My wife Colleen Watermon and I never missed an episode of The Sopranos when it originally aired.

Like millions of viewers, we were captivated by the world David Chase created. When we traveled to New York in 2002 (nerd alert), we even took both the Sex and the City and Sopranos tours.

The show felt like a genuine cultural phenomenon. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone had theories. Everyone wanted to know what would happen next.

What surprises me today isn’t how popular the show was. It’s how well it still holds up.  More than twenty-five years after its debut, The Sopranos remains compelling television. The clothes and flip phones are dated, but the storytelling feels remarkably fresh.

After watching the recent documentary about David Chase, I found myself asking why. The answer, I believe, has very little to do with organized crime. The answer is David Chase himself.

Like many great storytellers, Chase didn’t create his most successful work by chasing trends. He didn’t start with a market opportunity or ask what genre was hot.

He started with something far more personal. He started with family.

The Story Everyone Thinks They Know

Ask someone what The Sopranos is about and the answer comes quickly. It’s a mob show.

A New Jersey crime boss struggles to balance his criminal empire with family life. There are power struggles, betrayals, and unforgettable characters. The series helped launch the era of prestige television and fundamentally changed what audiences expected from drama.

All of that is true. But it’s also incomplete.

The documentary makes clear that David Chase did not set out to make a mob show. He set out to write about family. The mafia became the vehicle.

One of the earliest versions of the idea was remarkably simple: a mobster goes to therapy because of problems with his mother. That seed eventually grew into one of the most influential television series ever produced, but the emotional core never changed. Before there was a crime family, there was a family problem.

That distinction matters, because it reveals something aspiring storytellers sometimes miss.

A topic is not a story. The mafia is a topic. Family is a topic. Therapy is a topic. Italian American culture is a topic. But none of those are stories.

What transformed The Sopranos into one of the greatest television series ever made wasn’t the subject matter. It was the emotional truth beneath it. And that truth came directly from David Chase’s own life.

A Son, a Mother, and Years of Therapy

One of the most fascinating revelations from the documentary is how deeply personal The Sopranos really was.

Chase grew up in an Italian American family in New Jersey. He has spoken openly about his struggles with depression and anxiety, his years in therapy, and most significantly, his complicated relationship with his mother.

If you’ve seen The Sopranos, you already know where this is going.

Livia Soprano is one of the most memorable characters in television history. Manipulative, critical, emotionally destructive, and impossible to satisfy. She’s also central to the emotional architecture of the entire series.

According to Chase, Livia was heavily inspired by his own mother.

The resemblance wasn’t merely conceptual. Chase has described watching Nancy Marchand inhabit Livia and feeling as though parts of his own childhood were suddenly standing in front of him. The character worked because she wasn’t a television invention. She was rooted in emotional reality.

In recent interviews, Chase has recalled specific painful moments that shaped his understanding of that relationship — including a remark from his mother during the Vietnam era that stayed with him for decades. Whether consciously or not, those experiences became creative fuel.

Suddenly the series looks different.

What appears to be a story about organized crime becomes something else entirely — an exploration of family dynamics, emotional inheritance, resentment, guilt, and the ways parents continue to shape their children long after childhood ends.

The documentary also underscores the importance of Chase’s own therapy.

Tony Soprano’s sessions with Dr. Jennifer Melfi were revolutionary when the show premiered. Television audiences had never seen anything quite like it — a feared mob boss suffering panic attacks and talking about his feelings with a psychiatrist.

At first glance, that sounds like a clever storytelling gimmick. It wasn’t. It was David Chase exploring questions he had been wrestling with for years.

The most important room in The Sopranos wasn’t the Bada Bing. It was Dr. Melfi’s office.

That office gave Chase a place to examine the emotional contradictions at the center of the story. It allowed him to explore family, identity, trauma, and self-deception through a character who happened to be a mob boss.

The therapy scenes weren’t interruptions to the story. They were the story.

The Mafia Was the Setting, Not the Story

This may be the most important lesson David Chase offers storytellers. The mafia gave him a world. His life gave him a story.

