In the end, Wise Guy is not about a TV show. It is about the price of looking into the abyss. And David Chase, like his creation, stared so long that the abyss stared back. The only difference? Tony had a gun. Chase had a pen. And somehow, the pen was more dangerous.
Gibney cuts to the final shot: a black screen. Then, the faintest sound of a diner bell. Then nothing.
The documentary’s brilliance lies in how it maps Chase’s early career failures onto the DNA of The Sopranos . He wrote for The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure —shows he hated for their neat resolutions. He pitched a movie about a hitman in therapy in the early 1990s. It went nowhere. Gibney finds the original script. It’s titled “The Man Who Knew Too Little” (no relation to the later Bill Murray film). In it, a mobster named Donny has panic attacks about his mother. The studio executive’s notes are brutal: “Too dark. Too Italian. Too… psychological.” Wise Guy- David Chase and The Sopranos Miniseri...
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.
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.” In the end, Wise Guy is not about a TV show
The first image is not of Tony Soprano. It’s not a gun, a plate of gabagool, or the New Jersey Turnpike at dusk. According to the production notes for Alex Gibney’s two-part documentary miniseries, Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos , the opening shot is a slow zoom into a therapist’s waiting room. Specifically, the waiting room of Dr. Jennifer Melfi. But the chair is empty. The camera holds. Then, a whisper of a voice: “You ever feel like you’re the smartest guy in the room, and also the most lost?”
But the most moving segment is reserved for James Gandolfini, who died in 2013. Gibney has access to unreleased behind-the-scenes footage from the final season. In it, Gandolfini is not acting. He is sitting alone in the Bada Bing! set, in the dark, smoking a cigarette. He looks exhausted. Chase’s voice cracks as he describes their final conversation. “He said, ‘Dave, I don’t know who I am without this guy.’ I said, ‘Jim, you’re a father. You’re a husband. You’re an actor.’ He just shook his head. He knew something I didn’t.” The only difference
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 first part, titled “The Guy Who Didn’t Get the Girl,” is a masterclass in misdirection. It begins not with The Sopranos , but with Chase’s childhood in Clifton, New Jersey. His mother, Norma, was a sharp, anxious woman who once threw a plate of spaghetti against the wall because her husband, Henry, was late for dinner. His father, a hardware store owner, was a gentle, cowed presence. Gibney unearths home movies: young David at a birthday party, not laughing, staring at the cake as if trying to decode its meaning.
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.”
Through reenactments (a risky choice for Gibney, but rendered here with a dreamlike, almost Lynchian filter), we see the origins of Livia Soprano. Chase admits, for the first time on camera, that his mother once told him, “I wish you were never born.” He says it casually, then looks away. “But she made great manicotti,” he adds. The room laughs. It is the laugh of survivors.
Chace stares at the document. “They wanted Goodfellas ,” he says. “I wanted The Lost Weekend with guns.”