Van Zandt Read for Tony Soprano, and a Funnier Version of the Show Was on the Table
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Steven Van Zandt, who would go on to play Silvio Dante, came in to read for Tony Soprano while the pilot was still being written. The appeal was that with him the show could tilt toward The Simpsons: more comedy, fewer nasty bits, more absurdity.
Then Jim Gandolfini was hired for Tony and it went back to where it started. The first draft had gone to Fox, which turned it down; the writer's explanation is that it contained no murders, and since people watch mob shows for the murders and betrayals, the HBO version was completely rewritten.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
The Fox rejection reads less like a lesson in art than a lesson in genre plumbing: mob-show audiences want murders and betrayals, and the rewrite handed them over.
The writer's own verdict on a Fox yes is about competing agendas, not body count: it would have been “a calamity of competing agendas, a total piece of crap.”
The same instinct bites again at HBO, where a murder that was very graphic and brutal made the network nervous and the answer was that nobody accepts a guy as a real mobster if he doesn't kill a rat. Violence as plausibility, not only as ratings.