HBO’s Mobster Saga Does New Jersey Proud

It’s been a rough morning in Paterson, N.J. Three men have been shot downtown, and Deputy Mayor Alan Levine is struggling to say something positive about his city.

Here’s what he comes up with: “Remember when Big Pussy smashed the car into a bike rider, and Beansie got run over and they chased a guy down the street with a gun? All that was great for Paterson. It made a lot of people in New Jersey very proud.”

For the uninitiated, Big Pussy and Beansie are characters in HBO’s hit series “The Sopranos,” a saga of dysfunctional yet oddly appealing mobsters, and Levine, who’s had bit roles in several episodes, was referring to violent scenes recently shot in Paterson. He’s not alone in his slightly perverse pride over an award-winning show that has turned New Jersey and its often ridiculed landscape--long the butt of national jokes--into an oasis of self-esteem.

Forget those one-liners about toxic landfills and the Turnpike to Nowhere. In the Sopranos’ gritty world of North Jersey diners, trash dumps, expressways and malls, the ugly has become iconic, and creator David Chase, a native son, suggests it may be the first time that a state is the real star of a television series.

“This is the greatest thing to hit New Jersey since the movie ‘Atlantic City,’ ” says Joseph Friedman, director of the state’s television and motion picture commission. “Not a week goes by that I don’t get a call from some New Jersey refugee in L.A. who will ask a question like: ‘Wasn’t that my old diner on Route 3 that I saw on the show last night?’ ”

It’s been good therapy for many New Jerseyans who wrestle with an inferiority complex bigger than an 18-wheeler on the Pulaski Skyway. “This show is so Jersey, it makes you feel good,” says Beverly Kent, a Garden State native who picks out familiar sites in the show’s opening shots like she was watching a travelogue. “My mother doesn’t like all the profanity and violence, but she was really excited when they filmed a scene this year with a dumpster near her house.”

The excitement will build to a climax Sunday, when the second season ends. Fans are gearing up for months of HBO reruns, wondering how they’ll manage to last until “The Sopranos” returns with new episodes in January. “What am I supposed to do?” complained a New Jersey resident on one of the many Web sites devoted to the series. “Kill myself?”

Chase’s use of outdoor location shots has created a fascinating world unknown to millions of American viewers, a fictional yet realistic place that “invites comparison with John Updike’s New England, Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles [and] Lou Reed’s New York,” according to columnist Matt Zoller Seitz in the Newark Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest daily. The paper sponsors a Web site on the show and receives an official thank you in each week’s closing credits because characters often read it during episodes.

Recently, the Star-Ledger held a Sopranos look-alike contest, and the winners were feted at a dinner “which was so upbeat, so full of a feeling of community, it reminded you of what Brooklyn used to feel like at Ebbets Field with the Dodgers,” says Editor Jim Willse. “There was a sense of real pride in being from New Jersey, no matter how eccentric.”

The pride developed over time. During its first season, the show had difficulty convincing New Jersey property owners to let their sites be used, said location director Mark Kamine. But after its phenomenal critical success, the second season has been another story. “People in New Jersey are practically begging us to use their diners and other sites,” he notes. “One guy in an outdoors shop not only offered us his site--he handed us a long barbecue fork so that Tony Soprano could put somebody’s eye out if we wanted to do that.”

Some merchants were recently hustled by a man who claimed that he could get their sites on a list of locations used by the show, in exchange for a $100 fee, according to production officials. Once, Kamine recalls, he was eating in a local diner when a Roman Catholic priest came to his table, gave him his card and said he had a “perfect” church nearby that the show was welcome to use.

By now, hard-core fans can recite the real-life locations of Sopranos landmarks: The two-story, four-bedroom Soprano house is nestled on a quiet cul-de-sac in North Caldwell, right across the street from where the Unabomber claimed a victim in 1994. Satriale’s Pork Shop, where meat and other fine delicacies are ground to a pulp, is an old butcher shop in Kearny. The Bada Bing strip club is on Route 17 in Lodi.

To be sure, “it’s kind of sad that it took this show to make some people feel good about New Jersey,” says Kathy Kastner, a waitress at the Caldwell Diner. “But when you see an underpass you recognize on TV, you get very excited.”

Many viewers are also drawn by the show’s depiction of contemporary family conflict, generations interacting, and a rich portrait of ethnic heritage and even cuisine. Yet critics deplore the show’s violence and what they consider its brutal stereotyping of Italian Americans as mobsters.

“It’s denigrating to Italian Americans everywhere,” says Father Joseph Orsini of Bayonne, national chairman of the anti-bias committee of UNICO, America’s largest Italian American service organization. Others believe it’s unfair to single out New Jersey--where more than 1 in 7 residents are of Italian descent--because federal prosecutors have said for years that the Italian Mafia’s power and influence are in decline.

New Jersey boosters accentuate the positive. The state has a healthy economy, a beautiful shoreline and small, livable communities that attract thousands of new residents; New Jersey pays its public school teachers among the nation’s highest salaries and has excellent universities; former presidential candidate Bill Bradley represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate, and mega-entertainers like Bruce Springsteen and Lauren Hill, who hail from New Jersey, have burnished the state’s image as a place to live in, not just be from.

But at a time of bland, homogenized popular entertainment, even critics confess to guilty pleasure in HBO’s celebration of New Jersey’s darker side. “Real Italian Americans don’t curse in front of their children the way people do on ‘The Sopranos,’ ” sniffs Steven Colatrella, taking a walk with his mother in Caldwell. “Yet there’s a wonderful New Jersey quality that makes people feel great.”

Sometimes they lose touch with reality. Colatrella, who teaches sociology at Bard University in New York, notes proudly that “Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s son goes to Bard too.” Of course, she’s the fictional psychiatrist on “The Sopranos,” he quickly adds. “I think we all have to keep reminding ourselves--this is just a television show.”