“If this movie comes out first, we’re finished”: How ‘The Sopranos’ was saved by a stroke of luck
Nobody knew before it premiered that The Sopranos would go down in history as not only one of the greatest TV shows ever made but also one of the most important, which was far from being the greatest concern of its creator.
Showrunner David Chase’s sprawling crime drama has retrospectively been pinpointed as the genesis point for the ‘Golden Age’ of episodic storytelling that continues today, where long-form storylines and meticulously crafted shows have blurred the lines between film and television to a greater extent than ever before.
It could have turned out very differently, though, with Chase realising that a movie he didn’t even consider himself to be competing with on any level had the potential to torpedo his series and have it immediately tarred with the brush of being a blatant knock-off of a hugely popular feature.
The concept of twin films is a recurring one, but rarely does it involve developing one project apiece for screens big and small. HBO initially gave The Sopranos the greenlight in early 1997, with the pilot episode being filmed in August and completed by October, even if it would be more than a year before the finished article made it to the airwaves.
More than 12 months after HBO had okayed Chase’s ambitious crime drama, director Harold Ramis called action on Analyze This with Robert De Niro and Billy Crystal. It was merely a coincidence, but the showrunner was keenly aware that casual audiences either wouldn’t know or wouldn’t care that he’d gotten there first.
Whereas one was a character-driven narrative set to unfurl over multiple seasons and the other was an acerbic comedy, Chase had been in the business long enough to understand that two productions about a mobster undergoing therapy were inevitably going to be linked, especially when they were set to release within such close proximity. When he first caught wind of the movie, he couldn’t do anything but pray The Sopranos stole a march.
“Analyze This? What’s that?” he recalled to Alec Baldwin of it first coming to his attention. “It’s a movie that De Niro’s doing about a mobster in therapy. I just thought, ‘Oh, Jesus’. And so, for a year, I thought that if this movie comes out first, we’re finished because we’ll be the derivative television. And that’s just luck; we would have been just the derivative TV version, even though the two projects are not similar.”
As fate would have it, the first episode of The Sopranos aired on HBO in January 1999. Exactly 54 days later, Analyze This hit the big screen and went on to earn over $175 million at the box office. Just as he’d predicted, Ramis’ crime caper earned comparisons to the ongoing misadventures of James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano, but at least the shoe wasn’t on the other foot as he’d so greatly feared.
