Television: They Pull You Back In

It was life imitating art imitating life imitating art. On surveillance tapes released last month, reputed members of New Jersey's DeCavalcante crime family gave The Sopranos creator David Chase the most authoritative, if unsettling, rave of his career. Amid friendly, allegedly racketeering banter, the suspects rhapsodized about the HBO Mafia drama's depth and realism, speculating (hoping?) that it was based on them. "Every show you watch, more and more you pick up somebody," enthused one alleged capo. "What characters!"

The two-Glocks-up review amuses Chase, a Mob-movie buff from childhood, but it doesn't shock him. "I knew that contemporary wiseguys were very much influenced by the Godfather films and watched them continuously," he notes. "That becomes kind of a strange loop." Thus, in the show, Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) cracks up his Mob buddies with an Al Pacino impersonation from the maligned Godfather III ("Just when I thought I was out--they pull me back in!"), while family chief Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) expresses a preference for The Godfather II over the original. What characters, indeed. Like their real-life analogs, they know how to live their lives because they've seen them written out onscreen by soft-handed civilians like Chase. (Memo to the DeCavalcantes, by the way: Sorry, but--and we mean no disrespect--Chase actually drew on a now defunct family from his youth.)

Emmy voters are not exactly like mafiosi--the Cosa Nostra places greater emphasis on giving people what they've got coming to them--but they too honored the series last year with 16 nominations, including a stunning four of the five slots for drama writing (Chase and James Manos Jr. won for the episode in which Tony takes time out from a college tour with his daughter to kill a Mob informer). The show won only four statuettes, but its dominance of the writing category was its most appropriate tribute. For all its crisp direction, impeccable casting and at least half a dozen standout performances, this is above all a writers' show.

Note the plural. Chase is the undisputed boss of The Sopranos, and its origins are highly personal. He says he based Tony Soprano's crafty, malevolent mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) on his own, now deceased mother. Yet this seamless series--more like a continuous movie--is the work of eight writers, including Chase, working from story arcs that he sketches each season. One of the writers, actor Michael Imperioli, not only is an accomplished screenwriter (Summer of Sam) but also plays a Soprano soldier who dreams of writing movies. Imperioli gave Chase a script on spec last season for the chance to write in "a writer's medium, rather than a director's... I felt like such a part of this world, writing for actors I knew." The team shares a gift for the fluid patter of Northeastern Italian Americans (like Chase, ancestral name DeCesare); Edie Falco, who won an Emmy as Tony's steely wife Carmela, says that on other projects, "I instinctively start rewriting my lines--which I'm sure writers hate...[But] I have never, ever had to second-guess with The Sopranos."