Speaking at a career Q&A during the industry forum at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, Sopranos creator David Chase explained why he has not made a television series in almost two decades, saying he wrote numerous projects that failed to find buyers because his work falls outside what networks and studios want. He is now returning to the small screen with Project: MKUltra, a limited series in development at HBO about the CIA's secret Cold War-era mind control programme, marking his first series since The Sopranos. The candid remarks matter because they offer a rare insider critique of an industry Chase argues is driven by "greed and fear" and an aversion to creative risk.

Chase also reflected on 2021's The Many Saints of Newark, the Sopranos prequel film, calling it a "mistake": he had intended it to be only partly an origins story, but that element "took over", and the production notably left out Dickie — Christopher Moltisanti's father, long referenced in the series — to avoid overlap with the Tony Soprano character. Project: MKUltra is based on John Lisle's non-fiction book about chemist and spymaster Sidney Gottlieb, known as "The Black Sorcerer", who led the CIA's LSD experiments on willing and unwilling subjects, and falls under Chase's Riverain Pictures first-look deal at HBO. Chase, who says he took LSD "eight or nine times" in his youth and found it life-changing, is developing the subject as both the HBO series and a separate feature film he has been writing for five years, the latter of which currently has no distributor attached.