The MGM+ mini-series “American Hostage” drops in the wake of Gus Van Sant’s excellent “Dead Man’s Wire,” which tells much of the same true story while focusing on different elements that make it interesting. Based on a 2022 podcast that played more like a radio play than your typical true crime gabfest, this 8-part series from the brilliant Shawn Ryan (“The Shield”) and Eileen Myers (“Big Love”) features strong enough period detail, thematic development, and engaging performances that it works on its own terms, while never quite justifying its existence in the wake of Van Sant’s film or even the podcast that shares its name.
Most disappointingly, while the writers play with how easily fathers can damage their sons, they do shockingly little with the “American” aspect of the title. Opportunities to dissect the impact of true crime through the lens of one of the first times one was witnessed live through the media, or even how corporate greed led everyone to this dangerous place, are rarely taken. The final result is never dull, which can’t be said about a lot of modern streaming mini-series. But it’s also never as satisfying as it could or should have been, even if we didn’t see this story in film earlier this year.
While “Dead Man’s Wire” centered on Tony Kiritsis (Giovanni Ribisi, here) and his captive Dick Hall (Kristoffer Polaha), “American Hostage” is actually led by Fred Heckman (Jon Hamm), the Indianapolis radio reporter who Tony saw as his conduit to the police and public. On February 8, 1977, Kiritsis walked into the Meridian Mortgage company and took his mortgage broker hostage, tying a wire to the back of his neck, attached to a shotgun. He walked Hall out of the building and to his apartment, calling Heckman at 1070 AM to air his grievances about Meridian and finally be heard.
“American Hostage” puts Heckman in an uneasy position: the authorities, personified here by a G-man named Cormac McNally (Jonathan Tucker), use him to keep Tony in check, even as Fred starts to relate to his viewpoint. The show casts Heckman as the man in the middle, increasingly unsure of his role, even as it begins to shape his choices as a journalist, further complicated by a colleague (William Jackson Harper) who arguably sees the whole situation as a way to take Fred’s job.
It could be because of the recent familiarity with this true story, but “American Hostage” is more interesting on its fringes than in its center, most notably in an effective performance from Kat Cunning as Dick’s wife Ibby, and the relationship that forms between her and Fred’s wife Barbara (Mireille Enos), two people caught in the maelstrom of an increasingly fraught situation. Imagine the whole world learning more than you want them to know about your husband through a hostage crisis? (Fred chooses to share personal details that are barely spoken about in the Heckman house to keep Tony engaged.) Enos is good in an underwritten part; Cunning is even better.
Of course, the show naturally belongs to Hamm and Ribisi. The former feels more adjacent to Don Draper than he ever has before but also does some of the best work of his career in the 6th episode, easily the best of the series, an hour in which the writers flash back and reveal bits and pieces about how Fred, Tony, and Dick got here. They particularly and effectively parallel Fred and Dick’s fathers, two men on very different levels of society, but both hucksters and frauds in their own way.
The production design of “American Hostage” is also notable, never feeling like so many modern shows set a half-century end up: Like people playing dress-up. You can smell the smoke in the radio station and the sweat in Tony’s apartment. The music choices are effective without doing too much heavy lifting.
And yet it feels like the writers too often keep defaulting to plot over theme. It’s telling that the best episode, by far, doesn’t center the present-day hostage crisis but how we got there. And it feels like a wasted opportunity to unpack how this kind of thing played out over the next five decades, as we increasingly digest criminal actions as they happen. It was live on the radio in the ‘70s, then live on TV, and now live on screens in our hands. How journalism and crime intersect has become one of the most consistent topics of the 2020s, long after Fred Heckman and Tony Kiritsis departed this earth. It’s one of the most American things there is.
Whole series screened for review. On MGM+ on September 20, 2026.
