Streaming television’s friend, Jon Hamm, is set to add another good deed to his roster of on-demand favors: Fresh off launching his new Apple TV+ series Your Friends And Neighbors, Hamm has just been announced as the star of a new anthology series on MGM+. (Formerly Epix; don’t worry, we had to look it up to remind ourselves, too.)
Titled American Hostage, the series is being produced by Shawn Ryan, whose TV credits stretch through S.W.A.T. and The Night Agent all the way back to FX’s groundbreaking The Shield. Ryan co-created the show with Eileen Myers, who came up through Big Love before working on TV projects like Mad Dogs and Last Resort.
As the (working) title implies, American Hostage is being based on the first season of the podcast of the same name, a scripted dramatization of a 1977 incident in which a man named Tony Kiritsis held a bank manager hostage for nearly three days after he refused to offer him an extension on his mortgage. Hamm will reprise his role from the podcast as Fred Heckman, an Indianapolis radio host who Kiritsis frequently called during the ordeal in order to communicate with the public. No word yet on whether the rest of the cast, which also included Joseph Perrino, Carla Gugino, and Dylan Baker, will also reprise their roles for the show.
As it happens, this isn’t the only project about the Kiritsis incident that’s been put into development in recent months: Last December, news broke that Bill Skarsgård and Dacre Montgomery were set to star in Dead Man’s Wire, Gus Van Sant’s planned adaptation of the Kiritsis documentary of the same name. (We couldn’t begin to speculate, of course, why multiple projects about a guy snapping and deciding to point a gun at a banker because he’s losing his home might be resonating with creators at the moment.) Interestingly, Ryan and Hamm’s show is being described as an “anthology series,” despite the fact that it’s not clear what further material the series will have to pull from, once it’s run through everything covered in the single season of the podcast.
