The Sopranos Creator Returns to HBO to Unmask the CIA’s Darkest Secret: Inside Project MKUltra
The Sopranos creator David Chase returns to HBO with Project MKUltra, a razor-edged dive into the CIA’s most notorious Cold War mind-control experiments, adapted from John Lisle’s nonfiction book.
Well, this is a reunion I did not have on my 2025 bingo card: David Chase is back at HBO, and he is making a show about the CIA trying to control people’s minds. Yes, really.
So what is Project MKUltra?
It is Chase’s new HBO series, a dramatic thriller built around the CIA’s MKUltra program during the Cold War. If you know The Sopranos, you know the guy helped turn HBO into the prestige-TV machine it is. Now he is aiming that energy at a true story where the U.S. government secretly funded experiments on both willing and not-at-all-willing people, chasing the idea of mind control. It is a dark corner of history, and the show is leaning into it.
The book, the angle, the team
- Based on John Lisle’s nonfiction book 'Project Mind Control: Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA, and the Tragedy of MKUltra'.
- Told through the perspective of Sidney Gottlieb — the chemist and spymaster who ran the operation and was nicknamed 'The Black Sorcerer' (yes, that was really a thing).
- David Chase is writing and executive producing, alongside Nicole Lambert.
- Billed as a dramatic thriller for HBO.
A quick reality check on MKUltra
MKUltra wasn’t a single lab or one-off project. It was a web of covert experiments in psychiatric hospitals and other institutions across the U.S. and Canada. The CIA secretly bankrolled it, hunting for techniques to crack open the human mind. Journalist Seymour Hersh eventually blew it open, and that reporting helped trigger multiple congressional hearings. The whole thing reads like a conspiracy theory until you get to the part where Congress actually investigated it.
How dark is the show likely to get?
The source material is brutal. People were subjected to 'experiments' that, by any humane standard, were torture. Given Chase’s history and HBO’s appetite for unflinching storytelling, expect the series to stare straight at the worst of it rather than soft-pedal the horror.
Wait, is this connected to Stranger Things?
Not directly — but Stranger Things pulled clear inspiration from MKUltra and the Cold War paranoia around it. The Duffers have said as much:
'Well, there were a couple of reasons [for the '80s setting] for the story it’s important to have that, we needed it during the Cold War and during the paranoia then and experimentation, and a lot of it is based around MKULTRA and things that were going around during that.'
Eleven’s whole backstory echoes that world. The difference here is tone: instead of sci-fi stylization and nostalgia, Chase’s version sounds like it will go grounded and granular — think closer to Chernobyl than Hawkins.
Where this leaves us
Chase back at HBO doing a gut-punch historical thriller about an illegal government program that actually happened? That is a swing. No premiere date yet, but if this comes together the way it sounds, we are in for something unsettling, meticulous, and very hard to look away from.