Trust, FX’s latest anthology series, is promising to be a pretty wild ride. Focusing on the Getty family, it’ll explore some of the more bizarre parts of the clan of eccentrics, starting with one of the weirder true crime stories of the twentieth century.
Premiering January 2018, the first installment of the anthology series will dedicate ten episodes to the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, heir to the Getty oil fortune, which served as an inspiration for Man On Fire. The kidnappers, a group with organized crime ties, were expecting a fairly straightforward ransom scenario, only to fall afoul of postal strikes and the sociopathic cheapness of Getty’s grandfather, who only wanted to pay ransom up to the tax deductible amount. Getty was kept in a mountain hideout for months with only his mother, who was broke, trying to free him. And yes, the story gets even stranger from there.
This is, as you might have guessed, far from the only weird story about the Getty family. After all, the family fortune was created by a guy who said “A lasting relationship with a woman is only possible if you are a business failure” in front of a hot mic, so we suspect Trust will have plenty of fodder for more series.