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David Chase is making a return to the small screen. The iconic mob drama creator will write Project MKUltra, a mini-series centered around the CIA's covert cold war-era psychological manipulation project for HBO.

Exploring the Project

This new venture, first reported by entertainment insiders, marks David Chase's initial TV project since the era-defining HBO mob drama. This intense narrative, based on the author's book Project Mind Control, focuses on the notorious scientist, referred to as the “black sorcerer” who led Project MKUltra, the agency's clandestine hallucinogen experiments that tested hallucinogenic drugs, hypnotic techniques, and physical coercion on willing and unwilling subjects from the early 1950s until it was terminated in the early 1970s.

Research Activities

Gottlieb directed these tests in the interest 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 LSD counterculture, as he introduced the drug to the CIA in the 1950s, in an effort to investigate the potential of controlling human consciousness. Certain participants were volunteers from the agency, armed forces personnel and college students who had knowledge of the nature of the experiments. Others, however, were mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and prostitutes forced or misled into substance administration that in some cases resulted in long-term harm.

Chase's Legacy

David Chase won five Emmys for his hit series, a intricate narrative about a New Jersey-based crime syndicate broadly acknowledged with ushering in the golden age of “prestige” television. After the series, featuring the deceased James Gandolfini, concluded in 2007, Chase has primarily concentrated on feature films. He wrote, directed and produced the 2012 film "Not Fade Away". He also co-wrote and produced "The Many Saints of Newark", a Sopranos prequel starring Gandolfini’s son, that premiered in 2021.

Return to Television

This comeback to TV comes after he stated the period of sophisticated TV dramas in some ways defined by his show to be a “blip” that is now finished. Speaking to a major publication for the show’s 25th anniversary, the 78-year-old asserted that he had been instructed to “dumb down” his scripts in meetings with studio heads and warned against producing TV content that was too complex.

He attributed that perspective in partly to his encounter attempting to develop a series with the screenwriter Hannah Fidell about a luxury escort who ends up in witness protection. In multiple discussions with producers, he said, they were told "the harsh reality" that it was too complex. "What audience is this targeting?" he remarked. “I guess the stockholders?”

"It appears we are disoriented, and viewers struggle to concentrate, hence we cannot create content that is overly logical, engaging, and demands focus from the audience," he added. “And as for streaming executives? It is getting worse. We’re going back to where we were.”