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David Chase is set for a return to the small screen. The Sopranos visionary is scripting MKUltra, a limited series centered around the CIA's secret cold war-era mind control program for the premium network.

Exploring the Series

The project, initially revealed by entertainment insiders, marks Chase's first series since the groundbreaking HBO crime series. This intense narrative, inspired by the author's book Project Mind Control, focuses on the notorious scientist, known as the “black sorcerer” who led the MKUltra initiative, the agency's covert hallucinogen experiments that tested psychedelic substances, hypnotic techniques, and physical coercion on willing and unwilling subjects from 1953 until it was halted in 1973.

The Experiments

Gottlieb directed such experiments in the interest of state safety, to combat the alleged danger of Russian and Chinese “brainwashing” techniques. He is also regarded as the accidental pioneer of the LSD counterculture, as he introduced the drug to the CIA in the 1950s, in an effort to investigate the potential of manipulating human consciousness. Certain participants were willing individuals from the agency, military officers and university attendees who had knowledge of the nature of the experiments. Additional subjects, on the other hand, were mental patients, prisoners, substance abusers, and sex workers forced or misled into substance administration that in certain instances left permanent damage.

Chase's Legacy

Chase won multiple Emmy Awards for his hit series, a complex drama about a New Jersey crime syndicate broadly acknowledged with ushering in the peak era of high-quality TV. Since the show, starring the deceased James Gandolfini, wrapped in 2007, Chase has mostly focused on movie projects. He authored, helmed, and produced the 2012 movie Not Fade Away. He also co-wrote and produced The Many Saints of Newark, a Sopranos prequel starring Michael Gandolfini, that debuted in 2021.

TV Comeback

His return to TV comes after he declared the era of sophisticated TV dramas in some ways shaped by the Sopranos to be a “blip” that is now over. Speaking to a leading newspaper for the series' quarter-century milestone, the 78-year-old asserted that he had been instructed to “dumb down” his scripts in meetings with studio heads and advised against making television that was too complex.

He linked that perspective in part to his encounter attempting to develop a series with the writer Hannah Fidell about a high-end sex worker who ends up in witness protection. In numerous meetings with producers, he noted, they were told "the harsh reality" that it was not straightforward enough. "What audience is this targeting?" he said. “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 continued. “And as for streaming executives? It is getting worse. We’re going back to where we were.”