American Hostage Review: Jon Hamm Leads an Overstuffed but Ambitious True Crime Drama
Hamm stars as a radio reporter who's pulled into a crisis when a hostage taker demands to be interviewed on his program
Jon Hamm, American Hostage
On Feb. 8, 1977, Tony Kiritsis entered the offices of the Meridian Mortgage Company in downtown Indianapolis with his arm in a sling, a device he used to conceal a sawed-off shotgun. He left Meridian with mortgage officer Dick Hall after wiring the shotgun to the back of Hall's head and attaching it to himself to create what's known as a "dead man's line," which would ensure that if Kiritsis were killed, Hall would die with him. A 63-hour hostage crisis followed, one that concluded with Kiritsis delivering a profanity-ridden monologue on live television — while Hall remained restrained by the dead man's wire — in which he aired his grievances against Meridian, whom he accused of conspiring against him in a scheme to buy property he'd purchased with a loan they knew he could not pay back.
It's a dramatic story that's been revisited multiple times over the past few years, first via Alan Berry and Mark Enochs' 2018 documentary Dead Man's Line, which was followed by the 2022 scripted podcast American Hostage, Gus Van Sant's 2025 film Dead Man's Wire (which draws on Berry and Enochs' film and stars Bill Skarsgård and Dacre Montgomery), and now this eight-part miniseries. An adaptation of the podcast series of the same name, American Hostage finds Jon Hamm reprising his starring role as Fred Heckman, the news director of the local radio station, WIBC, who's become one of the town's most trusted voices both for his behind-the-scenes work and his popular "My Town Indy" segments.
As the series opens, Fred is entertaining making a move to a New York station that wants him to bring his personable but uncompromising approach to the big city. It's an opportunity he considers with no small reluctance, despite the encouragement of his wife, Barbara (Mireille Enos). Indianapolis isn't just his home; the city's part of his identity, and he's part of the city's. He's charted its changes while bringing in a generation of younger talent aligned with his principles. In fact, Fred is so trusted that Tony (Giovanni Ribisi) reaches out to him not long after he takes Dick (Kristoffer Polaha) hostage, making Fred a key part of the drama as Tony negotiates an end to the situation after bringing Dick back to his cluttered apartment.
Like
- The show has ambition
- Period detail
- Rich performances
Dislike
- The wobbly tone and sometimes unfocused approach
Co-created by Shawn Ryan (The Shield, Terriers) and Eileen Myers (Masters of Sex, The Night Agent), American Hostage revisits the incident by reworking it into a city-spanning saga, exploring its broader effects on everyone from the Indianapolis police (whose chief, played by Mark McKinney, is immediately revealed to be in over his head) to Fred's direct reports, Ben (William Jackson Harper) and Ginny (June Laporte), to Dick's unhappy wife, Ibby (Kat Cunning).
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Unavoidably, American Hostage's most exciting moments appear in its first and final episodes, but there's plenty of compelling material in between. American Hostage treats the hostage crisis as a reflection of larger cultural changes already in progress in the era. For Barbara and Ibby, it underscores how much they've based their identities around their husbands. Ben and Ginny struggle both with Fred's reluctance to cede control and, respectively, the everyday racism and sexism that always gets in their way. Fred finds himself concerned with the approach taken by Cormac (Jonathan Tucker), an FBI agent with a firm belief in the new practice of profiling. And, above all, Fred's experience treads an ethical line, one in which he has to weigh the cost of becoming part of the story, and maybe bending the truth, in the interest of saving lives. He can't yet know it, but in the era of infotainment and 24-hour news cycles just over the horizon, he's destined to look increasingly out of place.
It's an approach whose ambition occasionally gets the better of it. American Hostage develops some of its subplots better than others, and the fantasy sequences that pop up with increasing frequency in the later episodes often feels like padding. The series also seems to have trouble settling on a tone thanks to stretches of black comedy that never quite push it all the way into satire.
Yet while it might be overstuffed, much of American Hostage works anyway. With the support of an excellent supporting cast, Hamm plays Fred with a dignity and gravitas that contrasts sharply with Ribisi's hunched, manic work as Tony, who never loses a weird, funny charisma in spite of his nonstop self-pitying rants. (That his stand against the perceived injustice makes him a populist hero among those who share his grievances is yet another sign of things to come.) It's an unwieldy series, but maybe that's unavoidable when attempting to approach an untidy, still resonant, story from so many angles at once.
Premieres: Sunday, Sept. 20 at 9/8c on MGM+ with two episodes, followed by a new episode each week
Who's in it: Jon Hamm, Giovani Ribisi, Mireille Enos, William Jackson Harper
Who's behind it: Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers
For fans of: True crime stories with broad historic significance
How many episodes we watched: 8 of 8