Review: Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos

Woke Up This Morning: The Definitive Oral History of The Sopranos by Michael Imperioli
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

While I was a Sopranos fan when it originally aired, I haven’t thought much about it in the last five or ten years. But I always thought it was entertaining and groundbreaking television. I recently saw the prequel and then noticed this book was out. I picked it up.

The book is written as a series of conversations between two of the actors on the series and a number of cast and crew members from the original show. Ends up that this was originally a podcast, with guests for each episode that were interviewed. The authors then re-arranged snippets of the interviews to correspond to chapters relating to the development of the pilot, each season, and some special chapters on the writers and the music. The authors wrote short introduction paragraphs in front of each snippet, so you had some context and a description of the speaker. I found this quite useful in reading this book. I also applaud the consistent inclusion of the names of each speaker for each bit of conversation that they had. So many times I’ve read books like this that don’t annotate the conversations with the speakers and they get totally confusing. This was much nicer. The overall effect of chopping up conversations and refitting them into this season-based format wasn’t perfect. For instance some episodes were described by multiple people, sometimes in different ways, while other episodes were barely or not even mentioned. I suppose if you wanted to listen to the original podcasts you could get the same information divided up by guest instead of topic, but that would take a long, long time to go through. I tend to prefer audiobooks, but when I listened to a sample of this audiobook, those familiar characters from the show sound like they aged, and they seemed to be speaking very slowly. If they clipped together the original audio snippets, that would be a saving grace, perhaps, but I couldn’t tell it that happened with the sample.

For those who want to hear some of those stories about the actors and writers and directors that explain what happened during the show, this was a fun way to hear those stories. You really get the feel that the participants were all very positive on their experiences – most of the stories are glowing. Glad I read it – I really enjoyed it.


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