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After The Sopranos

The series ended June 10, 2007. This page covers what came after — the projects, the deaths, and the strange second life the show found on streaming.

The sequel that keeps almost happening

There has never been a Sopranos continuation, and there has almost always been talk of one.

The obstacles are, in order:

  1. **James Gandolfini died on June 19, 2013**, of a heart attack in Rome, aged 51. Any continuation of the original story died with him. Chase has been unambiguous that he would not recast Tony.
  2. Chase doesn't want to. He has spent eighteen years declining to extend, explain, or resolve the ending, and treats requests to do so as a category error.
  3. The prequel underperformed theatrically. The Many Saints of Newark took $13.1M on a $50M budget in 2021, which cooled studio appetite considerably.

What's actually been discussed: Chase has said he'd consider a second film covering Tony in his twenties — the gap between Many Saints and the series. Terence Winter has publicly said he'd do it. Chase has also said Warner Bros. Discovery hasn't made it a priority.

As of now, nothing is in production.

Where the cast went

Edie Falco went almost straight into Nurse Jackie (2009–15), winning a fourth Emmy — this time in comedy — for a character about as far from Carmela as the same actress could get.

Michael Imperioli did Life on Mars, Detroit 1-8-7, and then a career-refreshing turn in the second season of The White Lotus (2022), for which he was Emmy-nominated. He co-hosts Talking Sopranos with Steve Schirripa, an episode-by-episode rewatch podcast that became one of the biggest drivers of the show's streaming revival.

Steven Van Zandt went back to the E Street Band and made Lilyhammer (2012–14) — notable as Netflix's first original series, predating House of Cards.

Drea de Matteo went to Joey, Sons of Anarchy, and Desperate Housewives.

Lorraine Bracco moved largely into unscripted work, including My Big Italian Adventure, and wrote about her own long history with therapy.

Dominic Chianese continued acting and performing as a singer well into his nineties.

Robert Iler and Jamie-Lynn Sigler both stepped back from acting substantially; Iler co-hosts the rewatch podcast Pajama Pants. See Iler & Sigler.

Michael K. Williams, Steve Buscemi, and others went on to define the HBO drama era that The Sopranos had made possible.

The losses

The cast has been hit hard. The most significant:
Nancy Marchand (Livia) June 18, 2000 — during the run, before season three
Joseph Siravo (Johnny Boy) April 11, 2021
James Gandolfini (Tony) June 19, 2013, aged 51
Frank Vincent (Phil Leotardo) September 13, 2017
Tony Sirico (Paulie Walnuts) July 8, 2022, aged 79
Ray Liotta (Many Saints) May 26, 2022
Denise Borino-Quinn (Ginny Sacrimoni) November 2010, aged 46

Gandolfini's death produced a scale of public grief unusual for a television actor, and a genuinely unusual outpouring from New Jersey specifically. He was 51, and had spent the decade after the show deliberately taking small, strange, un-Tony-like parts.

The streaming revival

Something unexpected happened around 2019–2021: a large new audience found the show, and it skewed young.

The drivers, roughly in order:

  • The 20th anniversary in 2019 and the wave of retrospective criticism
  • HBO Max putting the full run in one accessible place
  • Talking Sopranos, the Imperioli/Schirripa rewatch podcast
  • The pandemic, which was extremely good for six-season dramas
  • A meme ecosystem on Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram that turned the show into a shared vocabulary for a generation that was in primary school when it aired
  • The Many Saints of Newark driving a measurable spike

The effect was that a show which ended in 2007 became, for a stretch, one of the most-discussed things on the internet — and that its reputation rose, which almost never happens to prestige television from that era.

What it left behind

The short version is on Legacy & Influence. The one-line version: The Sopranos is the reason television drama stopped being a lesser form, and the reason a protagonist no longer has to be likeable.

Every antihero drama of the following two decades — The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Shield, Boardwalk Empire, Better Call Saul, Succession — is downstream of a 1999 argument about whether a lead character could murder someone in episode five.

See also