High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam is a 2026 American drama series that puts a single CIA interrogation at the center of one of the defining moments of the 2003 Iraq War.
What is High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam about?
The series follows CIA analyst John Nixon, who became the first American to positively identify and question Saddam Hussein after his capture. Rather than framing the story as a straightforward manhunt thriller, the show lingers on the aftermath of that meeting: what Nixon began to understand, sitting across from Hussein, about the scale of what the invasion had already set in motion. Joel Kinnaman leads as Nixon, with Waleed Zuaiter and Lena Góra rounding out a cast built around tense, close-quarters scenes rather than large-scale action. Genre-wise this sits across drama, mystery, thriller and biography, and that mix shows in the pacing — procedural detail giving way to slower, more reflective stretches as the political and human consequences of Saddam's deposing come into focus.
About the cast
Joel Kinnaman anchors the series as John Nixon, playing the analyst as a man whose certainty erodes the longer he sits with his subject. Waleed Zuaiter and Lena Góra fill out the supporting roles, giving the interrogation-room scenes the two-hander intensity the material needs. Director Leslie Greif keeps the camera close and the settings sparse, letting the dialogue carry most of the weight rather than staging elaborate set pieces.
Context & significance
The series arrives as part of a wave of prestige dramatizations revisiting the Iraq War two decades on, and it distinguishes itself by narrowing its lens to one relationship rather than the whole invasion. Episodes run around 45 minutes, closer to a limited-series rhythm than a sprawling war epic, which suits the interrogation-room structure at its core. The choice to build a season around a single analyst's account also means the show leans heavily on internal conflict — Nixon's growing unease — rather than external spectacle, a structural bet that period political dramas have increasingly favored over the last several years.
Watching High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam on Ktime
High Value Target: The Hunt for Saddam streams on K-Time with a free account login, and the platform carries it with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles for viewers who prefer to watch in Farsi. No special setup is needed beyond signing in — the Farsi-language options sit alongside the original English audio in the player, aimed at giving diaspora audiences the same access to prestige English-language drama as any other market.