Wise Guy- David Chase And The Sopranos Miniseri... May 2026

Gibney cuts to the final shot: a black screen. Then, the faintest sound of a diner bell. Then nothing.

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.” Wise Guy- David Chase and The Sopranos Miniseri...

The documentary implies, gently but unmistakably, that Gandolfini became Tony in ways that destroyed him. The weight of the role—the rage, the loneliness, the endless appetite—was not a performance. It was an exorcism that went wrong. Wise Guy ends not with a thesis, but with a question. Gibney follows Chase to his childhood home in Clifton. It is now a dentist’s office. They stand in the driveway. Chase points to a second-floor window. “That was my room. I used to sit there and watch the men in black cars drive by. They were connected. They had respect. My father didn’t have that.” Gibney cuts to the final shot: a black screen

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.” But the most moving segment is reserved for

This is the core revelation of Part One: The Sopranos was not a show about the mafia. It was a show about depression that used the mafia as a Trojan horse. Gibney interviews Lorraine Bracco, who recalls reading the pilot script and thinking, “This is a woman treating a bear.” James Gandolfini’s audition tape is shown—the full, unedited three minutes. It is staggering. Gandolfini, then a character actor with a hangdog face, transforms in real time. He starts the scene as a sad, tired man. By the end, he has smashed a lamp and is weeping. Chase’s voiceover: “I knew him. I knew that guy. He was every uncle I ever had, if they’d been given a license to kill.” The second half, “Don’t Stop Believin’,” is where Gibney turns the lens on the legacy. And it is here that the documentary becomes genuinely destabilizing. We expect a victory lap. Instead, we get an autopsy.

That voice belongs to David Chase. He is 78 now. The anger is still there—the coiled, suburban, Italian-Catholic rage that birthed the greatest television drama of all time—but it has mellowed into something resembling rueful wisdom. For two decades, Chase has been asked the same questions: Was Tony a good man? Did he die in Holsten’s? Is the whole thing just a long joke about Americans being full of shit? He has answered them with the patience of a man pulling teeth. Now, in Wise Guy , he doesn’t so much answer as he does excavate.