Forget Young Tony, the ‘Sopranos’ Prequel Should Be About Janice

With the Sopranos 20th anniversary upon us and a Sopranos prequel movie — The Many Saints of Newark — on the way, we’re as Sporanos-focused as a culture as we’ve been in quite some time. But while it’s hard to be anything but excited about David Chase re-entering this world to bring us something new, the prequel idea leaves me cold. I realize that with the finale meant to stay a finale forever, the only way to continue the Sopranos’ story is to look backward, but with Many Saints star Alessandro Nivola confirming that a young Tony Soprano will be an “important” character in the film (though Nivola’s Dickie Moltisanti will be the protagonist), I have to admit that it’s not Tony’s story I want to see more of. If we’re going to expand upon the Soprano family history, the sibling they should really focus on is Janice.

Played by the fantastic and undervalued Aida Turturro in the original series, Janice was Tony’s black-sheep sister who returned to New Jersey in season 2 just as her mother was dying and ended up flipping Tony’s world upside down and nearly Lady Macbeth-ing her way into a coup against him. After that, tensions downshifted into an eternal passive-aggressive sibling friction (the Soprano family way!), but there were always hints of Janice’s rebellious childhood and how she and her mother clashed. For all her co-opting of her family’s deep Italian traditions (and also benefitting from its mob ties), Janice was also notably more New Age-y and (self-consciously) Bohemian as a way to set herself apart from the world she grew up in. It all added up to a rather maddening character, more often than not. Sopranos fans tended to hate Janice, which made sense given that the show was from Tony’s perspective, and Janice was forever a pain in her brother’s ass.

But what if we looked at the Soprano family through a different? perspective for once?

A Sopranos prequel focusing on Janice would solve a whole mess of potential problems and would open things up in some genuinely exciting ways.

Problem #1: Origin Stories Are Played Out: This will end up being an issue no matter who the Sopranos prequel focuses on, but as long as it’s not Tony, we won’t have the Han Solo problem of a story that simply checks all the boxes of stuff we already knew. And if it’s Janice, then it won’t be some “Make the Mafia Great Again” series that harkens back to the days when the mafia “was good.”

Problem #2: Another Difficult Man? If origin stories are played out, then antihero stories are CERTAINLY played out. Especially a story we’ve already seen! We spent six years inside Tony Sopranos head, with his dreams and rages and fears and loves and panic attacks. Give us a mob story with a woman at the center — and a particularly difficult woman at that.

Problem #3: The Tony Soprano Fanboys:If there was one thing Chase kept returning to across the series, it was a stubbornness about keeping the audience from liking Tony too much. He had to keep underlining Tony’s terrible actions to keep reminding the audience that he’s not the one they should be cheering for. (They still did, but that’s another discussion.) Imagine if Chase then asked the Sopranos audience to look at things through the eyes of Janice, a character they’ve largely hated (for bad reasons).

Any new Sopranos series deserves to be exciting and unexpected. For that, there’s only one family member unhinged enough to be worth following down a rabbit hole into her childhood. Let give Janice her time in the sun.

Where to stream The Sopranos