he read a script for the series’ first episode, which aired on January 10, 1999.
“When I read the pilot, I wasn’t like ‘This is gonna change television.’ I mean, it was okay!” Imperioli recalls in a new interview with The A.V. Club’s own Saloni Gajjar. “I’m not being facetious, really.”
Elaborating on his initial hesitance, Imperioli says he couldn’t tell if The Sopranos was supposed to be a spoof, a comedy, or what… not to mention the fact that at the turn of the 21st century, an HBO series didn’t exactly bring to mind the glamor it does today.
“The idea of a series on HBO did not have any prestige to actors at all at that time—it actually was the opposite. Being on a series didn’t really interest me, because I had mostly done movies and plays,” Imperioli recalls. “But I thought [Christopher Moltisanti] was kind of interesting in the pilot, he had some interesting things to do, and I really liked who they were casting, a lot of people who I had worked with before and who I knew.” One of those names: Lorraine Bracco, who Imperioli had previously worked with on Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas.
Although Imperioli enjoyed filming The Sopranos pilot, he (and his castmates) still had misgivings about the chances of moving to series. Some of the questions they considered: “Are people gonna wanna watch a show about mobsters? Are they gonna watch a TV show with sex, violence, and profanity?”
However obvious the answers to those queries may seem today, Imperioli points out that in 1999, a series quite like The Sopranos “really hadn’t happened.” Nevertheless, the pilot was picked up, and the “excited” crew got going on a full season— that’s when, by Imperioli’s account, the masterful and seminal nature of the series came into clearer view.
“When we started doing the episode 2, episode 3, every script was better and more complex,” Imperioli shares. “Then we really started seeing ‘Whoa, this is really special.’”
48 Comments
Best show in TV history and will never be topped.
He’s not wrong.The pilot is a good pilot, but, they had to retcon some pretty important points in order to make it work as a series.
You’re right. The one thing that has always stuck in my head is Silvio talking about Artie as if the two of them didn’t know each other
As I recall he also acts like Tony is someone he sees occasionally, rather than one of his closest friends.
The whole first season is pretty spotty. Half the time they were making like it was just another network drama that just happened to have swearing and violence.
Edie Falco certainly became one of the best parts of the show but I found her kind of shrill and irritating in the pilot (and the part where she gets the rifle out when she hears the noise outside is pretty jarring considering her characterization once the show really got going).
I thought he said the pilot was alright Spider. No no, I thought YOU said you thought the pilot was alright Spider. No no…
God damnit that’s funny
Funny how? Were you even doing that?
Are they gonna watch a TV show with sex, violence, and profanity?”Had he never met people before?
You’re misremembering how ground breaking the show was
You have to understand: people watched movies with sex, violence and profanity, but not TV series.
Imperioli says he couldn’t tell if The Sopranos was supposed to be a spoof, a comedyIt definitely was marketed as this. What I remember is that the promos for it were definitely comedic: protective mob boss goes to daughter’s campus to render judgment on what was (implied) to be her boyfriend. Blanking on the name of the classic tune they used for it but the musical cue was such that it signaled that this wasn’t going to be a serious show.Then it came out and it was just a wee bit different.
you convinced me to find it and you’re right lol, set to “green onions”
“He’s got an offer they can’t refuse… a WACKY offer! The Sopranos, this fall on HBO! Don’t you dare fuggedaboutit!”
Great find. I’m almost positive there was at least one more (and maybe two? – they played constantly on the TV guide channel) with him trying to murder the implied boyfriend at Meadow’s college, but you see exactly why nearly 25 years later I remembered this as one of the most misleading promos ever made. Thanks for getting the ear worm out too – they were all set to Green Onions.
It reminds me of the old promos for NYPD Blue, a show I never watched but whose ads would range from “This is a Serious and EDGY Show” to “Sipowicz is a BIT over his head on this one! 🤣”
These posters were all over Manhattan back in the day, and I remember thinking hardy har har, yet another wacky mob comedy filled with stereotypes.
I’ve always prefered those later posters for the series.
Piggybacking off the success of ANALYZE THIS.
Even the name made it sound like a joke. It’s still kind of odd that they went with that. Especially since no one on the show ever seemed bemused by it.
It almost feels like a quirky 90s indie. Something that got a lot of buzz and Sundance.
The pilot to the CLEAVER spinoff series was much better.
It’s King Lear, only with the mafia, and zombies.Innocent Blood is a good vampire mafia movie.
