Creator of The Sopranos David Chase onJames Gandolfini's Sudden Death

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David Chase has produced, written, and directed critically acclaimed television shows such as influential Peabody Award-winning HBO blockbuster drama series The Sopranos. The Sopranos, which he created, is the most financially successful series in the history of cable television and is acknowledged as one of the greatest television series of all time. Chase’s directorial feature film debut, Not Fade Away, was selected as the centerpiece of the 50th NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL in 2012. The film was a music-driven coming of age story set in suburbia in the '60s, and was released in by Paramount Pictures in December 2012.

With the Sopranos, Chase created a psychodrama about a family of Jersey mobsters, the program springboarded to a large degree from the sociopathic psyche of the main character, mafia don Tony Soprano, James Gandolfini, revealed during the mobster's numerous therapy sessions on the couch with Lorraine Bracco. Nevertheless, in true ensemble fashion, Chase also crafted an idiosyncratic and immensely colorful group of supporting characters and arced them deliberately and calculatedly as the seasons developed.

Chase began writing for network television and eventually became a writer and producer on the classic NBC show The Rockford Files. In 1978, he won his first Emmy when the show was named Outstanding Dramatic Series. In 1980, Chase earned his second Emmy, this time for Outstanding Writing in a Movie for Television, the acclaimed Off the Minnesota Strip. He also received the Writers Guild of America Award for that film.

Chase first directed a self-penned episode of the ‘80s incarnation of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. He continued writing, directing, and producing, garnering further Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series with Northern Exposure and the civil rights drama I’ll Fly Away.

Inspired by William Wellman’s The Public Enemy and his early years in New Jersey, Chase created and developed the HBO series The Sopranos. The show, which premiered January 10, 1999, is recognized as a phenomenon in American television and popular culture, winning a multitude of awards, 21 Emmys and five Golden Globes among them.