For the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos, I sat down with Nick Braccia, author of "Off the Back of a Truck: Unofficial Contraband for the Sopranos Fan," to talk about the legacy of the show, the state of television and fandom, and the creative process. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
NICK ZIDARESCU: I was just re-reading the introduction to the book, and you talked about how compared to the other books about the show, [your book] is not really a guide, but more of a party. I wanted to hear your thoughts on why you felt there was a need for your book and why you felt your book was unique.
NICK BRACCIA: Well, originally it was going to have a lot more celebrities, and I positioned it kind of as a guide-slash-bathroom book. At one point my recommended title was How Long You Gonna Be In There?
I'd written film and TV and pop criticism before at an amateur level. I felt like I had a lot to say, but there were already The Sopranos Sessions, which [are] recaps repackaged, which are fine. You had Woke Up This Morning, [and] people were getting the behind-the-scenes look there. You also had extremely incisive and really smart individual episode analysis from websites like Sopranos Autopsy. And I was like, “Okay, where's the market here?” [Having] the opportunity for this book and knowing who I could bring on to collaborate with, knowing I had about nine months to turn in a draft, I was like “Okay, I can do the heavy lifting, but there's other areas where there's going to be people who are just better and smarter to hit specific topics.”
So I kind of “cast” the book and [said], “I'm going to be the lead. I'm the wrangler. And let me fill this with” – frankly, a lot of it was my friends, people who studied with me at Holy Cross. We share among us a point of view that I think vacillates back and forth between highly academic and insightful, sometimes funny. And I was just like, “All right, what if we all just had a party and we expand our circle to other people I've met along the way, some of them on the internet, some of them who I've been reading [their work] and interacting with on social media for years.” I was basically throwing a party the same way I would literally, actually throw a party at my apartment. And I [thought], “This doesn't exist. I think people will dig this.” And I wanted people to be able to jump around. [I wanted] to experiment with the format of what a TV book could be.
NZ: Do you feel like as the author of this book, you have a particular relationship with the fanbase of the show?
NB: Not really. I went to the first SopranosCon as a researcher and I went to the second one as someone selling books – and I hosted trivia there – and people recognize you. 98% percent of the feedback has been positive. I sometimes make jokes in the Reddit groups… but the fact of the matter is that even though the show is appreciated by the literati and there are people who want to have elevated conversations about it, the vast majority of the community is into two things: One, just how great the writing was and how repeatable the lines are. It can be charming but maddening, and you're just gonna hit a wall if you [post] “I did this essay” or “Hey, check this out, you might like this.” You’re [going to get a lot of comments] like “Must have graduated top of your class.” Sometimes I find that really enjoyable, but I also just don't engage because there's a lot of posturing. I don't know that everyone's like “Come and inform me about how to have a deeper relationship with this show.” That's not the vibe I'm getting, certainly not from Reddit.
The other aspect – and this is way worse than [the first] aspect because I can kind of enjoy the fun of that – is the people that don't realize that the show is satire. It's the same thing that I think frustrated David Chase, which is that these aren't good people. Yes, there is stuff to indulge in with the gangster culture, and yes, those characters are funny. But no, they're not heroes, they're not good people. If you think this is a lifestyle to which you should aspire, you're missing the point completely, no matter how well-rounded the characters are. And David Chase tried to ram that home as hard as he could.
NZ: Over text, we briefly talked about the new HBO documentary coming out [Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos]. You mentioned that creators are not the best people to talk about their work. Elaborate on that, specifically with regards to David Chase and what you think of his relationship to the fan base.
NB: I’ve never met him but he seems like kind of a quiet, curmudgeonly, paradoxical guy. I believe he is – as much as one can be – an auteur in creating that show. It's just so consistent in the tone and the gags and the setups. When you're someone like him, or like David Lynch, you have a whole team that you get on your wavelength and they become your hands. [A showrunner] doesn’t have time to think about everything as much as we do. They have other people who they trust to do some of that thinking for them. People ask David questions and he's like “I don't remember, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about.”
