David Chase, the man who never wanted to write TV and made The Sopranos anyway

David Chase

Photo: US Embassy Dublin / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 22, 1945 Mount Vernon, New York, United States
Occupation	Screenwriter, showrunner, director and producer
Known for	The Many Saints of Newark
Awards	7 Emmy · Peabody · WGA Laurel · PGA Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television · New Jersey Hall of Fame

David Chase has spent most of his working life insisting he was in the wrong business. He wanted to direct films, the kind he watched as a boy in New Jersey matinees, and for two decades Hollywood kept handing him television scripts instead. He wrote detective episodes, network dramas and a short-lived series about growing up that critics liked and almost nobody watched. Then, out of that frustration, he built a show about a mob boss who starts seeing a psychiatrist because he is having trouble with his mother, and that show changed what television was allowed to be. “I never wanted to be a TV writer. I wanted to be a filmmaker,” he told reporters at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. “But I just couldn’t break out of it.”

The contradiction has never quite resolved. The Sopranos is the work that made him and the work he is still asked about in every room he enters. The films he has made since then have landed more quietly, and the new project he is writing, a limited series about the CIA’s experiments with LSD, is for HBO again. At an age when most of his contemporaries have stopped, Chase is still arguing with the medium that made his name, and still, by his own account, trying to get a movie made.

A New Jersey childhood and the mother who became Livia

The only child of Norma and Henry Chase, both raised in Italian-American working-class families, David Henry Chase came into the world in Mount Vernon, New York, on August 22, 1945, and grew up across the Hudson in New Jersey, first in a small garden apartment in Clifton and later in North Caldwell. His father owned Wright’s Hardware in Verona. The family name itself carried a story that surfaced in full only in recent years: his paternal grandmother, Teresa Melfi, had changed the surname of two of her children, Henry and his sister Evelyn, from DeCesare to Chase after leaving her much older husband for the young Italian immigrant who was their biological father. Melfi is a surname that would reappear, decades later, on Tony Soprano’s psychiatrist.

Chase has been blunt about the house he grew up in. He has described his father as an angry man who belittled him constantly, and his mother as a “passive-aggressive drama queen” and a “nervous woman who dominated any situation she was in by being so needy, and always on the verge of hysteria.” He would later turn her into Livia Soprano, one of the most frightening mothers in television history, and name the character after a maternal aunt. People who knew his mother, he said at Karlovy Vary, told him she was such a wild and funny person that he had to do something about her.

The other formative influence was the screen. He grew up on matinee gangster pictures such as The Public Enemy and on the crime series The Untouchables, and the mob was not an abstraction in the suburbs where he lived. The Boiardo family, a powerful New Jersey organized-crime clan during his childhood, would later feed into The Sopranos, alongside the state’s DeCavalcante family. He attended West Essex High School and was known among friends as a storyteller; the show would eventually borrow its name from high school friends of his.

Depression, drums and the long way to film school

After graduating from high school in 1964, Chase went south to Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and fell apart. He had suffered panic attacks and depression since his teens, and at Wake Forest it worsened. “I slept 18 hours a day,” he later said, describing his condition as “normal, nagging, clinical depression.” He was also playing drums and imagined a life as a professional musician, a detail worth remembering for anyone who has noticed how precisely songs are placed in his work.

After two years he transferred to New York University and decided on film, a choice his parents did not welcome. He graduated in 1968, married his high school sweetheart Denise Kelly and moved to California, where he enrolled at Stanford University’s film program and earned a master’s degree in 1971. The plan was to become a film director. The industry had other ideas.

Twenty years in the television trenches

His first screen credit came on a low-budget horror picture, Grave of the Vampire, released in 1972. Television work followed quickly and never really let him go. He became a story editor on Kolchak: The Night Stalker, then spent more than four years on The Rockford Files, the James Garner detective series, writing 19 episodes and moving up the producing ranks. The show won the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series in 1978, the first of the seven Primetime Emmys Chase would collect. Two years later he won another, this time for writing, with Off the Minnesota Strip, a television film about a teenage runaway.

In 1988 he got his first series of his own, Almost Grown, starring Eve Gordon and Timothy Daly. Critics praised it; only ten episodes aired before it disappeared in early 1989. He went on to produce I’ll Fly Away, the early-1990s drama about a Black housekeeper and a white Southern family during the civil rights era, and Northern Exposure, both of which brought Emmy nominations for drama series.

It was steady, respectable work, and Chase found much of it suffocating. He has said he “loathed and despised” television for years, a remark he later softened by explaining that it came out of the frustration of working inside the rules of network drama. In 2026 he described the Hollywood he entered in the 1970s in harsher terms: “It was like apartheid. If you were a TV writer, you couldn’t jump across. You couldn’t get a meeting with people in the movie business.”

