![]() Like in real life, mysteries often went unsolved. But back in the early aughts, no TV drama possessed as much coglioni as The Sopranos, which even before its ambiguous finale, had little interest in clean endings. “His house looked like shit,” Christopher responds, fully serious.) And it is also shorthand for the type of one-off showstopper that small-screen auteurs now periodically attempt to pull off. Guy was an interior decorator,” Paulie says at one point, referring to the elusive man in question. On top of being one of the most memorable episodes of The Sopranos, “Pine Barrens” is possibly the funniest. ![]() It was just a really different way to spend an hour.” “It was a totally new location for all these characters and more or less a self-contained episode. “It was very much a departure for the series,” says Sopranos writer-producer Terence Winter. Yet 20 years after “Pine Barrens” first aired, the duo’s evening out in the cold is what fans remember most. And the episode’s B- and C-plots, one involving Tony Soprano’s tumultuous love life, are far more consequential to the overall narrative than the two wiseguys’ misadventure. The fate of their target is never revealed. The men who venture deep into the Garden State’s tree-covered expanse, Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri and Christopher Moltisanti, learn no lessons. “It has a fairy tale quality.”īut unlike a fairy tale, there’s no moral. “In the woods, in the snow,” says David Chase, the show’s creator. The 11th episode of the show’s third season, “Pine Barrens” is a cross between an anti-buddy comedy and a living nightmare at once hilarious, absurdist, and terrifying. But two decades ago, it was avant-garde, even for a television series as radical as The Sopranos. Today, it’s the kind of premise that a studio might instantly green-light as a budget-conscious horror movie. They bond, bicker, and threaten each other, until they’re finally rescued in the light of the next morning. As day turns into night and cold turns into much colder, the gangsters give up their search and go into survival mode. Then he vanishes, leaving only a trail of blood. Two mobsters chase a seemingly invincible man through the South Jersey forest. In May 2021, The Ringer published this oral history on one of the show’s most beloved episodes (and one of Sirico’s most renowned performances), “Pine Barrens.” Editor’s note, July 8, 2022: On Friday, actor Tony Sirico, who played Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri on The Sopranos, died at age 79.
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