Is Jon Hamm's American Hostage worth streaming? Our MGM+ review
Here's the pitch that got me: February 1977, Indianapolis. A man named Tony Kiritsis wires a sawed-off shotgun to the neck of the mortgage broker he blames for ruining him, rigs it to fire if police shoot him, and then — this is the part — spends a 63-hour standoff demanding airtime from the city's most trusted radio newsman, Fred Heckman.
That's the true story under American Hostage, streaming Sundays on MGM+ through November 1, with Jon Hamm as Heckman and Giovanni Ribisi as Kiritsis. Eight episodes, created by Shawn Ryan (The Shield) and Eileen Myers, grown out of the 2022 podcast Hamm already led.
What works: the two men on the phone
The show lives on the Heckman-Kiritsis calls, and it's the best two-hander material either actor has had in years. Hamm plays Heckman in his post-Draper sweet spot — stillness, authority, and the creeping realization that "covering the story" and "being the story" stopped being different things about two phone calls ago. Ribisi goes big, because Kiritsis was big; the real man held press conferences with a wired shotgun in his hands. As Ribisi put it:
"This is a guy who took another man hostage in real life, and he was holding press conferences with people standing this close to him, and a loaded shotgun."
The 1977 texture is immaculate — the newsroom ashtrays, the transistor static, the sense of a country discovering live-broadcast hostage crisis as a format. Kristoffer Polaha, who plays hostage Dick Hall, calls the whole thing "really the tale of two Americas... and it still happens today," and the show is smartest when it trusts that idea to hum in the background instead of underlining it.
What doesn't: eight episodes for 63 hours
Stretching a three-day standoff across a full season means detours — family subplots, procedural filler — and the middle stretch feels it. The dissenters have a point: one review calls it "never as satisfying as it could or should have been," dinging the writers for "defaulting to plot over theme." It also had the bad luck of being the second Kiritsis project this year, after Gus Van Sant got to the same story on film. Awkward timing for everyone's Google results.
Verdict
Worth streaming — yes. It's a tense, handsomely built thriller with two lead performances that justify the subscription math, even if you'll feel the padding around episode four and the finale can't quite cash every check the premise writes. Watch it for the phone calls. Stay for Hamm quietly having one of the best hours of his career late in the season.
Previously we wrote: Chicago Fire season 15 release date: an October premiere, and a Firehouse 51 original is packing up