I think some of the fandom maybe embarrasses him a little bit. I think he knows [the show] was a tremendous accomplishment, but I think he's still a guy who would have preferred to be making movies. I think [his perspective] is pretty much “I made this show. I'm glad people liked it.” I also think that production making something is a lot more like a construction site than an art studio. Things are happening fast, so not only 25 years later is he not gonna remember stuff, but I think he was looking at the sum of the parts as things came together and he knows what he did. I believe in the role of the critic in society to really focus on appreciation. We are so zoomed in when making that [you need] someone who's zoomed out from you, but is on board and understands what you're going for, who can give great notes, who can tell you how this occurs in the world. In art, things that are wonderful occur outside of our intention all the time and they know how to roll with that.
NZ: I feel like modern audiences see shows or movies like a puzzle box to figure out, whereas The Sopranos has a lot of very ambiguous elements, things that are more mystical that you're not meant to know. I think a lot of people get very frustrated with that and try to gamify it and figure it out, to solve it. What do you think about that?
NB: Something like The Sopranos is a complete red herring [in that regard] because the point of the show is not an M. Night Shyamalan movie. The show has ambiguity, and [the answers] don’t matter. That's just plot. There’s not so much a puzzle to solve as there is a texture to pay attention to. It’s what I like to call watching hard. Watching hard is paying attention to what's in front of your face, not trying to organize a bunch of numbers.
NZ: Since the pandemic, The Sopranos in particular has had a resurgence, with people either rewatching it or discovering it for the first time. There were some articles about [that phenomenon] from The New York Times and other publications about why it connects with a younger audience. Do you have any thoughts about its staying power or why it's become relevant yet again?
NB: It's aged really well. It's also extremely quotable and clippable and memeable. I worked on a program at the end of last year to turn all 86 episodes into TikToks. I worked on that with an agency for the official HBO account. I was one of the people pulling time code and rewatching all of [the episodes] and giving very detailed instructions [about] what 25 seconds to put in. Max was very excited about introducing the show in that format.
NZ: Do you think there's something that a new generation of fans gets out of the show now?
NB: I think they're probably shocked by the quality. There's not a lot of scenes happening on TV today that push you to have two, three, or four emotional responses at the same time or to hold different thoughts in your head… how can you both feel empathy for someone and be completely repelled by them… how can you relate to them so much but also feel ashamed… People are not doing things with that many layers. It's a real skill. [I know] that sounds like Grandpa Simpson waving his fist at the cloud, but everything's been really, really dumbed down, so I think that show is just operating on such a high level. It's got great hooks because it's both a thinking person’s show and a show that operates on a pop level, whether it's with soap opera or slapstick or just the raw charisma of the cast members.
NZ: Do you think the show is differently received in an era where we're more “woke,” for lack of a better term?
NB: Not really. I think people know better. I can speak from my experience teaching...I wasn't sure what I was going to walk into with Gen Z, with levels of sensitivity – I tend to be pretty aware of that stuff and very cautious, but people are made of tougher stuff and more understanding of nuance versus offense than I thought. I do think that the outrage police was a real thing, [but] I think it was a few people being very loud going through and trying to take a beloved 25-year-old show and shame it. There's not a lot of value in getting that canceled.
For the people who do want to police culture that way, [to] police the past, of course, times change but you should assess something against the time that it was done, not the criteria of today. I think people are better at contextualizing that stuff than the media has like [led] us to believe. If it's for them, it's for them. If it's not, it's not. It [doesn’t] really serve anyone to try to serve the show up on a platter. [It’s] also so universally beloved. I think the people who are doing that stuff are wise enough to pick their foes and the army of defenders of all kinds for The Sopranos would have been a lot to handle.
NZ: We touched on this earlier when you were talking about how the show is just so layered and how a lot of shows today are dumbed down. Do you think that there is a reason that the show stands taller or is more popular than its other contemporaries at the time that are also in the peak TV debate? Like The Wire or Breaking Bad?
NB: [To me], The Sopranos is Dickens and Breaking Bad is a beach read. I like Vince Gilligan. I enjoyed Breaking Bad, but it's really about the plot. And there's great plot moments you want to revisit. And there's amazingly directed episodes – Rian Johnson's train episode is an all-time great. But largely, it was a show that existed to keep the popcorn coming, and it was very good at that and it had great character performances. But I don't go back to Breaking Bad. Maybe I'll watch a clip on TikTok or YouTube, but once you have experienced the plot, the story in the plot, it's kind of done. And one of the first things I do on the first day of class – I did [this] with my students at Columbia – is, I explain the difference between story, plot, and narrative. And Breaking Bad, I don't think, has a particularly nuanced, textured, or interesting narrative. It has a very compelling story and plot. One might call bullshit detector on the story, but from a plotting perspective, chef's kiss.
