: Writers and producers such as Terence Winter, Robin Green, and Frank Renzulli. Executives : Former HBO heads Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss. Archival Footage
Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian behind Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear , is an unlikely collaborator. He is a scalpel; Chase is a sledgehammer wrapped in Bergman-esque angst. Their pairing creates a fascinating tension. Gibney wants the truth. Chase wants the feeling of the truth. Over six hours (split into two feature-length parts for HBO), Wise Guy becomes less a "making of" and more a psychodrama about the man who made the thing that changed everything.
The documentary posits that Chase was the perfect storm of a creator. He was a seasoned TV writer who had grown cynical about the industry's formulaic constraints. The Sopranos was his "one for me" project after years of doing "one for them." As Wise Guy reveals, Chase initially envisioned the story as a feature film—a sort of update on The Godfather focusing on a boss seeing a psychiatrist. When that pitch stalled, he took it to HBO, a network that, at the time, was desperate for content that didn't look like network TV.
Chase leans forward. He has the posture of a prosecutor. “The point is that you root for him. You, the viewer, are the problem. Not me. You. You sit there eating pizza while a man suffocates his nephew’s informant with a garrote, and you think, ‘Well, Ralphie was a jerk anyway.’ That is the sickness. That is America.” Wise Guy- David Chase and The Sopranos Miniseri...
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Gibney plays the last minute of "Made in America" in silence. He asks Chase: "Is he dead?"
Chace stares at the document. “They wanted Goodfellas ,” he says. “I wanted The Lost Weekend with guns.” : Writers and producers such as Terence Winter,
The miniseries includes audition tapes that are nothing short of electrifying. Watching Gandolfini audition, one sees the alchemy happen in real-time. He wasn't just playing a gangster; he was playing a man who was tired, a man who carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. In one snippet highlighted in the documentary, Gandolfini improvizes a moment of tenderness mixed with violence—kissing a woman’s
For two decades, we have tried to fill the void. Every prestige drama that airs on Sunday night—from Mad Men to The Wire to Breaking Bad —owes a blood debt to Tony Soprano. But until 2024, no documentary had truly dissected why David Chase’s creation felt less like a TV show and more like a midlife crisis captured in celluloid.
The first fifteen minutes cover the infamous “College” episode (Season 1, Episode 5), where Tony kills a rat while taking Meadow to tour colleges. Chase admits he thought the episode would get him fired. Instead, it won Emmys. But the cost, he argues, was that the show became a cipher. People loved the violence. They loved Paulie Walnuts’ one-liners. They missed the point. He is a scalpel; Chase is a sledgehammer
The final hour of Wise Guy is melancholic. We see modern America—the CGI blockbusters, the algorithm-driven streaming slop. Gibney asks younger filmmakers (including Bill Hader and the Succession writing staff) how The Sopranos changed them.
The documentary then pivots to the show’s infamous ending—the cut to black at Holsten’s diner. For thirty minutes, Gibney deconstructs it with the precision of a bomb squad. He interviews fans, critics, and cast members. Steven Van Zandt (Silvio Dante) admits he threw his remote at the TV. Edie Falco (Carmela) says she understood it immediately: “It’s the only way it could end. Because death doesn’t give you a crescendo. It gives you nothing.”