Lorraine Bracco pitched HGTV on My Big Italian Adventure

The New York Times

“I said to myself, what do I have to lose? What is the downside?” the former Sopranos star said of deciding to buy a ramshackle house in Sicily and restore it to its former glory with HGTV cameras rolling. Bracco was a fan of home-renovation shows, so she directly contacted Loren Ruch, HGTV’s group senior vice president of development and production. Ruch said that Bracco’s approach “was completely not our typical way of finding a show, but it felt right.” Ruch added: “If it was a celebrity that just asked us to buy them a vacation home, we would probably politely decline." (HGTV tells The New York Times that it covered its own production costs for My Big Italian Adventure and compensated Bracco for appearing in the series, but that she paid the costs for the home renovation herself.) Ruch said that Bracco’s proposal “felt rooted in passion and love to us — that’s what we’re always looking for.” In total, Bracco estimated that the home restoration cost her between $250,000 and $300,000, considerably more than the $150,000 she had budgeted for the project. “One euro, my a**,” she said. Surprisingly, Bracco was recognized more in Italy for starring in TNT's Rizzoli & Isles than for The Sopranos and Goodfellas.