‘Sopranos’ Staying Hip Amid Hype

A few weeks ago, eight cast members from the HBO drama “The Sopranos” went to Foxwoods Casino, the gambling resort in the Connecticut woods run by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe. The occasion was a private dinner and meet-and-greet with several hundred of the casino’s high rollers--a kind of “Sopranos” fantasy camp with Tony Soprano, his gangster nephew Christopher, and wise guys named Furio and Paulie Walnuts.

It was the third go-round for this under-publicized bit of show business--a way for the actors on a hit show to pick up some extra cash by mingling with the public in a controlled environment. But the event also symbolizes a certain art versus commerce tug-of-war going on beneath the surface of a series that many feel remains the crown jewel of dramatic television, and one that continues to challenge the normal processes by which studios and networks cash in on a hit.

The fourth season of “The Sopranos” arrives tonight at 9 on HBO, after a year-plus hiatus and with the kind of media anticipation that the broadcast networks have come to crave in a cluttered, many-channeled TV universe.

Amid the possibility of unprecedented viewing levels this season, “The Sopranos” remains the reluctant franchise--a reflection both of HBO, where the goal is to hype by not appearing to hype, and of its creator, David Chase. The formerly out-of-the-loop TV writer-producer was given 16 months to complete a fresh 13 episodes of his series. That amounts to half the number of shows in twice the amount of time that his broadcast network colleagues are afforded.

If Chase and HBO have earned this sort of creative and commercial license, the goal now is to protect the integrity of the brand and make millions all the same. It is a dance that involves keeping the public interested while declining various merchandising tie-ins, including a Tony Soprano sport-utility vehicle.

On the phone from New York, where he had just returned from France to attend “The Sopranos” premiere at Radio City Music Hall, Chase hardly sounded like a show creator trying to beat back the market forces that would turn his baby into a cottage industry.

Chase wholeheartedly endorsed releasing DVDs of the first three seasons (“I was the first one to say we should do a DVD”), and he was involved with “The Sopranos Family Cookbook”--”a goof,” he called it--which is due in stores Sept. 24 from Warner Books.

He said the cookbook, written in the voices of the characters, grew out of the passionate interest in “The Sopranos” in the tri-state area (New York, New Jersey and Connecticut), where the Sopranos are familiar archetypes.

Chase, 57, has said repeatedly that he will end his relationship with the series after season five, perhaps stepping away before “The Sopranos” has hit critical mass. “After season three, we all needed to stop and sit down and figure out where the show was,” Chase said. “I could see another two years of where they were headed, and that seemed to be enough. I thought there was more to say than just in four seasons. I thought it needed more time to play out.”

Five seasons of “The Sopranos” would bring the total to only 65 episodes, making the series less lucrative in syndication. Hit network series can generate vast sums of revenue years after they’ve left the air through the licensing of reruns, but typically not until they reach at least 100 episodes.

In this context and others, the value of “The Sopranos” remains difficult to quantify. As its popularity increases, so does its cost. A source close to the show puts the per-episode production price at $4 million (close to twice as much as most network dramas). Renegotiated deals with star James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) and Chase will leave them with paydays in the eight figures by the end of the final two seasons.

For HBO, the fact that the series airs on a pay cable network means it’s cut off from commercial advertising sales. Although it seems safe to say that “The Sopranos” has significantly upped the network’s subscriber base, the main source of its revenue, HBO Chairman and Chief Executive Chris Albrecht says it is impossible to know how many people sign up for HBO because of “The Sopranos” versus “Sex and the City” or “Six Feet Under,” another emerging drama.

That said, “The Sopranos” has inspired its own commerce. Such is the cultural influence of the show that it is now possible, as the New York Times recently reported, to buy a CD-ROM outlining the architectural plans for the Sopranos’ suburban New Jersey home, courtesy of the real-life owners.

Visitors to the HBO Web site can browse for T-shirts, calendars and baseball jerseys (and coming soon, “Sopranos” gourmet foods). For the actors, particularly those in supporting roles that don’t generate magazine covers, there are opportunities such as the Foxwoods high-roller meet-and-greet, where gamblers who had accrued a certain number of points got face time with the coolest characters on TV, who posed for pictures and signed autographs.

