Sopranos Creator David Chase Is Returning To HBO With A Limited Series Based On The CIA Mind Control Project "MK Ultra"
Hollywood Reporter- David Chase has set up his next series project at HBO — one that’s a world away from The Sopranos.
Chase has optioned John Lisle’s nonfiction book Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA to adapt as a limited series. The drama, titled Project: MKUltra, is in development at the premium outlet. Should it go to series, it will be Chase’s first HBO effort since The Many Saints of Newark, a Sopranos prequel film that debuted on HBO Max at the same time as its theatrical release in 2021.
HBO describes Project: MKUltra as “a dramatic thriller centered on the infamous chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb, often known as The Black Sorcerer, who headed the CIA’s MKUltra Psychedelic program which conducted dangerous and deadly mind control experiments on willing — and unwilling — subjects during the height of the Cold War. Gottlieb is also known as the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.”
Lets. Fuckin. Go.
The creator of The Sopranos is officially taking the wheel on the CIA’s darkest acid trip. David Chase developing Project: MKUltra for HBO, adapted from John Lisle’s nonfiction on Sidney Gottlieb and the real mind-control program the U.S. government ran in the Cold War is a MASSIVE cultural moment with teeth.
A master of moral ambiguity is about to drag a very real American nightmare into prime time.
And I for one, cannot fucking wait.
MKULTRA wasn’t internet-poisoned fan fiction. Well, like pretty much everything, it started out as a "conspiracy theory". People would talk about it in dark corners at parties and get called lunatics.
Our government would never do something like that!
But as is almost always the case, over time, the truth started to be seen, and the truth was that it was very much official fucking policy.
Beginning in 1953, under Director Allen Dulles, the CIA launched a sprawling portfolio of “behavioral modification” experiments to break minds, extract truth, and build better interrogators.
If you have time, here is a fantastic breakdown of the whole thing. Warning. It is very fucked up.
The toolkit was straight out of a fucking horror movie- LSD, other hallucinogenic drugs, electroshock, sensory deprivation, hypnosis, and black-box psychiatric “treatments” tested on both consenting volunteers AND unsuspecting civilians in hospitals, prisons, universities, and CIA safehouses.
Let that really sink in.
Gottlieb ran it through the Agency’s Technical Services, earning himself a reputation as the clandestine chemist-in-chief who helped push LSD out of the lab and into the bloodstream of American culture. And before you start with the, "there goes Dante being crazy again" bullshit, just know that these aren’t rumors. They’re documented in declassified files and hammered in Senate testimony during the 1975–77 investigations. Read a Senate subcommittee report for me one time.
The official record (watered down and destroyed as it is) is still absolutely filthy and disgusting.
In 1973, as the Watergate heat rose, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered MKULTRA files destroyed, crippling accountability for himself, his predecessors, and his henchmen.
But even so, investigators later found boxes of financial records describing something like 160 subprojects- giving a grim ledger of where the money went.
In 1977, "a cache of roughly 8,000–20,000 pages surfaced by mistake", enough for Congress to confirm that “prior consent was obviously not obtained from many subjects.”
Which is the sanitized version. The human version is shattered lives.
Joe Rogan did a great deep dive on this side of it all with Tom O'Neill that's worth a watch-
The CIA knew what it was doing was horribly, terribly wrong. Which is why they did it all cloak and dagger, and tried to torch all record of it later. Secrecy and deceit was the official business model.
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The CIA ran MKULTRA through cut-outs and contracts to universities and hospitals, then torched all records in 1973.
Congressional investigators fought uphill against classification walls, jurisdictional dodges, and missing paper trails. What survives is a patchwork of financial ledgers, inspector general notes, and sworn testimony. It was just enough to prove the moral crime, not enough to map every victim. That was their point. Which honestly might be even more fucked up.
David Chase couldn't be a better fit to cover this through his lens.
He understands American rot. And how, pretty much ever since they killed a sitting president, who was intent on dismantling them, the CIA and other elite institutions around this country and the world, have systematically destroyed everything that used to make this place so great.
His characters don’t wear white hats. They rationalize and they compartmentalize. Then they carry on. Think Tony Soprano strangling Febby Petrulio to death and then reconnecting with Meadow on her college open house trip.
That lens is perfect for MKULTRA because the scandal isn’t just about “what the CIA did.”
It is about how decent-on-paper institutions, credentialed doctors, and patriotic operatives built a machine that treated human beings as lab rats for national security. A dramatization with HBO’s reach can force us to view the victims as people, not footnotes, and to sit with the moral hangover.
There is also timing.
The national conversation on surveillance, disinformation, and “trust the science” fatigue needs a nice historical kick in the ass. MKULTRA is that kick in the ass.
The record shows real abuses with real files, hearings, and settlements.
Our culture has been trained to dismiss anything labeled “conspiracy.” This series can reset that baseline and wake people the fuck up. The skepticism is not paranoia when the archives back it up.
Then, last but certainly not least, this is David Chase back at HBO, a platform that still changes public memory when it decides to go all in. This subject aligns with prestige TV’s best tradition- hold a mirror to power, and refuse to look away.
People should be fucking hyped about this. I know I am.
But more importantly, people should be awake. Hopefully this helps with that. This should open lots of people's eyes. Because the facts are not fragile, and the files exist. The only thing that keeps this story in the shadows is indifference. And here's hoping David Chase throws on that giant light switch.
p.s. - Kenjac broke this down pretty well on his project big screen account