In the more than twenty years since The Sopranos went off the air, HBO‘s hit drama series has become the foundational TV show for decades and arguably the most important American TV show of the past thirty years, and maybe ever. Despite the critical acclaim it achieved at the time, and the status it has earned in the year since its ending, series creator David Chase hasn’t done anything else in the realm of television as a follow-up. Though he has directed a few films and even wrote The Sopranos prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, he hasn’t been back to TV since 2007, until now.
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Deadline brings word that David Chase is officially coming back to HBO with a new TV project, his first in almost two decades. According to the trade, Chase is developing a limited series for the premium cable network, all about the CIA’s Project: MKUltra. As students of history may know, MKUltra was designed by the CIA as a testing ground for psychedelic drugs and other means that could be used to weaken interrogation subjects, or perhaps control minds. If it sounds familiar to Stranger Things fans, there’s a reason for that.
The Sopranos Creator Returns to TV for an MKUltra Limited Series
According to the trade, Chase’s new TV series will be based on the non-fiction book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra from author John Lisle. Chase will pen the series. An official description of the show calls it a “dramatic thriller” focused on Sidney Gottlieb, the man in charge of MKUltra and who signed off on its experiments, some of which were done on people without their knowledge.
Elements of the MKUltra program, notably the way they utilized drugs like LSD on unwitting participants, have been the baseline for TV shows and movies for years, but the bigger picture of Gottlieb’s work in the CIA and the larger ripples of MKUltra have never really been told. Among them was Gottlieb’s work in government-sanctioned assassination attempts.
Stranger Things, of course, also utilized pieces of the true story of MKUltra to set up its larger narrative. In the context of the series, Eleven is actually the daughter of an MKUltra test subject, with the implication being that this is the source of her telekinetic abilities. Naturally, this sort of thing is not reflective in the reality of MKUltra, which, of course, did not result in the opening of doors to alternate dimensions like the Upside Down. That said, the same true story being the starting point for the Netflix hit and a new series from the creator of The Sopranos is a funny one.
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