Married to This Mob

David Chase, Nancy Marchand and James Gandolfini are seated in a private dining room at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills, lunching on swordfish and discussing their HBO show, “The Sopranos,” which has fast become the most talked-about series on television.

But the setting for this lunch is all wrong. Chase, the series’ creator, has invented such a convincing mother and son that to interview them in a posh L.A. hotel requires a suspension of disbelief. You want to meet Livia Soprano, the larger-than-life Italian American matriarch played by Marchand, and her son, Tony (Gandolfini), the putative head of the Soprano crime family, on their own turf--specifically, the New Jersey backdrops that give the series its authentic texture.

“The grande dame is here,” Gandolfini had said when Marchand made her entrance into the dining room--a deadpan remark Tony might make at one of the Soprano family’s Sunday night dinners of pasta and passive-aggressive behavior.

The first season of “The Sopranos” concludes Sunday night at 9, and if you’ve never seen the show you’re advised not to jump on the bandwagon without doing 12 hours of homework first. Initiates are waiting to see how the plots and sub-plots play out: Did Livia really order a hit on her son, and if so, is she feigning Alzheimer’s disease to cover up some plan to give Uncle Junior control of the business? Which of the crime family capos is wearing a wire, and who’s going to end up in jail and / or dead? Have Tony and his psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, resolved the sexual tension so apparent between them?

Describing the show thusly makes it sound like soap opera, when, in fact, “The Sopranos” is so smartly written and well-acted that it plays like good television in the key of real life. True, the success of the show reflects the enduring entertainment value of mob life, and the series did begin with a high-concept conceit (Mafia guy seeks out shrink, starts taking Prozac), but “The Sopranos” has hit home on a far deeper, more visceral level.

In fact, while being on cable affords Chase creative freedoms he wouldn’t get on a network, the show’s violence and sexual content are hardly the engines driving its popularity. In what is quickly becoming TV industry lore, “The Sopranos” was developed by Fox in 1996 before the network passed on the show. NBC and CBS also took a look, but the pilot ended up at HBO. The reasons the series was rejected at the network level are not necessarily obvious.

“I pitched this show to a network, which will remain nameless,” Chase says, “and the head of the network said to me, ‘Does [Tony] have to be in psychotherapy? I got no problem with any of this. Does he have to take Prozac and be in psychotherapy? Because I think a lot of people out there in America don’t understand it.’

“Killing and pillaging is fine,” Chase adds, “but complaining, and trying to get to your feelings, no.”

Viewers’ emotional connection to the show was evident in the almost smothering testimonials given by fans Tuesday night, when Chase and some of his cast gathered at the Writers Guild of America for a screening of the first season’s final episode followed by a question-and-answer session, an event sponsored by the Museum of Television & Radio and HBO. One after the other they stood up--one man to lament that new episodes won’t arrive until January.

Chase gently explained that the creative care given “The Sopranos” means episodes can’t be turned around as quickly as viewers might like. But with 13 installments in the books (season one begins reruns June 9), and shooting on season No. 2 scheduled to begin in early summer, “The Sopranos” already has generated the kind of manic following that, in the hands of less levelheaded artists as Chase and his band of New York actors, mightthreaten to impair the quality of the work.

Says Chase: “We used to wonder who’s going to watch it, when we were making it. Who’s going to watch these mooks going about their business?”

More than 10 million people, if you count each episode’s four weekly showings on HBO, where viewers have come to know not only Tony and Livia but Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese); Tony’s wife, Carmela (Edie Falco); his kids Meadow and Anthony Jr. (Jamie Lynn Sigler and Robert Iler); psychiatrist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), and the various mob lieutenants who light up the screen.

A Guilt-Ridden Son and Tyrannical Mom

Of the many well-drawn relationships on “The Sopranos,” however, none is richer than the emotionally buried connection between Tony and his mother. Livia is, in the words of Marchand, “a ballbuster”--weak yet manipulative, growing senile and yet monstrous enough to touch off a mini-revolution in the crime family that swirls around her. When “The Sopranos” began, a guilt-ridden Tony was on the verge of moving his addled and stubborn mother into a retirement community and selling off the family house. Thirteen episodes later, that same mother had turned the tables, apparently prompting a hit on her son. Is there a better metaphor for the complex dynamic between an elderly parent and her grown child?

