The Sopranos (The Sopranos episode) Michael Santoro play Irina and Father Phil respectively. For future episodes, these roles were recast with Oksana Lada and Paul Schulze. Drea De Matteo was originally simply cast as a restaurant hostess for this one episode only. The filmmakers liked her performance, and her character was developed into the role of Adriana La Cerva in future episodes. The pork store used as a meeting place is Centanni's Meat Market, a real butcher shop in Elizabeth, New Jersey. However, because the shop had a steady business and because local business owners were annoyed with the incidental effects of having a television
The Sopranos who co-created "Almost Grown" with Chase in 1988. In total, 20 writers or writing teams (22 people) are credited with writing episodes of "The Sopranos". Of these, Tim Van Patten and Maria Laurino receive a single story credit, and eight others are credited with writing a sole episode. The most prolific writers of the series were Chase (30 credited episodes, including story credits), Winter (25 episodes), Green and Burgess (22 episodes), Weiner (12 episodes), and Renzulli (9 episodes). Many of the directors had previously worked on television series and independent films. The most frequent directors of the series were Tim