Truth Seekers Review: Don’t Sleep on One of Amazon’s Best Shows of 2020 By Bill Bodkin
On October 30, the streaming world was treated to one of the best shows of the year. And no, we’re not talking about The Mandalorian.
Truth Seekers, which had the dubious honor of premiering the same day as the second season of the acclaimed Star Wars series, is easily and unequivocally one of the best shows to stream on Amazon Prime Video in 2020.
The series produced, created, and co-written by the beloved comedy duo of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (Shaun of the Dead) stars Frost as Gus, a British broadband installer who also happens to be an amateur ghost hunter and runs the YouTube channel “Truth Seeker.” His fairly regimented life is turned on its head when he and his new partner, the easily frightened Elton John (Samson Kayo, Timewasters), and are oddly dispatched to extremely haunted locations, where they stumble upon Astrid (Emma D’Arcy, Wanderlust) — a woman haunted by malevolent entities.
The series is an absolutely brilliant blend of legit hair-raising horror and suspense with vintage, subtle wry British humor. Pegg and Frost’s ability to craft a series that is able to balance horror and comedy should come to zero surprise to the audience as the duo has being doing this both in front of the camera with Shaun of the Dead and The World’s End and behind the camera with their first produced film, Slaughterhouse Rulez.
However, longtime Pegg and Frost fans need to be forewarned. If you’re looking for the big laughs from outlandish physical and horror-based comedy or foul-mouthed jokes that are abound in Shaun of the Dead, you’re not finding them in Truth Seekers. The focus in this series is not the yucks and laughs. Instead it’s the multi-layered mysteries of the narrative and the terrifying visuals lurking at every corner. The humor here is more reactionary and organic, played as moments of quick relief from, at times, unrelenting intensity.
If you’ve followed Pegg and Frost’s careers you know that their comedy is based on being honest and respectful of where they derive their humor from and never lampooning it. Hot Fuzz wasn’t a National Lampoon or Zucker Brothers take on action films — it was their (and director Edgar Wright’s) homage to the run-and-gun genre with a bunch of laughs thrown in. So it makes all the sense that the duo’s series takes the supernatural and the world of ghost hunting extremely seriously. It’s in that seriousness that the natural chemistry between Frost and his co-stars, particularly Samson Kayo, allows for well-placed, well-timed and quick-witted humor.
Frost serves as the driving force of the series and his uncanny ability to imbue a sense of sincerity and vulnerability into a blustering know-it-all works to absolute perfection. He makes Gus more than just some wonky ghost hunter — he’s a man driven by the death of his wife — and while he’ll rumble and stumble through supernatural adventures, his character’s motivations and intentions always have a sense of purity to them. With that being said, this is in no way a one-man show. Kayo, Emma D’Arcy, Malcolm McDowell (A Clockwork Orange) and Susan Wokima (Enola Holmes) absolutely runaway with the material Pegg, Frost and company have given them. The performances are all wonderfully lived in and feel as though they were ripped out of the audiences’ lives. We know people like them in real life and that slim sense of realism only makes the horror more intense and the humor more robust.
That’s why Truth Seekers is one of the best shows Amazon — or the other streamers — has produced in 2020. It’s a legitimately frightening series that is also legitimately hilarious, while still heartfelt and oddly relatable. The pacing of each episode makes this an easy binge and the master narrative of the series is so compelling, and the characters so beguiling, that you’ll find yourself burning through half the series without even realizing it. Simply put, don’t sleep on this series as you’ll be missing out on a great one.
