The Sopranos – “Pine Barrens” (HBO)

Writer Terence Winter and director Steve Buscemi take us behind the scenes of one of the greatest of all Sopranos episodes, Season Three’s “Pine Barrens,” the one where Paulie Walnuts and Christopher Moltisanti are hunted by a Russian gangster in a snowy stretch of New Jersey forest.

“Pine Barrens” is a great example of The Sopranos‘ knack for splitting the difference between serialized, long-form storytelling, in which an entire season is united by one or more ongoing plot strands, and the more traditional sort of TV narrative, where characters and conflicts are introduced at the start of an episode and resolved neatly at the end, in the manner of a lot of mid-century American short fiction. Well, maybe not neatly: the end of “Pine Barrens” is classic Sopranos in that it brings the tale to an inevitable yet surprising conclusion but also a prankishly frustrating one, denying both characters and viewers the closure they crave. Its wrap-up invites speculation not just about what happened but whether there’s actually anything to speculate on, or if the storytellers’ interests lie elsewhere. In that respect, it feels like a harbinger of the show’s notorious 2007 cut-to-black ending, which fans argue about to this day.

In attendance: Series creator and executive producer David Chase; co-executive producer and co-writer Terence Winter; director and actor Steve Buscemi.