An even earlier HBO drama, Oz, mastered the art of killing off major characters on television, but The Sopranos took it to another level. In The Sopranos, no one was safe. Everyone was liable to get shot or stabbed or garrotted before the end of a given scene. Arguments between husbands and wives are pretty commonplace in TV shows, but it’s rarer for the wife to gun down the husband in the heat of the fight.
The Sopranos had a ton of memorable character deaths: Christopher, Big Pussy, the aforementioned Richie. Ralph brutally beating Tracee to death outside the Bing is almost as gut-wrenching as that scene from Irréversible (almost), and that made it all the more grimly cathartic when Tony choked the life out of Ralphie. But the most haunting death in The Sopranos, and maybe the most haunting character death in television history, remains unparalleled.
In The Sopranos season 5, episode 12, “Long Term Parking,” Chris finally finds out that Adriana is a rat, and she’s been talking to the FBI. At first, he reacts violently, then he breaks down crying, and then they agree to run away together. But, shortly after making this plan, Adriana gets a mysterious call from Silvio, claiming Chris is in the hospital after a suicide attempt. He picks her up, ostensibly to go and see him, but it soon dawns on her that it’s all a ruse. They’re not going to the hospital; this is her last rodeo.
Adriana slowly realizing she’s being driven to a secluded space to be whacked, only figuring it out when it’s too late to save herself (but early enough to feel a long, drawn-out sense of dread), might be the most disturbing sequence in the whole series. Adriana’s death is one of The Sopranos’ defining moments, and it was almost ruined.
Adriana’s Death Exemplifies The Sopranos At Its Best
In season 6, episode 9, “The Ride,” The Sopranos showed a flashback to Christopher sealing Adriana’s fate. We saw that, after Chris went to gas up his car, he reluctantly told Tony that Adriana was an FBI informant, and he sent Sil to whack her. It provides some interesting context, but it wasn’t originally shot as a flashback; that scene was initially filmed for “Long Term Parking,” but Drea De Matteo felt that Adriana’s death should be a surprise for the audience.
If we’d seen Chris go to Tony, then we would’ve known that Adriana was doomed as soon as Sil called. De Matteo asked David Chase to cut that scene, and he complied, and the episode became a hundred times more effective. Without that scene, Sil’s arrival seems dubious, but we can’t tell for sure if he’s lying. Without that scene, we realize Adriana is about to be killed at the same time she does. So, thankfully, Chase listened to De Matteo, put that scene in the vault, and “Long Term Parking” landed a long-term parking spot in the annals of TV history.
Adriana’s death represents The Sopranos at its absolute best. The Sopranos was the most effective when it brought a chilling sense of realism to familiar mob movie tropes. We’ve seen plenty of gangster movies where a hitman is sent to dispatch an unsuspecting target, but we’d never seen it portrayed so vividly through the eyes of that unsuspecting target. The show tricks us much in the same way that Sil tricks Adriana.
We’ve seen plenty of gangster movies where a mob boss spots a rat in witness protection out in the wild and goes after revenge, but we’ve never seen that same mob boss balancing his pursuit of vengeance with his responsibilities as a father. The Sopranos’ mob boss didn’t just kill Febby; he got his daughter to her college tour on time.
The Sopranos
10/10
- Release Date
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1999 – 2007-00-00
- Network
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HBO
- Showrunner
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David Chase
- Directors
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Tim Van Patten, John Patterson, Alan Taylor, Jack Bender, Steve Buscemi, Daniel Attias, David Chase, Andy Wolk, Danny Leiner, David Nutter, James Hayman, Lee Tamahori, Lorraine Senna, Matthew Penn, Mike Figgis, Nick Gomez, Peter Bogdanovich, Phil Abraham, Rodrigo García
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James Gandolfini
Tony Soprano
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