Direction & Craft¶
The show's visual reputation is that it "looked like a movie." That's true, and the reasons are specific and mostly procedural.
Shot by shot, in the room¶
The single most consequential production decision.
Scripts were broken down shot by shot during development, in the writers' room, before a director was assigned. Chase came from film school and treated the script as a visual document rather than a blueprint for coverage.
The consequence: directors arrived with the visual approach substantially decided, which is why 86 episodes made by a dozen different people look like one thing. It's also why the show's few genuinely unusual hours — the Buscemi and Bogdanovich episodes — still fit.
See The Directors.
Film, and a film aspect ratio¶
Shot on 35mm throughout, at a time when a great deal of television was moving to video for cost reasons, and framed at a cinematic aspect ratio.
Cinematographers Alik Sakharov (later Game of Thrones) and Phil Abraham (later a director on Mad Men and elsewhere) lit it like a feature: motivated sources, deep shadow, and a willingness to let faces go dark.
The New Jersey exteriors are deliberately unglamorous — overcast, flat, suburban, industrial. The show shot on location constantly, in real houses and real strip malls, and the texture is the argument: this life is not operatic, it's a business park off Route 3. See Locations.
The long take¶
The show's signature, and the opposite of television convention.
Scenes run long, on fewer setups than standard coverage would demand, with the camera static or moving slowly. Actors play whole exchanges in a single frame rather than in shot-reverse-shot.
Three effects:
Performance carries. Gandolfini and Falco in "Whitecaps" are given whole minutes without a cut, which is why the argument feels like an argument and not like editing.
Silence becomes usable. The show holds on faces long past the point a network drama would cut away, which lets it stage thinking as an event.
Violence has no warning. Because the rhythm doesn't change before something terrible happens — no accelerating cuts, no musical sting — a killing arrives at the same tempo as a conversation about sandwiches. That's the most frightening thing about the show's craft, and it's entirely a decision about editing.
The refusal to cue¶
Related, and worth separating out.
There is no score. Almost all music is source. So the standard grammar of television emotional instruction — strings arriving to tell you this is sad — is simply unavailable.
The show declines to tell you how to feel, then closes each episode with a song that comments on what happened. See Music.
The title sequence¶
Ninety seconds that do the show's whole argument.
Tony emerges from the Lincoln Tunnel, takes a ticket, and drives the Turnpike through Newark and the refineries and the industrial waterfront — his father's world — out to a large house in North Caldwell. Cigar, toll plaza, cemeteries, strip malls, and then lawn.
It's the immigrant story compressed into a drive, and it happens over an acid-house blues track by a British band.
The World Trade Center appears in the side mirror for the first three seasons and was removed after September 2001.
What it changed¶
Before 1999, "cinematic television" mostly meant expensive. After The Sopranos it meant a set of specific, copyable techniques: film stock, long takes, natural light, source music, location shooting, and scripts broken visually.
Every HBO drama that followed used the vocabulary, and the crew dispersed to build them — Tim Van Patten to Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones, Alan Taylor to Game of Thrones and Mad Men, Alik Sakharov to Game of Thrones, Phil Abraham to Mad Men, and the writers to their own shows.
See Legacy & Influence.