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David Chase is returning to television. The Sopranos creator will write MKUltra, a limited series on the CIA’s secret cold war-era mind control program, for HBO.
The project, first reported by Deadline, will be Chase’s first series since the era-defining HBO mob drama. The dramatic thriller, based on John Lisle’s book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra, focuses on Gottlieb, a notorious scientist known as the “black sorcerer” who led Project MKUltra, the CIA’s covert psychedelic program that tested hallucinogenic drugs, hypnosis, and torture on willing and unwilling subjects from 1953 until it was halted in 1973.
Gottlieb oversaw such experiments in the name of national security, to counter the perceived threat of Soviet and Chinese “brainwashing” techniques. He’s also known as the inadvertent father of the LSD counterculture, as he introduced the drug to the CIA in the 1950s, in an effort to explore the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. Some test subjects were volunteers from the agency, military officers and college students who had knowledge of the nature of the experiments. Others, however, were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and sex workers coerced or misled into drug dosages that in some cases left permanent damage.
Chase won five Emmys for the Sopranos, a complex drama about a New Jersey mafia family widely credited with starting the golden age of “prestige” television. Since the show, starring the late James Gandolfini, wrapped in 2007, Chase has mostly focused on feature films. He wrote, directed and produced the 2012 film Not Fade Away. He also co-wrote and produced The Many Saints of Newark, a Sopranos prequel starring Gandolfini’s son, Michael, that premiered in 2021.
His return to television comes after he declared the era of ambitious TV dramas in part defined by the Sopranos to be a “blip” that is now over. Speaking to the Times for the show’s 25th anniversary, the 78-year-old claimed that he had been told to “dumb down” his scripts in meetings with studio heads and warned against making television that was too complex.
Chase attributed that view in part to his experience trying to make a show with the screenwriter Hannah Fidell about a high-end sex worker who ends up in witness protection. In numerous meetings with executives, he said, they were told “the unfortunate truth” that it was too complex. “Who is this all really for?” he said. “I guess the stockholders?”
“We seem to be confused and audiences can’t keep their minds on things, so we can’t make anything that makes too much sense, takes our attention and requires an audience to focus,” he added. “And as for streaming executives? It is getting worse. We’re going back to where we were.”
