Jon Hamm vs Giovanni Ribisi in American Hostage — our review

We do get our fair share of TV and film doppelgangers, but the story behind American Hostage is especially odd. Not content with the classic 'two volcano films in one year' routine, Hollywood's now decided one creepy real-life standoff wasn't enough for just one adaptation—or even just one medium.

American Hostage lands on MGM+ with its first two episodes on 20 September 2026.

Two Takes on the Same Crime

Let me untangle this: American Hostage is a psychological thriller set in the '70s, ratcheting up tension around the true-crime ordeal of Tony Kiritsis, a bloke from Indianapolis who took a mortgage broker hostage. If you feel like you've heard all this before, you probably caught Gus Van Sant's 2025 film, Dead Man's Wire, which covered precisely the same wild story. The difference is, that film was all about Kiritsis himself—whereas in American Hostage, the focus shifts to the broadcaster who tried to manage the chaos live on air: Fred Heckman.

• Dead Man's Wire (film, 2025): Told from the perspective of Tony Kiritsis, more claustrophobic, and centres the actual hostage situation. Fronted by Bill Skarsgård as Tony; Colman Domingo as radio man Fred Temple. Big on actors—Cary Elwes, Al Pacino, Dacre Montgomery all appear.
• American Hostage (TV series, 2026): Based on the 2022 podcast (which, by the way, also starred Jon Hamm). Takes Heckman (Hamm again) as its main character, showing how bizarre the whole case appeared when seen through both a journalist's and a lawman's eyes. Leans into black comedy at times, less bombastic in its casting but takes more time to pick apart the '70s media panic and the mystery behind the crime.

Both projects take the Kiritsis-Hall hostage crisis: three days, a shotgun with a wire literally wrapped round the victim's throat, and a city glued to the radio as the entire event unfolded minute by minute. Where the film painted Tony as close to unhinged (Skarsgård's performance was genuinely manic), Giovanni Ribisi in the series turns in something more soft-edged—almost likeable, always unsettling, never so deranged you'd expect the writing to underline it in red.

Heckman's Version

Anyway, back to Fred Heckman. Hamm plays him as the single-minded newsman you'd imagine, on the verge of national syndication when Indianapolis is plunged into this crisis. The real Fred is preoccupied less by the headlines and more by what’s really at the heart of the ordeal. His wife Barbara (Mireille Enos) gets a few moments in the spotlight, while William Jackson Harper pitches in as fellow journo Ben Hairston—productively clashing with Hamm's Heckman as they comb through all the strangeness, both desperate to break the story for the right reasons.

Just to make things even more complicated, the real-life circus is jammed with other characters: Chief Gallagher (Mark McKinney) wrangling the police response; shady legal types like M.L. Hall (Steven Ratzlaff) and lawyer John Ruckelshaus (Alan Arkin—who’s also co-directing a few episodes). There's also Cormac McNally (Jonathan Tucker) swirling in when someone floats the idea of just killing Tony and ending it all. For a hostage show, it certainly doesn’t lack for plot twists.

Behind the Scenes: Familiar Faces, Odd Choices

Showrunning duties are handled by Shawn Ryan (who did The Shield, The Unit, and more recently The Night Agent) with Eileen Myers (whose work includes Hung and Big Love). Directing chores bounce between Alan Arkin and Nina Lopez-Corrado (who’s previously shot episodes of Perry Mason, The Last of Us, and House of the Dragon), so there’s a bit of a prestige drama crowd assembled here.

The visual style makes the most of '70s garishness—big collars, wood-panelled radio studios, everyone chain-smoking to within an inch of their lives. The original podcast (2022) was audio only, so it's a treat to see it realised in all its retro glory. Hamm's performance anchors everything—he doesn’t play it for melodrama, but as a proper newsman, poking at the system in what’s now turning into an anthology (each season, supposedly, will find a new hostage standoff to obsess over).

There are lighter moments here too, in the midst of all the tension—though the shifts from darkly comic to genuinely unnerving are a bit abrupt at times. Also, the cast past Hamm and Ribisi isn’t packed with household names, and you sometimes feel it when compared to Dead Man’s Wire and its ensemble of heavyweights. Not that names are everything, but it’s noticeable given the side-by-side releases.

The real draw is the media madness swirling around the Kiritsis affair—both what actually happened, and what people thought was happening. The show lifts the curtain a bit, illustrating just how much was swirling beneath the surface, with plenty of pointed questions about whether Tony’s conspiracy theories were quite as wild as they first seemed.