'The Looming Tower' First Look: Hulu's New Counterterrorism Miniseries

The events leading up to 9/11 will soon be dramatized in Hulu's new miniseries The Looming Tower. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-fiction book by Lawrence Wright, the series will follow the rising threat of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the 1990s, and how a rivalry between the FBI and CIA may have inadvertently contributed to a failure to prevent the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

A new The Looming Tower first look offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the show.

Lawrence Wright's Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 is being brought to life by Hulu in 2018. The new miniseries adaptation comes from producer Alex Gibney (Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief) and features an impressive cast that includes Tahar Rahim, Jeff Daniels, Peter Sarsgaard, Wrenn Schmidt, Michael Stuhlbarg, Bill Camp, and Alec Baldwin. A new The Looming Tower first look reveals tense footage from the miniseries, as well as behind-the-scenes interviews with cast and crew.

This looks very promising, and the cast – particularly folks like Daniels, Sarsgaard, Stuhlbarg – ensure that there will be plenty of great acting on display. According to USA Today, The Looming Tower "opens in 1998, shortly before terrorists bomb two U.S. embassies in Africa, and eventually climaxes with the Sept. 11 attacks in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania." Here's the official synopsis:

Based on the Pulitzer-Prize winning book, The Looming Tower traces the rising threat of Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda in the late 1990s and how the rivalry between the FBI and CIA during that time may have inadvertently set the path for the tragedy of 9/11. The series follows members of the I-49 Squad in New York and Alec Station in Washington, D.C., the counter-terrorism divisions of the FBI and CIA, respectively, as they travel the world fighting for ownership of information while seemingly working toward the same goal – trying to prevent an imminent attack on U.S. soil.

In writing the book that inspired the series, Wright said, "I wanted to understand who these people were and why they had attacked us – the most elemental question that we were all asking after 9/11. The level of our cultural ignorance is hard to overstate, even my own. Even though I had spent time in the Middle East...I still was left with many riddles that I needed to unscramble. Originally my first goal was how am I going to write about it, where do I start, and what kind of book would it be? I felt instinctively that it had to be about individuals, had to have certain stories that would personalize this massive tragedy and help us understand it through their lives."

The Looming Tower will debut on Hulu on February 28, 2018.