That’s why The Sopranos connected with audiences far beyond people interested in organized crime. Most viewers have never met a mob boss, committed a crime, or ordered someone killed. Yet millions recognized themselves in Tony Soprano.

Why?

Because beneath the violence and criminal intrigue, the show was wrestling with universal human experiences. Mothers and sons. Fathers and daughters. Marriage. Career pressures. Mental health. Identity. Loyalty. Regret.

The fear of disappointing people we love. The fear of becoming our parents. The desire to escape our past while remaining connected to it.

Those themes aren’t unique to organized crime. They’re uniquely human. The mafia was simply the storytelling container Chase used to explore them.

The setting creates interest. The emotional truth creates connection.

The Most Valuable Story Chase Had Was His Own

Chase didn’t invent a world from scratch. He built it around a world he already knew from the inside. He transformed lived experience into commercial intellectual property.

He wrote about what he knew, and it connected because audiences could see themselves — their friends, their parents, their own complicated family dynamics — reflected in those characters. That’s the real art of storytelling: telling a unique story that is also universal, because it reveals truths we all recognize.

I’m a firm believer that plot isn’t nearly as important as characters and world. As an audience, we want to be taken somewhere else but experience something familiar. That sounds counterintuitive. I believe it’s true.

Chase did that. He created characters who were compelling and familiar. He showed us a world unlike ours that felt, somehow, like home.

He had plot, action, and transformation too — all the elements you expect from great television. But the biggest aha moment I had watching the documentary was learning that Chase was a writer on The Rockford Files — one of my favorite shows growing up.

That show was written exceptionally well. And the irony of great writing is that it needs to follow a familiar formula while still taking us somewhere we haven’t been, with characters we’re compelled to follow because they feel like people we know in our own lives.

The key ingredient is always a fresh point of view.

Hollywood Doesn’t Buy Topics. It Buys Perspective.

One of the recurring themes in this newsletter is that Hollywood isn’t really buying stories. It’s buying the ability to tell them.

David Simon’s The Wire worked because Simon understood Baltimore better than almost anyone writing for television. He knew the police, the criminals, the journalists, the politics, and the culture from years on the crime beat.

David Chase brought the same kind of authority to New Jersey. He knew Italian American families from the inside out. He knew therapy. He knew depression. He knew the emotional landscape he was writing about because he had lived it.

What executives and audiences responded to wasn’t just the concept. It was the authenticity. The specificity. The unmistakable point of view.

This is one of the most important lessons for filmmakers, journalists, writers, and rights holders. When someone asks what story you should tell, the answer is rarely found by studying trends.

The better questions are:

• What world do you know?
• What experiences have shaped you?
• What truths have you earned the right to explore?

Those answers are often more valuable than any high-concept premise.

The industry is full of people searching for ideas. What it desperately needs are people with a point of view. David Chase had one that was fresh and universally relatable. That’s what made the show different.

I understand that when Chase was developing the series, traditional television executives struggled to categorize it. Was it a crime drama? A family drama? A dark comedy? A psychological study?

HBO’s breakthrough was recognizing that the unusual combination was precisely the point. They weren’t buying a mob story. They were buying David Chase’s unique perspective on one.

The Contradiction That Changed Television

Every great story contains tension. Often that tension comes from contradiction.

David Chase built The Sopranos around one of the most compelling contradictions in television history. Tony Soprano was a feared mob boss — and deeply vulnerable. Powerful and insecure. A predator and a victim of his own emotional wounds. A criminal, and a husband and father trying to hold his family together.

Those competing truths created dramatic tension in almost every scene. The audience never knew quite how to feel about him. Chase’s writing and James Gandolfini’s performance — those eyes alone — had us rooting for Tony.

We feared him. We laughed with him. We were horrified by him. Sometimes all at once.

That complexity elevated the show beyond genre television. Tony wasn’t a hero. He wasn’t a villain. He was a human being. Messy, contradictory, flawed, and entirely believable.

The same contradiction existed in the casting. Gandolfini didn’t look like a traditional television hero. That was exactly why he worked. He could be intimidating and vulnerable in the same scene, and viewers believed both sides of Tony because Gandolfini embodied both.