[With] something like The Wire… I think its brilliance is that it was really five different kinds of seasons. The real joy for me is [that] the characters were great. I think they play a little fast and loose between having them be grounded and realistic and trying to make a point from a social problems perspective [versus] having them be cartoonishly mythic. But it was entertaining and the procedural was always satisfying because it was through how these systems work that you understand the social problems and you get the characters you get. But even though it was covering a book, it was adapted from journalism that predated the show, and then the show came out when it did, and even more time has passed now. So I don't think The Wire's aged as well as The Sopranos because it was made in a specific time and place, about a specific time and place. So I don't think it fits. Whereas I think that The Sopranos is about an evergreen American conundrum around our relationships to consumerism, class and immigration.
NZ: Could you speak a little more to that?
NB: Well, I think The Sopranos ultimately is pointing at us and laughing at us for being the hamsters on the wheel and [laughing at] the folly of our inability to change, taking on extra responsibility we don't want to buy things we don't need that push us further away from happiness. And I think the characters are constantly making decisions that are not in their best interests because they're trying to scratch short-term itches around fitting in in certain communities. And the other thing is that it does almost a slapstick job of showing how quick we are – and obviously it's heightened because they're criminals - to take ethical and moral shortcuts, things that are outside of our personal code or sense of self because the desire to want, the need to consume, to keep up outweighs and is stronger than those things. And I just find that to be so universal.
The other aspect is there's immigrant cycles in this country. And it was really about the cycle of the families [who] moved here in the early part of the 20th century getting assimilated to the point where there's not a ton of culture left of the old world, of the old ways. I'm not saying those things are better, but [it’s about] the idea of how people strive to hold on to them, but not really because it's not as important as fitting into the new place. And that theater is really interesting to me. But there's also the tried and true American way of “a new immigrant group arrives here and we all want them to thrive.” Again, this country exists for immigrants, but the first thing every group does is turn around and try to lock that door as hard as possible so that that next group, which is definitely inferior to them, can't get through and shouldn't have the same opportunities because that means I'm going to be giving away my share.
NZ: You also mentioned you don't really look into a lot of the behind-the-scenes stuff. Is there a reason for that?
NB: Some of it is completely ego-based, because I don't want to find out I'm wrong about something specific. [There’s] one thing I both would love to do [but would] dread it. I think it'll happen one day cause he's around the city and we go to some of the same places and I stopped by his bar, but I'd love to talk to Michael Imperioli about Marco Polo [S5E8] because he wrote it and it's my favorite episode. I've got a lot of ideas about what they were up to and I wrote about them in the book. He may tell me that I'm completely full of shit. I don't think he would. It's just that I think there's what we bring to things as individuals, and if we can make arguments based on what we see, that's like working out your brain, and I don't want anything to get in the way of that being a good exercise.
Where I do think [behind the scenes] stuff is really helpful is if one wants to make stuff. Hearing about how things actually come together and how stuff is made is important for anyone that wants to make stuff. So as a creator, that stuff's interesting to me. As someone who's interested in studying the text, intention means less to me than output.
NZ: Do you feel like writing this book [changed] your perspective or relationship to the show at all?
NB: Oh, much so. I always knew that I liked [the show], and I had watched it a bunch of times. Any time I have gone into the fray it has always provided a reward. [After the show first ended], I needed distance from the experience of the story and the plot to truly understand the narrative. Going back in as a kind of narrative scientist and narrative excavator, I felt like I was looking at the choices in it like tiles in a beautiful mosaic in Venice or something. It, to this day, continues to reward me for every moment I've put into it. [The book] is a work of art that pushed me to whatever my limits are. It has helped me grow. And it provided one of the greatest challenges. It's something that's helped form who I am, [with] whom I've strengthened friendships. I was able to say thank you to my mentor by asking him to contribute, because without his inspiration and guidance and him helping me to sharpen and develop skills and confidence, never in a million years would I have taken it on. So yeah, I mean, I threw a party, but The Sopranos is what we were celebrating.
NZ: If you're trying to get someone who's never seen The Sopranos before to watch it, what would you tell them?
NB: I would say “You want to understand America? Watch this show.”
Nick Braccia is a creative director and writer based in New York City.
-Nick Z.
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