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The acclaimed creator is set for a return to television. The iconic mob drama visionary will write Project MKUltra, a mini-series focusing on the CIA's covert cold war-era psychological manipulation project for HBO.

About the Series

This new venture, initially revealed by entertainment insiders, will be Chase's first series following the era-defining HBO mob drama. The dramatic thriller, based on John Lisle's non-fiction work "Project Mind Control", zeroes in on Sidney Gottlieb, known as the "dark magician" who oversaw Project MKUltra, the CIA's covert hallucinogen experiments that tested psychedelic substances, hypnosis, and torture on volunteers and non-consenting individuals from 1953 until it was halted in the early 1970s.

Research Activities

Gottlieb directed such experiments in the name of state safety, to combat the alleged danger of Soviet and Chinese mind control methods. He's also known as the inadvertent father of the psychedelic movement, as he introduced the substance to the agency in the 1950s, in an attempt to investigate the possibilities of controlling human consciousness. Certain participants were willing individuals from the agency, armed forces personnel and university attendees who had awareness of the nature of the experiments. Additional subjects, on the other hand, were psychiatric inmates, incarcerated persons, drug addicts, and prostitutes coerced or misled into drug dosages that in certain instances resulted in long-term harm.

Creator's Background

Chase won five Emmys for his hit series, a complex drama about a New Jersey-based crime syndicate broadly acknowledged with starting the peak era of high-quality TV. Since the show, featuring the late James Gandolfini, concluded in 2007, the creator has mostly focused on feature films. He authored, helmed, and produced the 2012 movie "Not Fade Away". Additionally, he collaborated on The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to The Sopranos starring Michael Gandolfini, that premiered in 2021.

Return to Television

This comeback to TV comes after he stated the era of sophisticated television series in part defined by the Sopranos to be a "temporary phase" that is now finished. In an interview with a leading newspaper for the show’s 25th anniversary, the 78-year-old asserted that he had been instructed to "simplify" his screenplays in meetings with studio heads and warned against making TV content that was too complex.

He attributed that perspective in partly to his experience trying to make a series with the writer Hannah Fidell about a luxury escort who ends up in witness protection. In multiple discussions with executives, he said, they were informed "the harsh reality" that it was not straightforward enough. "What audience is this targeting?" he remarked. "Presumably, the investors?"

“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.”