1997 - 1997
The Last Don is a six-hour CBS miniseries that aired across two three-hour parts in May 1997, adapted from Mario Puzo's 1996 novel of the same name. It was Puzo's attempted follow-up to The Godfather, set in a parallel mafia world roughly fifty years down the road, and CBS swung for the fences by turning it into network event television of the sort that barely exists anymore. Graeme Clifford, a veteran of big-canvas TV drama, directed. The running time was chunky enough to allow for real ensemble work, and the production values landed somewhere between a glossy prime-time drama and a theatrical feature pretending to be one.
Danny Aiello leads the cast as Don Domenico "Dom" Clericuzio, the aging patriarch of the Clericuzio crime family. At his grandson's christening, Dom announces a decision that sets the whole story in motion. He wants his family out of the traditional rackets and into legitimate Las Vegas gambling, a pivot that will take years, cost bodies, and test every loyalty inside the Clericuzio bloodline and their extended network.
What follows tracks the generational fallout of that choice. Dom's enforcer, his nephew by marriage Pippi De Lena, is asked to square old obligations with the new direction. Pippi's son Cross De Lena is groomed as the face of the Vegas operation. Dom's daughter Rose Marie, played by Kirstie Alley, carries her own wounds from the family's earlier years. And Dante Clericuzio, the grandson at the centre of Dom's plans, is already turning into something Dom did not quite intend.
The miniseries leans on a cast of late-80s and mid-90s mainstays who give the thing more weight than the script sometimes earns.
Jason Gedrick
Cross De Lena
Seymour Cassel
Ensemble cast member
Mario Puzo
Source novelist (The Last Don, 1996)
Daryl Hannah
Athena Aquitane
Rory Cochrane
Dante Clericuzio
Graeme Clifford
Director
Lloyd Bochner
Ensemble cast member
Tim Matheson
Ensemble cast member
It is a proper ensemble, and on the page the bench is deep.
Puzo spent his whole writing life circling the same question. What does a mafia family actually want? In The Godfather the answer is respect and a seat at the table. In The Last Don the answer is out. Dom Clericuzio is a man who has looked at the sixties, the seventies, and the eighties, and concluded that the American mob has no exit strategy. His solution is to move the family into Las Vegas gaming while the opportunity is open, launder the past, and hand his grandchildren something legitimate.
That is the spine of the novel and the miniseries both. The Vegas pivot is not an ending so much as an attempted laundering of bloodline, and everyone in the family has a different view on whether it is even possible. The younger generation, Cross especially, has to decide whether he is inheriting a clean business or a clean cover. The older generation, Pippi especially, has to decide what the cost of compliance is when the Don asks for one last round of old-style work.
Woven through all of this is Puzo's other favourite theme: Hollywood as a mirror of organised crime. Athena's storyline, and the film-business scenes generally, let the miniseries argue that Las Vegas and Los Angeles are two versions of the same machine. The mafia sells fantasy for money, and so does the movie industry. Dom sees it. Cross learns it.
Visually the thing is pure mid-90s network. Warm interiors, a lot of dark wood, Vegas sequences that lean on neon and velvet, and a tasteful score that points at Nino Rota without actually using him. Graeme Clifford stages the christening in a way that knows exactly what it is referencing, and the opening act is the strongest single stretch of the show.
Where it shows its age is in the rhythm. Network miniseries of the period were cut to fit ad breaks and hit commercial beats, and that pacing is baked in. Scenes land their moment and move on a bit more tidily than a prestige cable show would today. That was the format. If you accept it, the thing breathes. If you are coming to it from the breathing room of The Sopranos or Boardwalk Empire, the first hour will feel a bit brisk.
CBS got its numbers. The Last Don pulled strong ratings across both nights of broadcast, and CBS greenlit The Last Don II for 1998, which most viewers now agree is the weaker of the two. The original miniseries was received as competent prestige television, not a revelation. Critics were kind to the cast, polite about the script, and noted that Puzo on page had a density of interior life that television struggled to translate in two nights.
Its legacy is odd. It arrived at the tail end of the mid-90s network event era, a format that was already being outpaced by what HBO was about to do. Within three years The Sopranos would redefine the mafia story for television, and everything that came after, Boardwalk Empire, Gomorrah, Peaky Blinders, Gangs of London, Kin, Godfather of Harlem and MobLand, would owe a debt to that new grammar rather than to the Puzo-adaptation approach taken here.
The Last Don is an artifact. That is not an insult. It sits in a very specific pocket of television history, the last gasp of the network miniseries as a prestige vehicle, and it carries the weight of Puzo's late-career thinking about what the American mafia was supposed to do with itself when the FBI finally came for it properly. Aiello, Mantegna and Cochrane are worth the watch on their own. The Vegas pivot at the heart of the story is a quietly interesting piece of crime-fiction thinking. Dom Clericuzio's decision to move the family into legitimacy, and his calm acceptance of what it will cost, is the kind of patriarch writing Puzo did better than almost anyone.
If you are a Puzo completist or a 90s-TV archaeologist, go in with the right expectations and it holds up. If you are a cable-prestige viewer coming in cold, come for Aiello's face in close-up, stay for Mantegna doing more with less, and do not skip to [The Last Don II] after.
Don Fargas
Ensemble cast member
Jane Milmore
Ensemble cast member
Patti D'Arbanville
Ensemble cast member
Michelle Forbes
Ensemble cast member
Danny Aiello
Don Domenico "Dom" Clericuzio
Kirstie Alley
Rose Marie Clericuzio
Joe Mantegna
Pippi De Lena