“You can’t overestimate the chemistry between [Gandolfini and Marchand] and everyone on the show, really,” Chase says. “These are very hard jobs. This woman is playing a senior citizen with a real nasty streak and a lot of personality deficits. And yet, on some level you have to respond to her, otherwise you just get tired of it. And him, he’s a killer, and you have to, at the same time, not get tired with him.”

Not surprisingly, the New Jersey-born Chase says his earliest vision for the series came in the form of anecdotes about his own Italian mother whom he did, in fact, move into a retirement home shortly before her death.

“Livia’s a tough cookie, I think that’s true, but that’s not what she would ever say to people or how she presents [herself],” he says of the character. “To me she’s really about the tyranny of the weak. It’s about how people who don’t have a life and who like to present themselves as victims--the kind of turmoil it can cause.”

But, says Chase, “If you were to ask Livia tomorrow, ‘Did you try to kill your son?’ she’d say, ‘No.’ Because I think she’s someone who works out of impulses. Her ability to wreak havoc is instinctive, and she does that by being the weak person.”

Marchand agrees.

“I don’t know that she has a master plan,” she says. “I just think she loves to cause problems.”

Actors Talk About--and Know--the Characters

After a long, distinguished career playing upper-crust, patrician women on stage (A.R. Gurney’s “The Cocktail Hour”), screen (“Sabrina”) and TV (“Lou Grant”), Marchand is getting to sink her acting chops into an entirely different kind of matriarchal creature in a genre where such women are typically seen stirring pots of sauce or crying at funerals. It’s a character, and a performance, writ large not only over this series, but the history of people talking about their mothers in therapy.

“One of my sons-in-law says that [Livia] is absolutely his mother,” says Marchand, who herself grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of Buffalo, not the world of ‘The Sopranos.’ “There are ladies like that. I hope I don’t become like that.”

Gandolfini smiles across the table. Like Chase, he, too, has New Jersey, Italian American bloodlines (Bergen County to Chase’s Essex County). And, like Chase, his own mother reverberates through Livia Soprano.

“My mother had an opinion about everything, man, an opinion about everything,” he says. “She came from old-school Italian [culture], where you sum up somebody in about five seconds. They walk in the door, they’re summed up, and that is it. . . . Doesn’t matter what he does or what he says. It’s, ‘Look at the shoes.’ ”

After doing a collection of jobs in New York City nightclubs for years, Gandolfini began acting in the late 1980s and says it took “two years of steady acting before I could stand up [onstage] without shaking.” Before “The Sopranos,” he played brutes mostly, with some meatier roles along the way (“Angie,” “Get Shorty,” “She’s So Lovely”).

In person, Gandolfini has the same imposing look of Tony Soprano, but he’s more soft-spoken. To be honest, he says, discussing his or any of the other Soprano characters feels alien to him, largely because he knows Tony instinctively, without having to verbalize things for reporters.

“This is the only time I do this, when I talk to you,” he says. “Otherwise I understand Tony somewhere else, and I don’t have to think about this.”

Before cameras rolled, Chase says, there wasn’t much hand-wringing or deconstructing of characters. At one point during the lunch, however, a conversation reveals just how well Chase, Marchand and Gandolfini understand the people they portray.

It’s a discussion that begins on the subject of Tony Soprano’s dead mobster father. In a flashback episode, Livia is seen as the real dominating force in the home, a kind of neutering influence on her would-be powerful husband.

“I think that’s very normal in Italian families,” Gandolfini says. “At least from what I’ve seen.”

“Yeah,” Marchand says. “The women are much stronger than the men.”

“Especially Italians,” Gandolfini says. “I mean, we’re all Momma’s boys, basically.”

“I’ve heard that Japanese women who in public walk three steps behind their husbands and everything, they’re part of a very strong matriarchal system,” Chase says. “They just kick ass.”

“I think it’s like if you had a bad relationship with a girlfriend,” Gandolfini says, bringing the topic back to Livia and Tony. “. . . Momma’s not getting enough attention, and she’s gonna make sure he knows it and pays for it. . . . It’s like a girlfriend where no matter how hard you try, nothing’s ever right. And that makes you try harder and harder and harder, but you make yourself nuts.”

“Yeah,” Marchand says, “but you gotta realize, you also say to [Dr. Melfi] that by the time your father died, he was . . .”

“A squeaking gerbil,” Gandolfini says. He laughs, grinning that Tony Soprano grin. “That’s one of my favorite lines, by the way.”

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“The Sopranos” airs on HBO at 9 p.m. Sunday. The network has rated the final episode TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17).