Why The Sopranos Still Works

Many television shows become artifacts of their era. The Sopranos feels different.

That’s because Chase anchored the series in timeless questions rather than temporary trends.

• Can people really change?
• How much of our identity comes from our families?
• Do we ever truly escape where we came from?
• How honest are we with ourselves?
• What do we owe our parents? What do we owe our children?
• What happens when the life we’ve built no longer matches the person we want to become?

Those questions were as relevant in 1999 as they are today. Technology changes. Culture changes. Human nature doesn’t. Because Chase focused on human nature, the series continues to resonate with new generations of viewers.

The surface details age, but the emotional truth does not.

What Storytellers Can Learn from David Chase

The success of The Sopranos is an important reminder for anyone trying to tell stories professionally. Don’t start with what’s trending. Don’t start with what seems commercial. Don’t start by asking what Hollywood wants.

Start with what you know. Start with what fascinates you. Start with the questions you can’t stop thinking about. That aha happened with me with this newsletter. I'm writing about the stuff that interests me. I hope it interests you too, but candidly it is much less of a chore to write a blog every two weeks when it is a topic you love.

That should be your North Star, like it was for David.

Chase didn’t become David Chase by studying audience research reports. He became David Chase by examining his own life closely enough to discover something universal inside it.

The irony is that the more personal a story becomes, the more universal it often feels. That principle shows up repeatedly in great storytelling.

• The Wire wasn’t really about crime.
• Friday Night Lights wasn’t really about football.
• Mad Men wasn’t really about advertising.
• The Sopranos wasn’t really about the mob.

Ask my friend Thomas Frase what Jaws is really about. Here's a clue, it isn't what you are looking for when you wade out into the water at the beach. Seriously.

Each of these amazing stories used a specific world to explore larger truths about human beings. That’s what audiences remember. That’s what endures and makes a story timeless.

The Story Beneath the Story

When audiences tuned into The Sopranos, they came for the mob story. They stayed for the family story. The episode that hooked me was when Tony took Meadow to look at colleges. After that, I was all in because I wanted to see what happened with his family.

David Chase gave viewers organized crime, but what he was really writing about was family, identity, anxiety, love, resentment, and the emotional baggage we all carry.

The documentary reminded me that the greatest storytellers rarely invent their best work out of thin air. They excavate it.  They take experiences, relationships, frustrations, fears, and unresolved questions from their own lives and transform them into something audiences recognize as true.

David Chase turned family pain into one of the greatest television series of all time. That’s an extraordinary creative achievement. It’s also a powerful reminder for the rest of us.

The most valuable story world you’ll ever have access to is the one you’ve already lived.

About the Storytelling for ALL® Newsletter

The Storytelling for ALL® LinkedIn Newsletter is a biweekly publication examining how stories are developed and brought to life professionally in today’s evolving storytelling economy.

Every other week, I explore the creative, ethical, and economic forces shaping films, television, and other story-based media through the lens of professional development, rights, collaboration, and long-term value.

Written primarily for filmmakers, journalists, writers, producers, and media entrepreneurs, the newsletter also serves public figures, rights holders, and media investors who want to understand how true stories move from lived experience to finished work.

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About Ron Watermon

Ron Watermon is a creator, builder, media entrepreneur, filmmaker, and the founder of STORYSMART®. He writes about professional storytelling, media entrepreneurship, filmmaking, and the business of turning stories into valuable assets.

Ron is the author of STORYSMART® Storytelling for ALL® and is currently building STORYSMART® STUDIOS, an independent media company dedicated to developing, producing, and owning profitable, enduring original media properties.

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At STORYSMART®, we approach storytelling, filmmaking, and media development as a long-term, rights-first business rather than a project-by-project creative exercise.

Our focus is on understanding how stories create value over time through ownership, disciplined development, audience relationships, and thoughtful risk management.

The articles, commentary, and educational materials published here are intended to contribute to broader conversations about storytelling, media, and intellectual property. They are provided for informational and educational purposes only and should not be construed as investment, legal, tax, or financial advice.

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