American Hostage Review – An Undercooked Drama with Good Performances

In 2022, Shawn Christensen developed a podcast series about Tony Kiritsis, who took his mortgage broker hostage in 1977. The podcast was adapted by Shawn Ryan for the upcoming series for MGM+, American Hostage. Jon Hamm was part of the podcast stars in the series alongside Giovanni Ribisi and William Jackson Harper. While I am a huge fan of MGM+ series this year, American Hostage falls a little short. 

What is American Hostage about?

Fred Heckman (Jon Hamm) is a radio reporter in Indianapolis who gets thrust into the middle of a life-or-death situation when Tony Kiritsis (Giovanni Ribisi) demands to be interviewed on his popular radio news program after kidnapping his mortgage broker. Heckman finds himself in the difficult scenario trying to make it right. 

American Hostage Season 1 Review

We open with Fred Heckman hosting his radio show like he does every week. Moments later, we follow Tony Kiritsis, who walks into the offices of Dick Hall and takes him hostage by gun. Shortly after taking him hostage, Kiritsis gets on the phone to call into the radio station to talk to Heckman. He explains to Heckman why he is doing what he is doing and wants to share his story on Heckman’s show because he knows he will help him get the truth out. 

I truly believe that Jon Hamm is one of our greatest TV actors. It all began with his run as Don Draper on Mad Men. Over the last three years he has been on an insane run with great turns on shows like Landman, The Morning Show, Fargo, and Your Friends & Neighbors. Hamm continues this great run with a captivating turn as Fred Heckman. Although Tony is at the forefront of the hostage situation, this is the Fred Heckman journey. A radio show host having to save not only the hostage but Tony himself. 

Speaking of Tony, Giovanni Ribisi is always good. I don’t think he gets enough credit for his work. Regardless of Tony being “wrong” in this scenario, there was that vulnerability within his story that made you empathize with his journey and why he was doing what he was doing. This all works because of Ribisi. 

Shawn Ryan created one of my all-time favorite shows, The Shield. I do think he had a tall task here of developing this series between the real-life story and the podcast that was highly successful. What Ryan gets right is the characters. He wrote Fred and Tony with such perfection (the performances help), but I do think that struggle of finding the side stories is where he falls short of what I was hoping for. The meat was there, but the potatoes were lacking. 

The pacing of this series really threw me off. It starts out the gate rather hot but cools down, which I get as they were trying to develop the characters. However, it felt like a slog throughout the middle portion of the series. After having binged it, I really felt like this could’ve been better developed as a movie or a limited series with four episodes. Although it finds its rhythm in those final two episodes, it almost felt like a chore to get to that time. 

Is American Hostage worth watching?

Ultimately, American Hostage does many things right, but where it falters is where I struggle to give this a recommendation. If you have the patience to weed through the middle half of the series, you may find yourself satisfied when you get around to those final two episodes. But if you are someone looking for a quickly paced show, this isn’t the one. I enjoyed the performances, the story, but the execution left much to be desired. 

American Hostage begins with two episodes on September 20 and will stream on MGM+ through November 1st.