Museum of the Moving Image’s New “Sopranos” Display Pulls Back the Curtain on TV’s Most Famous Rooms
Before Tony Soprano ever sat down in Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s office, the team behind The Sopranos was doing homework that looked less like Hollywood and more like a case file. At the Museum of the Moving Image (MoMI) in Queens, a new exhibition display foregrounds the show’s early research and design process, tracing how David Chase’s New Jersey saga moved from pilot to full-scale series production.
At the center is a vitrine devoted to the months leading up to the pilot: clippings on the Genovese crime family, pages labeled “Wiseguy Research,” and a chart that slots characters into a mafia hierarchy. The materials suggest that while Chase drew on the northern New Jersey milieu he grew up around, the writers’ room pursued granular detail. One document records an inquiry into the Chicago crime network to understand how infidelity was handled in mob marriages. “The wives look the other way,” the source notes.
From that paper trail, the display expands outward into the show’s physical world. Four surrounding walls are organized around the key interiors that became as recognizable as any character: the Soprano family home, the Bada Bing strip club, Dr. Melfi’s psychiatry office, and Satriale’s Pork Store, the meat market that doubles as a meeting place.
For the pilot, most of these spaces were filmed on location, with the exception of Melfi’s office. When the series went into production, production designer Dean Taucher rebuilt the sets at Silvercup Studios in Queens. Chase, however, insisted that exterior shots remain rooted in New Jersey, preserving the show’s geographic specificity even as its interiors migrated to a soundstage.
MoMI pairs each location with an episode clip and script pages, alongside concept art and ground plans that have been in the museum’s collection for years. Curator Barbara Miller said the goal is to show the mechanics of television-making by placing design materials in direct conversation with writing materials. “By joining the design materials to the writing materials we wanted to provide a closer look at how The Sopranos, and a television series more broadly, moves from that initial pilot stage into series production,” she said. “It uncovers the mystery of how these things happen. It’s work; it’s not magic.”
The psychological dimension that distinguished The Sopranos from earlier screen mafiosi is anchored, fittingly, in Melfi’s office. Ed Pisano’s original design — drawings of which were previously gifted to the museum — renders the room in hardwood and cold light, an austere circular space that feels both clinical and inescapable. In the pilot, Tony (played by James Gandolfini) protests, “Look, it’s impossible for me to talk to a psychiatrist.” The set’s geometry quietly contradicts him: there is nowhere to hide, and no easy exit.
Those sessions orbit Tony’s volatile relationship with his mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), a character loosely inspired by Chase’s own mother. The display also reveals a major early story plan that never made it to screen: Chase initially intended for Tony to kill Livia at the end of the season, an idea later abandoned in response to the character’s force and Marchand’s rapport with the production.
Elsewhere, the exhibition underscores how set decoration carried narrative weight. The contrast between Livia’s home and Tony’s house is presented as a visual measure of ambition and inheritance. Livia lives in what the show frames as a generic middle-class box; Tony occupies a sprawling suburban mansion outfitted with faux-Renaissance paintings by Michael Zansky, crystal wall lamps, and a swimming pool. Concept art shows Tony at the top of his foyer staircase, surveying the space in a tight polo shirt, crowned by a halo-like glow — a domestic refuge with a faintly ironic sanctity.
That veneer is punctured by the show’s other headquarters. The Bada Bing’s backroom leans into dim light, a pool table, and risqué posters; even the club’s sign, the display notes, was inspired by truck mud flaps. Satriale’s, meanwhile, recreates a meat market in Elizabeth, New Jersey, used for the pilot. For the series, the production took over a plot in nearby Kearny to build the set, adding a smiling pig to the roof.
Taken together, the materials make a case for The Sopranos as a feat of craft as much as storytelling: a world built from research binders, floor plans, and hard decisions about character and place. In MoMI’s presentation, the show’s familiar rooms read less like backdrops than like evidence — of labor, intention, and the careful engineering of a modern American myth.
