If there’s one thing that Jon Hamm is great at, it’s playing a morally conflicted man in a bygone era. And in American Hostage, a new MGM+ series based on a true story (and a narrative podcast of that story which also starred Hamm), he’s asked to do just that as he plays Indianapolis radio man Fred Heckman who starts out reporting on a story and eventually finds himself stuck within it. It’s an interesting tale – set in 1977, a down-on-his-luck Tony Kiritsis (Giovanni Ribisi, playing things a touch too over the top in a very over the top role) takes Dick Hall (Kristoffer Polaha, very good once the show lets us learn a bit about Dick’s backstory), the local mortgage broker, hostage, accusing him of trying to take his house and bleeding him dry. When Heckman reports on the developing story, Tony reaches out and demands that Heckman interview him live on air so that his grievances can be made clear to the world. As the pair develop a détente of sorts, Heckman starts to work with Tony in an effort to keep Dick alive – turning himself into a character in the very story he’s trying to report and crossing a host of journalistic lines.
The parts of the series that work best are those that ground these characters in their humanity rather than offering up the sensationalist pieces of the story (so, most of the bits that don’t involve Tony). There’s a really lovely arc where we flashback to the first date between Dick and his wife, Ibby (Kat Cunning, who I wanted to see a lot more of), and we see that he’s not a heartless money man at all. Hamm gets some great moments as Heckman is required to talk about a deep trauma in his own past – something he never discusses, not even with his wife, Barbara (Mireille Enos, who is wasted in the role – if you have Mireille Enos, you have to use her). And William Jackson Harper is stellar as Heckman’s colleague Ben Hairston, who continually warns Heckman that he’s flying too close to the sun and is going to get burnt. Unsurprisingly, Heckman doesn’t listen.
What is less successful is the thriller aspect of the show. True, you can just google the characters and learn what actually happened, but I found myself getting bored the longer the hostage crisis continued. The show takes a heck of a long time to flesh out these characters – although when it does, it’s successful at doing so. For an eight-episode miniseries, there’s too much drag within the story to justify the length. Cutting it down to six or even four would have made the story feel tighter. But, co-creators Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers have a host of successful television shows between them and understand how to craft a series. The bones are strong here and the characters work – and the casting is top-notch.
I didn’t find myself blown away by American Hostage, but every time I started to think about turning it off and walking away, something would happen that would pull me back in. We’d see a particularly interesting dream Dick has while locked in the bathroom, chained up. We’d watch Ibby and Barbara chat, expressing things to each other that they could never tell their husbands. We’d watch as Heckman finds himself pulled deeper and deeper into the quicksand of becoming the story rather than reporting it – whilst Hariston warns him it’s happening and Heckman just refuses to see it. Actually, that’s probably the part of the story that could have been shaved down a bit – there are so many warnings to Heckman about this that he ignores that it starts to get a bit tedious. But the series is well-made, it’s smart, and it’s got a great cast. While I wouldn’t rush out and subscribe to MGM+ for this show alone, it’s well worth a look if you already have the streaming service.
American Hostage premieres on MGM+ on September 20. All eight episodes were provided for review.
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