Me and my college roommate were stoned and we flipped to a channel playing that and we were like “is this a vampire movie? With Robert fucking Loggia playing a mobster?”Needless to say we watched the rest of it.
With Robert fucking Loggia playing a mobster?”Loggia as a mobster made sense to me right off.I was surprised how great Don Rickles worked as a mobster.
It’s a shame we never got Lawrence Tierney as one of the Family.
I mean, Loggia as a mobster is an obvious casting choice, our surprise had more to do with the presence of the mafia in that movie.
Don Rickles was a surprisingly good actor. I wish he’d done more of that kind of work.
very observant, the sacred and the propane
The pilot does have a significantly wackier tone, and hews a lot more closely to that Scorcese vibe. The therapy sequences appear to function largely as a means of offering some Ray Liotta style VO for instance
I always thought the therapy sessions were started as a play on the “Analyze This/That” movies, and a more clever way to provide the narration that most mob movies utilize to provide the exposition that isn’t possible in dialogue.
I believe the Analyze This parallel is essentially coincidental, and I think that the therapy sequences certainly became what you describe, from a writing perspective. I’m just talking about the pilot specifically, and I think I’m talking how, structurally and formally at least, they’re basically Tony saying “let me tell you something” before a cut to a needle drop and a humorously casual act of violence under a voice over. By the time the series goes into production they’ve already begun the work of distinguishing themselves from that time though, and it’s really apparent that episode one is clearly, well, a pilot: shot and directed and constructed wholly seperately from the season which absorbed it. I think that based on the pilot alone it’s quite easy to see where Imperioli’s doubt comes from.
The first season of The Sopranos actually aired about a year before Analyze This came out. A number of critics compared the latter unfavorably. I remember Ebert said something like “The Sopranos has unfortunately exposed how thin and schticky Ramis’ approach to the material is.” But what’s funny in considering the whole Sopranos series is that in the first season (and especially the pilot), the material is very thin and schticky compared to the darker later seasons. The tone is all over the place early on, more of a dramedy about Archie Bunker as a mob boss. It builds up very slowly to the point where Tony is staring with dead eyes as he suffocates his own cousin.The therapy sessions definitely start out as exposition, so that Tony can describe the history and org chart of the family without a VO. It’s only in later seasons that the writer’s room really starts to dig into the possibilities of using the therapy sessions to interrogate Tony’s motivations and kind of psychoanalyze past episodes of the show the way recappers do.
I thought it was a riff on Get Shorty, with the mafia humor and everything.
It was 3 months apart. Sopranos debuted on Jan 10 1999 & Analyze This came out on March 5th 1999.
Indeed and the pilot itself was actually shot in 1997, a year before the rest of the series.
Binged this show for the first time ever last summer and it’s one of my all-time favorites, hands down. I don’t remember much from the pilot — but the scene of Tony chasing the guy down in his car will always be one of the most memorable moments of the series for me. It definitely tipped me off that the show was going to be something special
Yeah, it actually was not a particularly great pilot.
I’d say it’s better than the majority of the other Prestige Drama pilots at least.
I rewatched the Sopranos recently, and realized we’ve all been giving it a little too much credit. It’s not really any edgier than NYPD Blue, it just has slightly more nudity and a lot more cursing, and Hill Street Blues was really the first show with what we’d consider Prestige Television level writing. If you discovered it all a hundred years from now, I don’t think you’d notice the Sopranos as a big turning point for the artform of serialized television.
Ah! Oh! Forget about it over here!
Lorraine Bracco, who Imperioli had previously worked with on Martin Scorcese’s Goodfellas.I guess the scene where Spider gets Karen a drink is in the DVD Extras??
That’s not Michael Imperioli, that’s Peter Capaldi’s cousin Vinnie.
Wait, I thought he was YOUR cousin Vinnie.
Talk about odd timing—I had never seen Sopranos until I started watching it last week. I just made it through the first season today. Imperioli wasn’t wrong.It does get better, though, right?
The pilot never had the makings of a varsity athlete.
A close friend of mine who has since sadly passed away was an assistant director on the show for the entirety of its run. He told me – roughly in the middle of the series – that Imperioli was one of the best actors he’d ever seen, that he could just turn it on in an instant and go. My buddy was also deeply impressed by Edie Falco’s ability to make dialogue that seemed ungainly and bizarre on the page suddenly spring to life when she started delivering it. Yes, it was a very well-written and directed series, but it has an odd, fluctuating tone that could have tanked. The real stars were…well…the stars.