Celebrities to compete for cash, get ‘whacked’ in Mob-inspired reality show

A Mob-themed competition show is set to air soon on Hulu and Disney+, featuring celebrity contestants at a luxury Italian villa competing for up to $250,000 in cash prizes.

Titled The Mob, the reality game show stars The White Lotus’ Parker Posey as host and features participants such as Aida Turturro, who played Tony Soprano’s sister, Janice, in the HBO drama series The Sopranos. Other contestants include Dancing with the Stars judge Bruno Tonioli and The Real Housewives of New Jersey’s Joe Gorga, and rapper Romeo.

A run date for The Mob has not been announced, but the series is expected to premiere later in 2026. Posey serves as executive producer along with teams from Studio Lambert, which produced The Traitors, and Primal Media, the British firm behind the horror game show Release the Hounds.

According to Hulu, each episode showcases celebrities tackling Mob movie-inspired jobs to survive. The contestants in The Traitors-style production will vote among themselves for a powerful Mob “don,” tasked with deciding “who makes money, who stays, and who ultimately gets whacked.” Adding to the drama is the potential that the family might rise up and overthrow the don.

The promotional trailer available on Hulu’s YouTube channel introduces the 12-member cast while the Crystals’ song “Then He Kissed Me” plays in the background. At the conclusion, Posey steps into the scene and faces the camera. “As for me, I may look cute, but I kinda run the place,” she says. “You think you’ve seen a family like this before? Forget about it!” The video then cuts to a soundless black frame much like the final scene in the last episode of The Sopranos.

New Godfather novel

The Associated Press recently reported that Random House has acquired a new Godfather novel approved by author Mario Puzo’s estate. Puzo’s 1969 Mafia novel The Godfather, about the fictional Corleone crime family, led to a series of popular movies. Puzo received two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay in the 1970s, one for the first Godfather movie and the other for The Godfather, Part II. He worked with director Francis Ford Coppola on the adaptations.

After Puzo died in 1999 at age 78, his estate authorized subsequent Godfather novels by other writers, keeping the story alive.  The newest book is Connie, written by Adriana Trigiani, a New York-based best-selling author. The novel is the first to focus on a woman’s point of view and the first written by a woman. Slated for release in 2027, Trigiani’s novel is centered on Connie Corleone, the character portrayed by Coppola’s sister, Talia Shire, in the Godfather movies.

In a statement, Trigiani said Connie is a novel “about how a woman works to forge her own way in a world that’s already decided who she is, what she’s about, and how she should be treated.”

“People underestimated Don Vito Corleone and [his son] Michael Corleone at their peril,” the novelist said. “The same will be true for Connie Corleone.”

Paramount Pictures, which produced the Godfather movies, holds the film rights to Trigiani’s novel but has not released any details about a potential movie based on the book.

Whether Coppola would be involved in a film adaptation is another matter. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a representative for Coppola told the publication “it’s ‘unlikely’ the 87-year-old director will be making a female-focused Godfather IV anytime soon.”

Mafia stories still popular

New shows such as The Mob, as well as recent additions to longstanding favorites like The Godfather, reflect the continued appeal of organized crime stories. Author and journalist Tod Goldberg told The Mob Museum this appeal results from the intrigue of “living outside the normal rules of civil society.”

Described by the Orange County Register as “one of the best (and funniest) crime writers working today,” Goldberg lives in Southern California. His novels include Only Way Out, Gangsters Don’t Die, and Gangster Nation.

“It feels good to be a gangster because you answer to no one, theoretically, but of course we all know the truth,” he said, adding that a bad outcome—“a noose”—is waiting at the end.

Asked whether he is concerned that a game show like The Mob, with contestants being “whacked,” might trivialize Mafia violence, Goldberg said it already is trivialized.

“All violence tends to be,” he said, “until it happens to you.”

Currently, Goldberg is a consulting producer for The Roman, an eight-episode Netflix series centered on a modern-day casino in a “still dangerous version” of Las Vegas.

“At the center of it all stands Robert ‘Bobby Red’ Redman, president of the hottest hotel-casino in town, who has to make some long-odds moves to try and secure his position and take more ground,” according to Netflix.

A run date has not been set for the series, though the cast has been selected, including Oscar Isaac as the casino president, Bobby Red. Other cast members include Betty Gilpin as Bobby Red’s wife, David Costabile as the operator of a rival casino, and Alec Baldwin as Paul “Primo” Clark, a surrogate father figure to Bobby Red.

Legendary Hollywood director Martin Scorsese, whose many films include the 1995 movie Casino, is serving as executive producer for The Roman. It is unclear whether the series will touch on an earlier era when mobsters ruled Las Vegas casinos, as portrayed in the Scorsese movie, or will stick strictly to a dramatized version of today’s corporate resorts. For now, Netflix is playing its cards close to the vest, saying only that the “hour-long drama is set in the high-stakes, sharp-elbowed present-day Las Vegas casino business.”

Meanwhile, with the celebrity game show The Mob set to air soon, Goldberg said he liked Posey’s previous role in the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail. In that movie, she plays a book editor, which Goldberg says is “an entirely different kind of gangster.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas.