The Sopranos' David Chase and Drea De Matteo break down “Long Term Parking”

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The Sopranos’ creator and star, along with writer Terence Winter and director Tim Van Patten, go deep on the untold story behind season five’s penultimate episode, which centers around one of the most affecting TV deaths of all time

By Ben Allen

18 May 2023

Major spoilers for the greatest TV show of all time to follow.

Two things will strike you on a rewatch of The Sopranos: a) you’ll notice just how stupidly funny it is, even in its darkest moments – Tony’s heavily slapstick murder of Ralphie Cifaretto springs to mind – and b) you’ll feel the true weight of the darkness at its core, especially as the series marches toward its conclusion. Dramatic moments – Tony and Carmela’s cataclysmic fight in season four’s “Whitecaps”, AJ’s suicide attempt in season six’s “The Second Coming”, Tony gently smothering Christopher to death in season six’s “Kennedy and Heidi” – hit even harder, perhaps because we’re even further endeared to the characters after another 80-odd hours together.

But no arc feels quite as devastating as that of Adriana La Cerva, played by Drea De Matteo. Drafted in as fledgling mafioso Christopher Moltisanti’s girlfriend early in season one, she was one of the few true outsiders in the mob’s orbit. “You couldn’t help but fall in love with her because she was sort of collateral damage,” Sopranos director Tim Van Patten says. A loveable dumbass, she is perfect prey for the FBI, who enlist her as an informant in season four, and we immediately get that horrible sense of what’s to come.

Adriana’s demise is at the heart of season five’s “Long Term Parking”, an episode often spoken about in reverent tones, alongside season three’s “Pine Barrens”, as perhaps the show’s greatest ever. “Long Term Parking” works so well because it so perfectly teases out Adriana’s death after she confesses her sins to Christopher, leading the audience to believe that she might just make it out of New Jersey alive. But it almost didn't play out like that, writer Terence Winter tells GQ. There was a scene in an early cut where Christopher tells Tony that Adriana is a rat, which was removed from the final version (it appears in a later episode as a flashback instead). “Tim [Van Patten] and I felt really strongly that it should be in there,” Winter says. “We were wrong.”

The decision to remove it ratchets up the dramatic tension as Adriana sits in Silvio’s car, ostensibly on the way to see an injured Christopher in the hospital, allowing the audience to delude themselves about her fate for that bit longer. And then we see the car move into the depths of the woods, where only bad things happen.

“When I look back on the show, it’s one of my favorite decisions, if you want to call it that,” creator David Chase says, almost 20 years later, of the call to remove the scene.

Rewatching “Long Term Parking” for the purposes of this interview gave Chase a renewed sense of appreciation for the performance at the center of the episode. “I came away thinking that Drea De Matteo was superlative. It’s one of the best acting jobs I’ve seen in a long time,” he says.

In a series of conversations, Chase, De Matteo, and the episode’s writer and director, Winter and Van Patten, break down its making, and the execution of one of the most devastating TV deaths of all time.