Kessler threw himself into the show, staying on unpaid at the end of the season to watch the shooting of the finale, which he'd co-written. After that, he said, Chase allowed him to come to Los Angeles to sit in on two months of editing, asking him not to mention it to the other writers. He became close with the Chase family, often going out to dinner with them. Kessler's agent, who happened to also represent Chase, told him that Chase was considering the possibility of someday handing the show off to another writer and that he, Kessler, was being groomed.

Chase dismisses that idea outright, saying he had never thought about handing the show over to anybody. In fact, he says, he had been growing increasingly unhappy with Kessler's work as the writers reconvened for season three. "He had written a really good episode, and then it seemed to me that it was declining after that," Chase says. "Some people understand this completely strange, bizarre mind-set of organized crime. Some people don't."

On July 21, 2000, at about 8:30 a.m., the nominations for that year's Emmys were announced. They included one for Chase and Kessler as the writers of "Funhouse," the season-two finale. Chase had written the first thirty pages: Tony's long fever dream, occasioned by a bout of food poisoning and punctuated with graphic bathroom sound effects, in which his subconscious reveals what he's known for a long time but refused to acknowledge, that his deputy, Big Pussy, is a rat. Kessler wrote the second half, in which Pussy paid with his life, meeting a watery end.

As Kessler remembers it, he spent the next ten minutes fielding congratulatory phone calls. Then came one from Chase's assistant, saying that Chase wanted to see him in the office. When Kessler arrived, Chase closed the door and sat down.

"I guess the timing isn't great," he said, "but I think I need to end this relationship."

Kessler, astonished, asked what he meant. "I think you've lost the voice of the show," Chase said.

"David, the last thing we wrote was nominated for an Emmy, less than an hour ago," Kessler said. "If you felt this way, why didn't you say something?"


Kessler left work and went to see his brother, Glenn, an actor and writer, at the SoHo apartment they shared: "As soon as I started to tell him what happened, I burst into tears. Like the embarrassing, childlike crying where you can't catch your breath. The show had been my entire life." As he sat there, sobbing, a call came from Chase.

"He was asking my advice on writing a scene. Like, would Tony say this or something else. No mention of what had just happened," Kessler says. Two days later, Chase told him that he'd get his second chance, but that his next script had better come in "production ready," with no need of revision. Given Chase's way of working—and really any showrunner's—this was as definitive a death sentence as a fish in the mail. Sure enough, several months later—and after the two had lost the Emmy to The West Wing—Kessler was summoned once again to Chase's office. This time it was definitive.

"I've never seen people get fired so fast. You walk into David's office and ten seconds later the door opens and you have your shit in a box. He does not mince words," Winter says. This time, he didn't even see that much. Winter called Kessler a week later, wondering if he was sick, since he hadn't been showing up for work. Chase had failed to mention the dismissal.



Chase's memory of the Kessler incident isn't nearly as dramatic as Kessler's. "It's never good to be fired," he tells me. "Maybe there's no such thing as amicable. But it didn't appear to me I was cold when I did it. Although, look at the message: It probably can't come through very nicely." About the unfortunate timing around the Emmy nomination, he says, "It's hard for me to picture getting the news the nominations came out and then telling him, by the way, you're fired. I guess I'm capable of such thoughtlessness, but it's hard for me to picture." When told Kessler's version, complete with its overtones of Freud and betrayal, he says drily, "I might have had more on my mind than he did."


One of the pleasures of the movie had been working again with James Gandolfini, who had survived Tony Soprano to go on to a varied career on film and stage. It had been an artistically challenging experience, Chase says. With The Sopranos, he was accustomed to a certain way of telling stories. "I had gotten used to the idea that things could be taken back and fixed. Or that we could go take a little excursion, check out Patsy Parisi's wife or something. I thought I had cut all that out, but I really hadn't. The script was too discursive. So we had a lot of film that had to be cut," he says.