In “Inside the Episode,” writers and directors reflect on the making of their Emmy-winning episodes. The death of Adriana La Cerva (Drea de Matteo) on “The Sopranos” was quick. The build-up to it? Not so much.
As the fifth season of the HBO mob drama wound down in spring 2004, gossip magazines breathlessly devoted “will they/won’t they” ink from “inside sources” weighing in on whether the show would kill such a beloved character. (Not to mention the when, where, why and how of it all). But in the season’s penultimate episode, written by Terence Winter and directed by Tim Van Patten, Silvio (Steven Van Zandt) took Adriana on a one-way drive into the woods.
She’s lured into the car by a trumped-up story that her fiancé, Christopher (Michael Imperioli), had attempted suicide. In actuality, Christopher had chosen his other family and given her up as being a rat for the FBI. “From decades of TV, people expected that something will happen at the last minute and they’ll let her go,” Winter says of the build-up to the episode in the zeitgeist.
He reminds that, since the Season 1 episode “College” when a daddy-daughter road trip veers into a gruesome death, “Sopranos” never went by that playbook. With Adriana, Winter says, “People still wanted to convince themselves, ‘Oh, she got away.’ They still wanted the happy ending.
” “There is no happy ending here. These are horrible people,” Winter says. But “Long Term Parking” — which ran.
