What would you like to see from the Sopranos… | Little White Lies

Not Movies

What would you like to see from the Sopra­nos prequel?

28 Mar 2018

Words by Joe Boden

Five men standing outside a shop selling Italian sausage, one wearing a patterned shirt, the others in casual clothing.
Five men standing outside a shop selling Italian sausage, one wearing a patterned shirt, the others in casual clothing.
David Chase’s quin­tes­sen­tial mob series looks set to grace the big screen in 2019.

After years of spec­u­la­tion and demand from fans and HBO alike fol­low­ing that finale, pro­duc­er David Chase final­ly looks set to revive The Sopra­nos more than a decade since it left our screens.

Chron­i­cling the rise and fall of a New Jer­sey crime syn­di­cate, the show cat­a­pult­ed its stars into the main­stream and is wide­ly regard­ed as the tip­ping point for TV ​’s so-called gold­en age. With that in mind, it may come as a sur­prise that Chase is appar­ent­ly look­ing not to the future, but to the past.

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Ditch­ing the turn of the mil­len­ni­um set­ting for the 1960s, the ten­ta­tive­ly titled pre­quel movie The Many Saints of Newark will sup­pos­ed­ly cen­tre around the sum­mer of ​’67, specif­i­cal­ly the peri­od of social unrest that arose as a result of the redlin­ing of black cit­i­zens, cul­mi­nat­ing in the Newark Riots. Vio­lence erupt­ed through­out the city, and nowhere was this more preva­lent than between the African-Amer­i­can and Ital­ian-Amer­i­can crime families.

Though we’ve already seen young ver­sions of Tony’s father Gio­van­ni and uncle Junior via flash­back, explor­ing this time peri­od fur­ther will pro­vide fans with a deep­er under­stand­ing of how the DiMeo fam­i­ly got to where they were at the start of sea­son one.

If recent appraisals of Chase’s abil­i­ty to cap­ture light­ning in a bot­tle from series stal­warts Steve Busce­mi and Edie Fal­co are any­thing to go by, we could be in for a treat. “(He’s) one of the best sto­ry­tellers and direc­tors there is,” enthused Fal­co, a sen­ti­ment echoed by Busce­mi when asked for his thoughts on the deci­sion to revive the series. ​“It’s think it’s great. There’s still a lot of mate­r­i­al to be mined in these char­ac­ters. I’m excit­ed about it”.

What would you like to see from the Sopra­nos pre­quel? Let us know @LWLies

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