Chase, the man behind the curtain, doesn’t see himself participating in a merchandising circus just because he supports a cookbook. The art of eating, it should be said, is integral to “The Sopranos.” “It’s not like we imagine selling a zillion cookbooks,” Chase said, adding: “It’s more of a comedy book than a cookbook.”

He particularly cut short the suggestion that the DVDs should be lumped in with other products. “The DVD is a separate issue,” Chase said. They have generated what one source says is about $75 million, though Warner Home Video won’t provide sales figures.

Regardless, the extra publicity can only help HBO woo new subscribers. Albrecht, like Chase, hardly sees a Sopranos sellout. He noted that HBO is hardly alone in exploiting the DVD marketplace. Other studios have been releasing favorite TV shows, such as NBC’s “Friends,” on disc.

“There have been myriad merchandising opportunities, most of which we’ve declined, because they don’t feel right,” added Brad Grey, the talent manager-producer whose Brad Grey Television produces “The Sopranos” with HBO.

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A Series Like No Other

When “The Sopranos” debuted on Jan. 10, 1999, it felt like someone had opened a window in the stale room of series television. For all the attention the show has received for its violence, profanity and sexual content, critics also praise “The Sopranos” for the way it recognizes contemporary consumer culture--a world of anti-depressants, Sony PlayStations and cell phones that play “The Godfather” theme when they ring. More than the mob hits, “The Sopranos” is the sight of Tony, standing in his driveway, yelling at his wife about the pulp ratio in his carton of orange juice.

Along with “The West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin, Chase is now the “it” guy in dramatic television, though unlike Sorkin, he did not emerge onto the scene fully formed as an auteur. It took Chase a few decades, during which he wrote on “The Rockford Files” and “Northern Exposure,” to name two, and struck out with his own series, 1988’s “Almost Grown.”

Chase has said that the spine of “The Sopranos’ ” new season involves the marriage of Tony and Carmela (Edie Falco), which has long been laboring under Tony’s infidelities and illegal exploits, and the guilt Carmela feels for tolerating her husband’s affairs and his crimes.

“There are issues between those two,” Chase said. “They seem to talk to others about it, but not to each other. We’ve sort of tried to get them to talk to each other.”

As always, the feds are circling, and various characters retreat into therapy.

Season three ended in May 2001; HBO, which has cultivated a boutique audience on Sunday nights by mixing in fresh episodes of its critically acclaimed series, held new episodes of “The Sopranos” through the summer to showcase its popular comedy “Sex and the City.” It was a strategy undermined somewhat by “Sex” star Sarah Jessica Parker’s pregnancy, which limited the number of episodes that could be produced.

For Chase, though, the extra time proved handy. Tony Sirico, who plays gangster Paulie Walnuts, had an undisclosed illness and required surgery. Chase says Sirico’s medical situation forced him to “rip up” the first six episodes, and he ended up putting Paulie in prison in Ohio on a gun charge, which didn’t necessitate shooting with core cast members.

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Syndication Possibilities

Whether those who don’t subscribe to HBO or buy the DVDs will see the show in reruns remains to be seen. Grey says he thinks a credible version of “The Sopranos” can be edited for nudity and profanity (or at least scaled down) and sold into syndication, whether to a cable or broadcast network.

HBO has syndicated a few of its series before, though not with great success. The comedy “Dream On” had a brief run on Fox, and “The Larry Sanders Show,” comedian Garry Shandling’s withering behind-the-scenes look at a late-night talk show, is about to test the waters. Edited versions of “Sanders” (on which characters swear liberally) will begin airing on cable’s Bravo network later this month and as a late-night series on individual stations, including KABC-TV Channel 7 in Los Angeles.

For HBO, figuring out ways to syndicate its series is a happy problem given new immediacy; recently, the network created the position of president of programming distribution to address off-network sales of the HBO library.

But there may be bigger plans for “The Sopranos.” Chase, Grey and Albrecht say they’ve had casual discussions about eventually continuing the series on the big screen, in the way “Star Trek” moved from TV series to film franchise.

“Is there a creative next step on film that we feel would be the next step for ‘The Sopranos’?” Grey asked. “Something that would allow the series to grow in features, rather than continuing to grow as a series? That is a very interesting conversation that we’ve never had based on any network show.”