A mobster, a therapist and a mother

The idea that would change everything began, fittingly, as a movie. Chase imagined a feature about “a mobster in therapy having problems with his mother.” His agent told him the genre was exhausted. “The mob is finished. People don’t care anymore, forget it!” So the idea sat in his pocket for three years. With input from his manager Lloyd Braun, he reworked it for television, signed a development deal with the production company Brillstein-Grey in 1995 and wrote the pilot. He was in psychotherapy himself at the time, and he modeled Dr. Jennifer Melfi on his own psychiatrist. What he was really doing, he has said, was applying his own “family dynamic to mobsters.”

Chase and producer Brad Grey took the script around town. Fox showed interest and then passed after reading it. Chris Albrecht, who ran original programming at HBO, agreed to pay for a pilot, which Chase directed himself in 1997. Then came months of silence. Convinced the series would never happen, Chase considered asking HBO for money to shoot 45 more minutes and release the pilot as a feature film, one more attempt to get out of television through the back door. In December 1997 HBO ordered twelve more episodes instead. The Sopranos premiered on January 10, 1999.

Chase has listed his influences with unusual precision for a showrunner: the playwrights Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams for the writing, and Federico Fellini for the show’s cinematic style. You can see that last influence in the show’s willingness to stop the plot for a dream sequence, a digression or an unexplained image, something American television drama rarely risked at the time.

What Chase built at HBO

For eight years and 86 episodes, the series followed Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini, through panic attacks, therapy sessions, murders and family dinners in suburban New Jersey. Chase is credited on 30 scripts, but as creator, showrunner and head writer he rewrote and polished the final draft of every episode, and he directed both the pilot and the finale. His writers’ room became a school: Terence Winter went on to create Boardwalk Empire, and Matthew Weiner created Mad Men. The show won 21 Emmys, and in 2004 it became the first cable series to win Outstanding Drama Series.

Chase still talks about Gandolfini with a kind of wonder. “He was just a great actor,” he said at Karlovy Vary. “I think it’s all about his eyes. One of the things about him was that you could see the little boy in there. Even though he was 40 years old, you could feel in his face that little boy, kind of mystified by the universe and the world.” It is a precise description of what made Tony watchable: a violent man who never stopped being somebody’s disappointed son.

The frustrated film director was all over the screen. Chase treated each hour as a small movie, with dream sequences, long silences and scenes that refused to explain themselves. His old drummer’s instinct showed in the soundtrack, where existing songs did work that dialogue could not, from the opening credits to the final minutes. Steven Van Zandt, the E Street Band guitarist Chase cast as Silvio Dante, would later serve as music supervisor on his first feature.

The cut to black and the arguments that never ended

Nothing in Chase’s career has been argued over as much as the ending. On June 10, 2007, the finale, “Made in America,” closed with Tony, his wife and his son in a diner as Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” played on the jukebox, and then the screen went black mid-scene. Some viewers thought their cable had failed. Critics have debated for nearly two decades whether Tony died. Chase has refused to settle it: “I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there.” The episode brought him his third writing Emmy for the series.

The critical reading of Chase is more complicated than the victory lap the show usually receives. He built one of the most admired dramas ever made, yet he has never stopped describing it as a consolation prize for the career he wanted. He has admitted he worries the show will date: “I thought for sure that a lot of the references wouldn’t work after a while, especially the comedic references, or when you mention a real person. I thought that’s going to fade away.” He has regrets about specific episodes, including the season in which the characters travel to Italy: “I think we made the woman in the show too sexy and too hot. It just didn’t seem real.” And he has little patience for the idea that the series was a sociological statement. “My main goal was to be entertaining,” he said in 2026. “But yeah, it’s the high point of my creative life.” His mother’s voice, he joked, still stops him from enjoying the praise: “Feeling good like that is not allowed.”

The movies, at last

After the finale, Chase finally made the film he had wanted to make since Stanford. Not Fade Away, released on December 21, 2012, was his feature directing debut: a music-driven coming-of-age story about the singer of a teenage rock band in 1960s New Jersey, played by John Magaro, with James Gandolfini as his father and Bella Heathcote and Jack Huston in the cast. Van Zandt served as music supervisor and executive producer. Chase described it as the story of “a post-war, post-Depression-era parent who has given his kid every advantage that he didn’t have growing up, but now can’t help feeling jealous of the liberated, more adventurous destiny his son is able to enjoy.” It is the most personal thing he has made.

He resisted going back to the Sopranos world for years. In 2018 New Line Cinema bought The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel he wrote with Lawrence Konner and produced, directed by Alan Taylor, a veteran of the series. Set around the 1967 Newark riots, it drew on Chase’s memories of Saturday-night dinners with his grandparents in the city, and cast Michael Gandolfini, James Gandolfini’s son, as the teenage Tony. The pandemic pushed the release several times, and when it finally opened on October 1, 2021, it arrived in theaters and on HBO Max on the same day.

