Jon Hamm’s Has Already Found the Perfect Replacement For His Masterpiece Apple TV Crime Thriller

I must admit that, despite being a big Jon Hamm fan, I was pessimistic when Your Friends & Neighbors began. I couldn’t see how a show about a hedge fund manager turned neighborhood thief would keep viewers hooked for long. I was quickly proven wrong. Season 2 was strong, even earning an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Drama Series, and a third chapter is currently in production. And Hamm has American Hostage to keep us occupied in the meantime.

Created by Shawn Ryan (The Shield, The Night Agent) and Eileen Myers (Masters of Sex, Mad Dogs) for MGM+, and based on the similarly titled podcast, American Hostage premiered on Sept. 20, 2026, and is set to conclude on Nov. 1, 2026, after eight episodes. It currently has a 90% score on Rotten Tomatoes (higher than Your Friends & Neighbors), which is no surprise, given the high-quality storytelling, production, and impressive cast that includes Mireille Enos, Giovanni Ribisi, Jackson Harper, and Kristoffer Polaha.

‘American Hostage’ Extends Jon Hamm’s Great TV Run

It’s hard to resist the spectacle of big-brained writers and actors taking on the topics of money and power. In American Hostage, scenes are shot and cut with such rough-breathing panache that you can see the sweat droplets on the faces of the characters and feel their footwear clipping and gliding on the hard, tiled floors underfoot. And once again, the ever-sharp Jon Hamm leaves us wondering why he isn’t in more three-piece suit commercials (maybe they pay too little).

The series stars Hamm as Fred Heckman, a popular Indianapolis radio reporter who is thrust into the middle of a deadly hostage situation when the hostage-taker, a businessman and army veteran, demands to be interviewed on Heckman’s popular trending topics radio show. It is adapted from Shawn Christensen’s 2022 scripted psychological thriller podcast and is a dramatization of the true incident of Tony Kiritsis, who took his mortgage broker hostage in a three-day crisis in 1977.

American Hostage doesn’t mark a significant turning point in Hamm’s career trajectory, either stylistically or thematically. After all, this story of extreme measures, during which a man gets denied additional time to make mortgage repayments, isn’t too far from The Town, starring Hamm, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively, and Ben Affleck. The show’s greater significance is the additional boost it has given the actor’s career. Hamm is having the best spell of his career since his Mad Men, with his recent performances in Your Friends & Neighbors, Landman, and Fargo all attracting much praise.

As for Shawn Ryan, he has always been something of an activist against injustice, and in most of his shows, he makes no secret of where his sympathies lie. He portrays upper-class figures as antagonists and parasites, with greed and corruption being the poisons that slowly kill the common man. American Hostage reminds me more of Dog Day Afternoon, an even more virulent assault on the American Dream, where Sidney Lumet reviles the immense power that a few institutions hold but appears to accept it as an inevitable consequence of the socio-economic order we have inherited. American Hostage proves that such a problem persists, but it dances around enough to not make it a static phenomenon.

Like ‘Your Friends & Neighbors’, ‘American Hostage’ Examines Desperation and Accountability

Tony leading Dick through the streets with a gun to his back in American Hostage.

At a glance, American Hostage doesn’t seem like it has much in common with Your Friends & Neighbors. But the two shows share a greater genome than just Hamm as the lead. Both place their central characters in desperate situations that force them to cross ethical lines. Tony Kiritsis takes a mortgage broker hostage because he doesn’t see any other way out of his financial predicament, and Coop decides to become a thief to maintain his elite image after losing his job.

Both shows complement the theme of violence as a response to powerlessness, with the suggestion that the temporary criminals aren’t doing anything wrong. Tony Kiritsis strongly believes the mortgage company is trying to sabotage the project on his land so they can assume ownership of the property. During the standoff, he demands public admission of wrongdoing from the firm, treating the entire situation as a form of forced accountability. Coop does something similar in Your Friends & Neighbors. Even though he starts stealing to keep up appearances, he eventually forces those who forced him out of his job unfairly to look in the mirror.

American Hostage is thus ideal for those who like Your Friends & Neighbors for its financial plots and weighty themes rather than melodrama. Season 1 will tell Tony Kiritsis’ entire story, but the MGM+ gem is being advertised as an anthology, so it’s highly likely that Season 2 will focus on a different hostage situation. This is a good thing, as there aren’t many great TV shows focusing on this particular topic.