{"id":847457,"date":"2026-09-14T12:20:10","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/847457\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T12:20:10","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T12:20:10","slug":"jon-hamm-american-hostage-feels-relevant-to-current-political-climate","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/847457\/","title":{"rendered":"Jon Hamm: American Hostage Feels Relevant to Current Political Climate"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tIn Jon Hamm<\/a>\u2019s new series, American Hostage<\/a>, he stars as a local news broadcaster who finds himself in the middle of a hostage situation when a disgruntled borrower kidnaps a mortgage broker.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe 1977 true crime story, which was chronicled on a narrative podcast of the same name<\/a> also starring Hamm, is decades old, but its political themes closely mirror today\u2019s world, Hamm told The Hollywood Reporter on Sunday.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c\u200aI think that there\u2019s some thematic devices that resonate in the culture politically now,\u201d Hamm said at The Hollywood Reporter\u2019s Studio at 1 Hotel during TIFF<\/a>, presented by sponsor Canada Goose. \u201cI think the idea of a certain segment of the population being overlooked, or feeling overlooked or feeling under-addressed, in their wants and needs and desires. The show is called American Hostage. We fought very hard for that title because we thought it really spoke to the story on several occasions. This man obviously takes a person hostage, but is he in fact hostage to his American Dream?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of resonance to the title,\u201d the Emmy winner added. \u201cI think that\u2019s why the story, for whatever reason, feels \u2014 even though it\u2019s a 50-year-old true story \u2014 it feels very relevant, given the current political climate.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tCo-created by Shawn Ryan and Eileen Myers, American Hostage is described by Sony as a \u201cpsychological thriller that tells the harrowing true story of Fred Heckman, a beloved Indianapolis radio reporter who is thrust into the middle of a life-or-death crisis when hostage-taker, Tony Kiritsis, demands to be interviewed on his popular radio news program.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe news story on which the series is based made headlines at the time and reflected a changing media landscape, where live local stories made national news. For Hamm, the local news story he remembers as being the most significant is O.J. Simpson<\/a>\u2019s infamous police chase in June 1994.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201c\u200aI think probably most people\u2019s first experience of any of that was the O.J. situation because it happened in the middle of a huge sporting event,\u201d Hamm said. \u201cIt was national. Most of us live in L.A., and L.A. had a car chase kind of every day, but it was very local. That became a very daily kind of thing in the \u201990s. Some helicopter would chase some car going somewhere. The original one was most likely the O.J. situation.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIf you go back in time, this [1977 Tony Kiritsis case]\u00a0is one of the first times we kind of see a local story explode nationally,\u201d Hamm continued. \u201cAnother similar thing that happened was the Patty Hearst situation, where when they raided the house down in South Central Los Angeles. \u2026 It was the beginning of where we are now. I think the salacious part of this story \u2014 through no fault of its own \u2014 [it became] this life or death story. [It\u2019s] kind of where we have landed now, where everything is maximized for the salaciousness of its content.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAmerican Hostage also shows how audiences previously trusted the information delivered by their news organizations, in stark contrast to today where trust in the media remains at record lows, according to data from Gallup<\/a>. Ryan emphasized that the \u201cjournalistic aspect to the show\u201d is \u201cvery pertinent today.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cRight now, we live in a very fractured journalist world,\u201d Ryan explained. \u201cYou can kind of choose your news more than the news really informing you these days. Back then, I\u2019m old enough to remember what it was like for journalists to be trusted and for the news to be something that was sacred.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tRyan added that Hamm\u2019s character is \u201cstuck in a very precarious position\u201d in the series because he\u2019s a journalist \u201cwho has invested decades into building his reputation as telling the truth \u2026 and now he\u2019s also expected to be a hostage negotiator and to try to save two lives.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAmerican Hostage is scheduled to premiere on MGM+ on Sept. 20.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Jon Hamm\u2019s new series, American Hostage, he stars as a local news broadcaster who finds himself in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[358526,236,88,13772,16821],"class_list":["post-847457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-american-hostage","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-jon-hamm","tag-thr-original-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=847457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}