“The Sopranos” creator David Chase is back on television and back on the home of “The Sopranos” with HBO. Chase has optioned a non-fiction book about a dark period in the history of the CIA and will adapt it as a limited series for HBO.
The series is called “Project: MKUltra” and is based on John Lisle’s book “Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKULTRA.” Published earlier this year, the book dives into the work of Sidney Gottlieb, an infamous chemist and spymaster at the CIA known as The Black Sorcerer. Gottlieb headed the 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. After Gottlieb’s retirement in 1973, he incinerated all of his files, but Lisle uncovered previously hidden testimony and depositions that informed the accounts in the book.
The series is executive produced by David Chase and Nicole Lambert for Riverain Pictures, where Lambert serves as Head of Production and Development.
Chase concluded “The Sopranos” in 2007, and he since wrote the 2012 film “Not Fade Away” and the “Sopranos” prequel movie “The Many Saints of Newark” from 2021, but this is his proper return to television and the network that made him a legend. HBO in 2022 indicated he was done with “The Sopranos” and that any rumors of a reunion weren’t happening. And in 2024, upon the 25th anniversary of the start of “The Sopranos,” he considered the Golden Age of TV officially over, with the show’s anniversary marking a funeral of sorts for the gritty, sophisticated, and ambitious television that “The Sopranos” helped pioneer.
Clearly though Chase, now 80, isn’t done with television just yet. He’s even still kicking around an indie film project that hopes to shoot early next year, though no details on that one either. Chase has 7 Primetime Emmys, including five of them for his work on “The Sopranos.”
Chase is represented by UTA, Untitled, Gendler Kelly & Cunningham and 42West.
Deadline first reported the news.