This post is for subscribers to the What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus tier. Click here to upgrade your subscription.
Alan Sepinwall
After devoting an entire (free) mailbag last week to Rod Serling-related questions, I promise that our regular installment of Ask Alan will be entirely-Twilight Zone free. Please send all future questions to alan@whatsalanwatching.com.
Paul: We just passed the fifth anniversary of The Many Saints of Newark movie Now that the dust has long settled, it could be a good chance to discuss what the movie was and was not.
For a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it was released during that early-Covid period when Warner Bros. was putting every new movie simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max, The Many Saints of Newark is a classic case of what various film podcasts refer to as a Movie That Doesn't Exist. You may already have forgotten that there even was a Sopranos prequel film that featured voiceover by Michael Imperioli as the ghost of Christopher Moltisanti (whose father Dickie is the main character), Ray Liotta playing identical twins(*), and young versions of Tony (played by James Gandolfini's son Michael!), Livia, Paulie Walnuts, and many other Sopranos characters, and that it was written by David Chase himself, and directed by Sopranos veteran Alan Taylor.