Jon Hamm broke out thanks to Mad Men, a show set in the 1960s where Hamm played a morally flexible ad executive. His new series, American Hostage, is set in the late ’70s, but it’s hard to look at Hamm wearing these sharp suits and not get a little nostalgic.
That said, the details of the two shows are quite different. American Hostage is about the real-life incident where Indianapolis resident Tony Kiritsis kidnapped his mortgage broker, Richard O. Hall, after Hall refused to allow Kiritsis additional time for payment. Holed up in his apartment, Kiritsis held Hall at gunpoint for 63 hours, often calling into radio station WIBC, where newsman Fred Heckman broadcast what Kiritsis had to say.
In 2022, Shawn Christensen directed a scripted podcast series about the incident, starring Jon Hamm as Heckman. Now, Eileen Myers and The Night Agent creator Shawn Ryan are producing a TV adaptation. Check out the first trailer below:
The original American Hostage podcast also starred Joseph Perrino, Carla Gugino, and Dylan Baker, but it looks like only Hamm is making the jump to TV. The American Hostage TV show will co-star Mireille Enos (The Killing), William Jackson Harper (The Good Place), and Giovanni Ribisi (A Million Ways to Die in the West), who will play Tony Kiritsis.
The trailer promises us “63 hours of total chaos.” It almost looks like a movie, but American Hostage is actually an eight-episode TV show. The first two episodes will drop together on MGM+ on Sunday, Sept. 20.
Although Kiritsis is obviously an important part of the story, the trailer makes it look like the show will focus more on Fred Heckman as he wrestles with the dilemma of whether to give the kidnapper a platform. Doing so would raise Heckman’s own profile even as it turns what should be a serious news story into a lurid entertainment spectacle. That’s likely what the trailer means when it says that the incident “changed the news forever.”
We’ll know soon enough where American Hostage ranks on the list of great movies about hostages and hostage takers. In the meantime, you can see Hamm on Your Friends and Neighbors, where he plays an unemployed financier who resorts to criminality to maintain his lifestyle. Apple TV has renewed that show for a third season.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