Chase has been unusually candid about how it turned out. At Karlovy Vary he said the film was never meant to be an origin story, but “unfortunately that took over the whole process.” He pointed to Dickie Moltisanti’s backstory: “We had talked about him all through The Sopranos, that he was a drug addict and an alcoholic and insane. And then when we made the movie, he wasn’t in it. I can tell you, we just made a mistake.” The film, he added, “wasn’t successful in the theater; it was successful on television.”

Other projects never made it at all. A Ribbon of Dreams, an ambitious HBO miniseries about two men who rise from working for D.W. Griffith to power in Hollywood across the decades, collapsed in 2021 when, Chase said, the network offered “a cheesy budget” and he walked away. In October 2021 his production company signed a deal with WarnerMedia, and in 2022 he and the director Phil Abraham revived two Sopranos characters for a Super Bowl commercial.

Wise Guy and the man behind the show

For most of his career Chase was the least visible person connected to his own hit. That changed on September 7, 2024, when HBO premiered Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos, a two-part documentary by the Oscar-winning director Alex Gibney built around long conversations with Chase. It traced the family history, the depression and the years of network compromise that fed the series, and it presented a man far more anxious and funny than the reputation for austerity suggested. A year earlier, in 2023, he had been inducted into the New Jersey Hall of Fame. Around the show’s 25th anniversary he also turned up on late-night television, where he told the story of his own brief brush with the mob.

Back to HBO, and back to LSD

In March 2024 New Line announced an untitled horror film that Chase would direct from a script he wrote with Terence Winter, their first feature collaboration; no production date has been announced. In October 2025 HBO unveiled a much more personal project. Project: MKUltra is a limited series in development based on John Lisle’s nonfiction book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra. Chase optioned the book and is writing the adaptation under the first-look deal his company, Riverain Pictures, has with HBO, with Nicole Lambert executive producing. The story centers on Sidney Gottlieb, the chemist and spymaster known as the Black Sorcerer, who ran the CIA’s Cold War program of psychedelic and mind-control experiments on willing and unwilling subjects. If it goes to series, it will be his first television series since The Sopranos. Around the same time, an unproduced Chase script was reported as the basis for an FX pilot about witness protection starring Alison Brie.

At the 60th Karlovy Vary festival in July 2026, Chase explained why the subject grips him. “Most likely because I took LSD when I was younger,” he said. “I was not an acid head, but I took it eight or nine times, and I believe that it changed my life, and I still don’t quite understand it.” He had been writing a feature on the subject for five years, “a family story,” not a drug movie, and only optioned Lisle’s book so that nobody else would get there first. When he told HBO’s Casey Bloys and Francesca Orsi, they bought it on the spot. The series is “in the story stage,” he said. The film still has no distributor: “I guess we’re gonna have to make the movie and then try to find one.”

His explanation for why it took almost two decades to return to series television was characteristically dry: “Well, I wrote a lot of things, and nobody bought them.” He is scathing about an industry he thinks has gone back to playing safe. Studios, he said, “want everything they’ve seen before. They want things they’ve seen make loads of money before.” Borrowing a line from Christopher McQuarrie, he argued that Hollywood runs on two things, greed and fear, and pointed out that profit margins in the film business have always hovered around six percent. “You’re better off selling running shoes.” Of HBO today he said: “I don’t have much to do with it anymore, but it feels more like network television again.”

Private life

Chase has been married to Denise Kelly since the late 1960s. Their daughter, the actress Michele DeCesare, appeared in six episodes of The Sopranos as Hunter Scangarelo, Meadow Soprano’s school friend. He has spoken openly about depression and therapy, which he credits, in part, with giving him the premise of his life’s defining work. He is also more publicly visible than his reputation suggests: the late-night appearances, the festival Q&A sessions and the documentary interviews of recent years show a talker with a comedian’s timing.

Awards and recognition

Chase has won seven Primetime Emmy Awards: Outstanding Drama Series for The Rockford Files in 1978 and for The Sopranos in 2004 and 2007, and writing awards for Off the Minnesota Strip in 1980 and for the Sopranos episodes “College” in 1999, “Whitecaps” in 2003 and “Made in America” in 2007. The Sopranos also won a Peabody Award, which Chase accepted alongside Lorraine Bracco. The Writers Guild of America gave him its Laurel Award for TV Writing Achievement in 2007, and the Producers Guild honored him with the Norman Lear Achievement Award in Television in 2008.

What comes next

He still has a list. Chase wants to reunite the Not Fade Away cast, Jack Huston, Will Brill and Bella Heathcote, for another film. He would like, at last, to work with Robert De Niro. And he has an idea about Italian Americans buying cheap houses in the emptied-out towns of Italy, four people going back to the old country “and what surprises are in store for them.” He says he would do mob movies again but does not have one right now. The next confirmed step is Project: MKUltra at HBO, which would put the man who never wanted to write television back in charge of a television series, telling a story he first imagined as a film.