For the first time in 18 years, David Chase, the auteur behind HBO’s legendary mobster drama The Sopranos, is finally making another TV show. Chase’s new project is just as fascinating as his tale of a mafia boss going through a mid-life crisis. Provisionally titled Project: MKUltra, this series will delve into a secret CIA program which breached human rights.
Just as The Sopranos took true-story elements from the life of actual mob don Vincent Palermo, we can expect Project: MKUltra to be a dramatization of events that happened in reality. In this way, the series will lift the lid on one of the most disturbing things that American intelligence agencies have ever been involved in.
The MKUltra program tested experimental drugs on human subjects with the aim of changing their behavior, controlling their actions, and even splitting their personalities. The modeling behind the project is eerily reminiscent of how the process of severance works, in Dan Erickson’s sci-fi thriller of the same name on Apple TV.
David Chase Is Working On His First TV Show Since The Sopranos
David Chase’s new show Project: MKUltra is his first work as a TV creator, writer and producer since The Sopranos ended after six seasons in 2007. At the age of 80, Chase has already completed his magnum opus, and has no reason to return with another series except his passion for the project.
We have reason to expect something pretty special from this new HBO show, then. Indeed, Project: MKUltra sounds like it has all the ingredients to be another gripping, gritty and darkly humorous neo-noir masterpiece from Chase, but one which captures the zeitgeist of the 2020s, when shadowy, state-level conspiracies and covert attempts at mind control are global realities.
MKUltra Will Be The True Story Of A CIA Mind Control Program
Project: MKUltra will explore CIA experiments which took place between 1953 and 1973, involving the administering of various mind-altering techniques to human subjects without their knowledge. These techniques included secretly dosing people with psychoactive drugs such as LSD, subjecting them to electroshock treatment, and hypnotizing them under false pretenses.
Those chosen as subjects for the experiments were typically prison inmates, mentally ill patients in psychiatric hospitals, and students and addicts who were duped by the idea of access to free recreational drugs. The United States Senate ruled in 1977 that the program had been carrying out illegal activity (via Public Intelligence).
In fact, the work of MKUltra was directly based on barbaric experiments carried out by Nazi scientists at Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps in the 1940s. Some of these very same scientists even worked on the CIA’s program, including high-ranking Reich Health Leader Kurt Blome. However, not one person has ever been prosecuted for their involvement in MKUltra.
The express aim of the program was to develop techniques to alter and control the minds of individuals deemed enemies of or threats to U.S. interests, whether prisoners under interrogation, foreign agents at large, or subversive elements of the American population. While it failed to achieve anything constructive, MKUltra was responsible for several deaths, and the torture of thousands.
The Show Will Feel Like A True-Story Version Of Severance
Image via Apple TV+
Project: MKUltra’s dark historical subject matter will undoubtedly draw direct comparisons with an entirely fictional TV series about a centralized institution applying mind-control techniques. Severance’s override protocols would have been very useful to the team of CIA scientists working on breaking down the psychological makeup of their subjects.
This Apple TV sci-fi thriller show depicts a powerful corporation using mental manipulation techniques to split people’s minds into two distinct personas, one of which is fully subservient to the corporation itself. Much like Severance, MKUltra will portray a central power’s attempts to forcibly subordinate the minds of individuals to its own needs. The difference is, it really happened.
This story originally appeared on Screenrant
