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

Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos airs on HBO in the fall. It is not a celebration. It is a wake. And you are invited to bring your own gabagool.

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

Gibney cuts to the final shot: a black screen. Then, the faintest sound of a diner bell. Then nothing. Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos airs

Gibney, the Oscar-winning documentarian behind Taxi to the Dark Side and Going Clear , is an unlikely collaborator. He is a scalpel; Chase is a sledgehammer wrapped in Bergman-esque angst. Their pairing creates a fascinating tension. Gibney wants the truth. Chase wants the feeling of the truth. Over six hours (split into two feature-length parts for HBO), Wise Guy becomes less a "making of" and more a psychodrama about the man who made the thing that changed everything. The first part, titled “The Guy Who Didn’t Get the Girl,” is a masterclass in misdirection. It begins not with The Sopranos , but with Chase’s childhood in Clifton, New Jersey. His mother, Norma, was a sharp, anxious woman who once threw a plate of spaghetti against the wall because her husband, Henry, was late for dinner. His father, a hardware store owner, was a gentle, cowed presence. Gibney unearths home movies: young David at a birthday party, not laughing, staring at the cake as if trying to decode its meaning. And you are invited to bring your own gabagool

For fans, Wise Guy is essential not because it reveals the secrets of The Sopranos —there are no secrets left, only mysteries—but because it captures the essential loneliness of creation. David Chase made a world so real that we forgot it was a lie. And this miniseries is his confession: that he loved Tony Soprano, and that loving him was a kind of sin.