The series was created by Eric Newman, Noah Oppenheim, and Michael Schmidt, who conceived the story together, with Newman and Oppenheim writing the pilot script.

Robert De Niro was attached to star from early on and also served as an executive producer alongside creators Eric Newman and Noah Oppenheim, Jonathan Glickman of Panoramic Media, and Michael Schmidt.

Netflix officially greenlit the project on March 1, 2023, with Lesli Linka Glatter set to direct.

Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Plemons, Joan Allen, and Connie Britton joined the cast in April 2023, followed by Bill Camp, Matthew Modine, Dan Stevens, McKinley Belcher III, Gaby Hoffmann, Mark Ivanir and Clark Gregg in December 2023, and Mozhan Navabi in February 2024.

An application to film a train crash sequence was submitted for Westchester County, New York, for July 2023 as part of production.

Filming, which began in and around New York, was suspended in June 2023 due to the Writers Guild of America strike, sending cast and crew home before production resumed in December of that year.

A New York Times review compared the series' paranoid political thriller tone to 1970s films such as The Conversation, Chinatown, The Parallax View, and Three Days of the Condor.

The series received mixed reviews, holding a 54% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 81 critics and a Metacritic score of 52 out of 100, though it still ranked second on Netflix's U.S. charts for two consecutive weeks after its release.