Word: wiseguy
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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When it comes to TV depictions of Mob life, we know we can count on the fact that men will get whacked, women will wear unflattering housecoats and someone at some point will say "prosciutt'." What we don't expect is to follow a wiseguy's path through psychotherapy. Debuting on Jan. 10, this wryly conceived weekly drama focuses on Anthony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a suburban dad and Mafioso whose general malaise and thorny mommy issues send him to the couch. While refraining from slapping the comedy on too thick, creator David Chase has made Soprano's inward search surprisingly...
...made, with grit courtesy of Marty. Citizen Kane (1941). Orson Welles' masterwork remains the ur-text of film schools worldwide because it blew wide open the envelope of cinematic possiblity. Mean Streets (1973). The gritty realism of Scorsese's breakthrough movie began the stylish exploration of the low-rent wiseguy that he completed in "Goodfellas." The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The finest American political film ever goes deep and noir into the fear and loathing at the heart of Washington, D.C. The Getaway (1972). Noir cinema reaches its apotheosis with Peckinpah's rendering of Jim Thompson. Throw in the coolest white...
...life. He appeared in regional theaters around the country, frequently returning to New York broke and sometimes homeless. Eventually he found work on Broadway, including his 1991 Tony Award-winning role in Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers. There also came television roles like bad guy Mel Profitt on Wiseguy and small parts in such movies as Heartburn and Working Girl...
Like Nicholas Pileggi's Wiseguy, Underboss is fascinating for its anthropologically detailed portrait of a subculture some of us can't get enough of, Al Pacino or no Al Pacino. Both Gravano and Maas (author previously of The Valachi Papers) claim Gravano will get no money from this de facto memoir. But why a man who recently left the federal witness-protection program would want to draw such attention to himself is a mystery. Maybe, given his gift for aphorism, he's thinking about going out on the corporate lecture circuit. "There's enough people to shoot in the head...
...credit for rescuing the show from a lengthy development hell goes to executive producer Stephen Cannell, who funded the pilot and was able to persuade initially reluctant programmers at Fox to pick it up. Over the years Cannell has mounted an incredibly wide range of dramas--everything from Wiseguy to the less cerebral The A-Team and Silk Stalkings. Initial ratings for Profit were weak, but Cannell thinks he can maintain his track record. "I broke all the rules with The Rockford Files,'' he says, referring to his first big hit. "I had an antihero the networks hated for being...