The truth is out there, and it will be streaming on Amazon Prime Video. As part of Comic-Con@Home, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost reunited to talk about and show a trailer for their upcoming eight-episode series, Truth Seekers, in which they play broadband installers who explore the paranormal. The show continues Pegg and Frost’s proud tradition of blending the comedic with the spooky. As co-writer Nat Saunders put it during the panel, “We wanted to take the horror really seriously and then make the comedy really funny. So the horror stuff is never spoofy — it’s homage, if anything. There might be things that you recognize from other films and TV shows in this film, but hopefully we’ve put a spin on them and taken them seriously. We haven’t just done a goofy, ‘let’s add some laughs to a classic horror trope’ kind of thing.â€
Co-writer James Serafinowicz cited Arthur C. Clarke as inspiration, but Frost added that they also took a lot “from watching exorcisms on YouTube. It’s so wonderfully obvious it isn’t [real]. But for that second, you watch it and you get that weird chill up your back, like, Oh fuck, maybe it is real. And it isn’t.â€
The fictional company the characters work for is called Smile, which Pegg described as a “thinly disguised Sky-type organization, a multinational broadband provider who may or may not be nefarious in their aims and deeds.†Saunders spoke about some of the actual creepy locations they shot at, including a house with a Georgian interior and Tudor exterior (a terrifying mismatch!) and an abandoned bio lab with “chilling clinical cages and gas chambers.â€
If Pegg and Frost are to be believed, as they take the piss out of each other and the Comic-Con moderator, they did plenty of ghost hunting as they prepped for their roles, knocking on abbey doors and asking if any ghosts were home, even boarding a ghost train in an abandoned tube station in the middle of the woods that appeared to them “like Brigadoon.†Truth Seekers will stream sometime this year … but the exact date is uuuunknooooowwwwn. Spooooookyyyy.