According to Variety, British comedy team Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are set to return to television with the paranormal series Truth Seekers. To be made through the pair’s new production company Stolen Picture, Truth Seekers will be a half-hour comedy-horror series about a three-man paranormal investigation team, with each episode focusing on a different paranormal incident in a “monster-of-the-week” format.
“Each episode is going to be an adventure, a potential haunting or something,” Pegg says. “It’ll start as a very parochial idea, a very small business venture for these people, but it will expand as the series goes on to be something far more global. It’s a language everyone understands, the mystery of the unknown. ‘Shaun of the Dead’ was a very parochial story set in North London and somehow it managed to get this global reach because everyone understands the language of zombie movies.”
“Despite being very British, in terms of their sense of humor and perspective on the world, they have created content that has been lapped up around the world,” said Wayne Garvie, president of international production at Sony Pictures Television, which is backing Stolen Picture. “Whether as actors, writers, producers, or even directors they have a constituency around the world they reach out to and a real bedrock of support and love in Britain.”
Stolen Picture has already wrapped its first feature film, Slaughterhouse Rulez, a horror comedy that takes place at a British boarding school and featuring Michael Sheen and Asa Butterfield in addition to Pegg and Frost. They’re also planning another feature with Pegg and Frost as a fading double act who decide to reunite with each other after years of separation.
“We’d like to do it as a two-hander and make it on a very low budget,” says Pegg. “We’ve had the idea for a long time, and we’re going to write an outline and then improvise and make something, which is far looser than when we work with Edgar…where every transition is so precise.”
“There’s that trade-off,” Frost added of the lower budgets. “I’d rather have a lot less money and make a film or a TV series and have a great time doing it than put it through a million processes and people you don’t know and you don’t respect creatively.”
The pair have been working together onscreen for nearly 20 years, beginning with the cult hit TV series Spaced (co-written by Pegg, directed by Edgar Wright), which ran for two seasons on Channel 4. Pegg, Frost and Wright expanded their partnership on the big screen with the Cornetto Trilogy, consisting of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, 2007’s Hot Fuzz and 2013’s The World’s End, as well as the non-Wright American feature Paul, which was co-written by Pegg and Frost.
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