Chase, cautious about getting ahead of himself, didn’t necessarily sound opposed to the idea of doing “The Sopranos” as a feature. When HBO picked up the show, he noted, he initially balked at designing the stories to be heavily serialized.

“I wanted to do a movie each week. I have kind of an aversion to TV soap. The whole reason people come back the next week [is to find out who’s sleeping with whom]. As much as we know about life in organized crime, not a lot happens. We try to be true, to present the quotidian nature of it. And it isn’t that dramatic.”

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Tension Draws Fans

Notwithstanding Chase’s devotion to the smaller moments of organized crime in the New Jersey suburbs, fans like to speculate about who’s going to get whacked--a variation on the who’s-sleeping-with-whom tensions that propel interest in soap opera.

Though unlikely, there is a possibility that “The Sopranos” will win its time period this fall, going up against “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” on NBC, “Alias” on ABC, a Sunday night movie on CBS and the sitcoms “Malcolm in the Middle” and “The Grubbs” on Fox. Last year, airing from March through May, initial telecasts of “The Sopranos” drew an average of 8.9 million viewers, according to Nielsen Media Research, up from 6.6 million viewers in season two and 3.4 million viewers in the first season.

That “The Sopranos” can even be competitive is impressive, given that HBO is seen in roughly one-third of the estimated 107 million TV homes. (Nielsen, The Times recently reported, inflates ratings a bit, combining viewership on all of HBO’s various channels when “Sopranos” episodes air.)

When it comes to ratings, HBO’s Albrecht says the network is more concerned with cumulative viewing as each episode is repeated during the week.

To some, “The Sopranos” remains the network’s face, even though other critically acclaimed series came on the air before it. “The Larry Sanders Show” while never a ratings success, was the kind of anti-hero comedy, beloved in entertainment circles, that justified the slogan, “It’s Not TV. It’s HBO.”

“We started really getting people’s attention with [the prison drama] ‘Oz’ and continued with ‘Sex and the City,’ and those shows at their inception were narrower in terms of the demographic they brought in,” Albrecht said. “ ‘The Sopranos’ really took those inroads that were created by those two shows and drove us to the point where we had total credibility, not only in the creative community, but in the press, and the sense that in popular culture we were a thing unto ourselves.”

Indeed, ever since HBO began stealing Emmy Awards--not to mention the hearts and minds of the ex-college lit majors who populate the entertainment news media--the broadcast networks have been red-faced with frustration.

Lost in all the praise for “The Sopranos” and “Six Feet Under” and “Sex and the City,” broadcast network executives regularly complain, is that HBO operates on an uneven playing field. The same creative constraints don’t exist on those shows, nor are episodes straitjacketed into a format that allows for carefully placed commercial breaks.

And shows that the news media treat as hits on HBO would struggle just to stay on the air in the mass-audience world of broadcast network TV, where drawing 7 million or 8 million viewers (as “Sex and the City” and “The Sopranos” have) is no guarantee of renewal.

It is doubtful that the public much cares about these inequities. But the growing concern that HBO--and specifically “The Sopranos”--has infiltrated the content business was articulated last year by NBC Chairman Bob Wright.

In a letter to various members of the entertainment community, Wright called it “a show which we could not and would not air on NBC because of the violence, language and nudity.” The letter, duly leaked to the media, came during the third season of “The Sopranos”--and around the time of an episode in which a stripper is brutally beaten to death. Wright went on to wonder aloud how nascent an influence on popular culture the series had become.

Even if HBO executives publicly reacted with bewilderment, the pay cable network had to be pleased. That the opinion sounded as though it was coming from an out-of-touch grandfather only confirmed how hip HBO had become.

It is evident in the billboard campaign for “The Sopranos.” If HBO needed to rebuild awareness after the show’s long layoff, the ad campaign is in keeping with the network’s air of soft-sell cool. The photos were done by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz, and there isn’t much accompanying text. The bus ads and the posters don’t say the title of the show, or what it’s generally about, or who all these slightly morbid-looking people are.

All it says is “Sept. 15” and “9 p.m.” and “HBO.” The rest you are just supposed to know.