Following his foray into major TV with Aaron Sorkin‘s The Newsroom, Jeff Daniels is set to return with Hulu’s The Looming Tower. The show is based on Lawrence Wright‘s Pulitzer Prize-winning 9/11 exposé of the same name.
Hulu has announced ten episodes, which will trace “the rising threat of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, and takes a controversial look at how the rivalry between the CIA and FBI may have inadvertently set the stage for the tragedy of 9/11 and the war in Iraq”. Daniels is set to star as John O’Neill, “the determined, at times bull-headed chief of the New York FBI’s Counter-Terrorism unit”.
The show will also star Tahir Rahim (The Eagle) as Ali Soufan, a young FBI agent on O’Neill’s team who “quickly ascends to O’Neill’s protégé due to his brilliance, as well as his fluency in Arabic and Islam”.
The show will be written by Academy Award nominated-writer, Dan Futterman (Foxcatcher, Capote), while each of the ten episodes will be directed by Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology And The Prison Of Belief).
The success of narrative series like American Crime Story and documentary series such as Making A Murderer have led to plenty of true story dramas be commissioned recently, and there’s very few bigger true stories to cover than 9/11. Daniels has always been a pro and will likely make this worth watching, but we’ll have to wait and see as to whether it can stand out from the glut of similar shows.
#Peace.Love.TheLoomingTower
