David Chase, between LSD and MKUltra: a Sopranos creator turns to the secret history of American counter-culture

David Chase, the writer who turned a New Jersey mob family into the defining television drama of the prestige-TV era, is moving on two fronts at once. In a 7 July 2026 interview with Variety, the creator of HBO's The Sopranos said he is independently developing a feature film about LSD while also shepherding a series tied to the CIA's MKUltra mind-control programme. The two projects — one a chemical, the other a political, history of the twentieth century — sit on the same shelf in Chase's imagination, and they share a preoccupation with what the state does to minds without telling the public.

The pairing is not incidental. Chase has spent the better part of two decades mining the undergrowth of American power: organised crime, then therapy, then the unspoken contracts that hold families and institutions together. An LSD film and an MKUltra series extend that line in a more literal direction. They also arrive at a moment when the cultural argument over what can be said, filmed, and distributed on American screens has sharpened.

A creator at the seam between culture and classification

The Sopranos ran on HBO from 1999 to 2007 and reshaped what long-form television could carry. Its afterlife — prequels, sequels, the perpetual rumour mill — has done little to diminish Chase's reputation for control. He is not a prolific public figure, and his interviews are events. The Variety conversation, timed to the early stages of promotion around the new projects, treats both as works-in-progress rather than finished artefacts. According to Variety, the LSD film is being handled independently, while the MKUltra series sits in a separate development track.

That separation matters. A feature film about LSD invites comparison to a long lineage of counter-cultural cinema — the kind of project a writer-director can shape on his own terms, with one screenplay, one cast, one release window. A series about MKUltra is structurally different: it depends on archive access, on cooperation or non-cooperation from intelligence agencies, on a streaming platform willing to absorb political risk over multiple seasons. Chase appears to want both, and to want them not to be the same thing.

Why MKUltra, why now

MKUltra was the CIA's formal programme of research into behavioural control, run from the early 1950s until its public exposure in the mid-1970s through congressional hearings chaired by Senator Frank Church. Its documented subjects included unwitting patients in American and Canadian hospitals, prisoners, and drug users recruited under false pretences. LSD was one of the compounds the programme investigated, alongside hypnosis, sensory deprivation, and a range of other techniques. The full documentary record remains partial; many files were destroyed on instruction in 1973.

A dramatic series on the subject is not new ground. Previous productions have approached the programme from procedural and conspiracy angles alike. What Chase appears to be offering, on the evidence of the Variety interview, is a creator-led treatment that treats the material as historical rather than sensational — closer in spirit to the long, patient excavation he brought to The Sopranos than to the faster rhythms of spy-thriller television. The details of the production — the network, the showrunner structure, the writers' room — are not specified in the available reporting.

The other half of the announcement, the LSD feature, also carries political freight. Lysergic acid diethylamide was criminalised in the United States in 1968 and has been the subject of a renewed research and policy debate over the last decade, including FDA-reviewed clinical trials. A film about the drug, made by a writer of Chase's standing, would land inside that live conversation regardless of its narrative intentions.

The censorship question

Chase told Variety he is concerned about censorship under the current Trump administration. He did not, in the available excerpts, specify which policies or decisions he had in mind. The reference sits inside a longer pattern of public comment from creators and producers who have argued that the boundaries of permissible speech on screen have shifted. For a writer whose previous work leaned heavily on moral ambiguity and unsympathetic protagonists, the concern is consistent with his record.

The framing has a structural dimension. American screen content is shaped less by formal censorship than by a stack of softer constraints: platform algorithms, advertiser categories, distributor risk appetites, and the political composition of state-level film incentive regimes. A creator of Chase's stature is unlikely to face direct state interference. The pressure he appears to be registering is the ambient kind — what gets greenlit, what gets shelved, which subjects quietly stop being fundable. That is the censorship most working writers actually experience.

Stakes, and what remains unspecified

What is on the table is a dual signal: Chase intends to keep working, and he intends to work on material that touches the seam between the American state and altered states of consciousness. What remains unspecified — and where the Variety conversation stops — is who is financing the projects, when they are likely to reach a screen, and how far each has progressed beyond early development.

For the television industry, the more interesting question is not whether Chase can land either project; his track record makes both plausible. It is whether prestige platforms will underwrite a multi-season MKUltra drama at a moment when intelligence题材 has become politically contested in both directions — attacked from the right as anti-American, and from parts of the left as inadequate to the present. A serious treatment of the programme, made outside a partisan frame, has to navigate both critiques. That is a familiar challenge for the kind of television Chase has spent his career making.

For the broader cultural argument, the announcement matters less as news than as a marker. The most influential American dramatist of his generation is choosing, at this moment, to spend his capital on a drug and on a programme the government once ran in secret. The pairing is the editorial position. Whether either project delivers on its premise is a question for later.

This article treats Chase's dual projects as the editorial position they amount to: a writer with rare institutional leverage choosing to spend it on the seam between altered minds and state power, at a moment when the boundaries of permissible American screen content are themselves being renegotiated.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://www.fda.gov/drugs/science-and-research-drugs/psychedelic-drugs