Meet Gus Roberts, a service technician for the telecommunications company Smyle, which is striving for 100% coverage of Britain so that every one of its customers can know that they will have the reliable service they need when they need it. Gus isn’t just your regular installer and technician, no. He’s the best. And his boss Dave, played by Simon Pegg (Hot Fuzz, Mission: Impossible), wants him to take on a new partner so he can pass some of that knowledge down to the next generation of Smyle techs. Elton, played by Samson Kayo (Our Flag Means Death), is eager to learn, but has a history of jumping from job to job. Although, that does mean he as a vast well of shallow, particular knowledge, which is nice to have to drawn upon.
Oh, did I forget to mention that Gus, played by Nick Frost (Hot Fuzz, Attack the Block) is also a part-time paranormal investigator with a YouTube channel called The Truth Seeker? And that on their first job together, they run into something very, very strange? On the way to the job, though, Gus plays a station on the radio that just repeats “1” in patterns of four. He explains to Elton that it’s a numbers station, put in place to defend England during WW2. Why it’s still going decades after the war ended, nobody knows. It only repeats “1” in patterns of four. But when Elton goes to change the frequency, for a reason as inexplicable as the station’s existence itself, the message is changes. 1 5 9 7. The broadcast remains a mystery. The job is at a little old lady’s house called Connolly’s Nook (I can only imagine the chutzpah it takes to not only name a house, but also to name it after yourself, as her father did), and despite her being very happy with their service, she calls them back in for a follow-up. During the second visit, Gus and Elton discover a secret door when Elton realizes that the interior dimensions of the room appeared too small compared to the outside of the house. He worked construction for short time, so it’s the kind of thing he notices. Eventually they open it and find that it was hiding a travesty of animal cruelty. Turns out, Ms. Connolly’s father was a scientist; a bit of a Dr. Frankenstein of his day, except he was using his daughter’s pet dog as an experiment in soul separation. And in all this time, a scared young woman being chased by apparitions after surviving a catastrophic event finds her way to them, hiding in the back of their work van, which Gus lovingly dubbed the HMS Darkside.
And that’s our introduction to Truth Seekers, the short-lived Amazon Prime series that you probably missed the first time around back in 2020. Centered around Gus, Elton, and Astrid, played by Emma D’Arcy (House of the Dragon), with Elton’s sister Helen, played by Susan Wokoma (Enola Holmes) and Richard, played by Malcolm McDowell (Community, A Clockwork Orange), the show follows them as they conduct their paranormal investigations for Gus’s YouTube channel. Elton and eventually Astrid are drafted into the project as things get weirder and weirder and the stakes of their endeavor get bigger and bigger. The soul transference of Connolly’s Nook is just the beginning. Gus and his late wife Emily have been involved in paranormal investigations for years, but it’s now that things are really beginning to heat up. The show takes the Truth Seekers to all sorts of places, including a haunted theme hotel, an abandoned restaurant in the English countryside, and the horror classic, a disused mental hospital for the criminally insane with a history of patient abuse and misogyny. As you can imagine, for people who believe in ghosts and psychic energy and stuff, that’s got to be a hotspot rife with paranormal activity. And you’d be right.
As you can probably imagine by the cast, it’s not exactly the new X-Files. It’s a horror-comedy, which, again, is my favorite way to engage with the horror genre, but in this case, Truth Seekers definitely brings the horror with the comedy. As much as I loved The Blackening for its sharp comedy and cutting satire, it isn’t really functional as a horror movie. It’s not scary; there’s some tension, but even for the least seasoned of horror movie watchers, The Blackening is unlikely to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up (which is fine by me, that’s not a criticism). Astrid, on the other hand, is being chased by really quite scary looking ghosts that have this really cool out-of-phase thing going on with them, which adds to the otherworldliness of their appearance. There are genuinely unnerving moments in this show and genuinely exciting ones as well. And, of course, there are genuinely funny moments too. With this cast, there pretty much has to be. Simon Pegg is relegated to little more than a cameo (though impactful to the story as it is) as Gus’s enthusiastic boss, but he and Nick Frost are sharp as ever in this series. More than that, Frost also flexes his dramatic skills as an actor, bringing a great deal of pathos and heart to the character. Samson Kayo and Emma D’Arcy (who uses they/them pronouns off-screen) are a delight as well. The two have instant and easy chemistry and they come off as old friends very quickly. Kayo went on from this to a successful run on Our Flag Means Death, where he shone again. Emma D’Arcy went on to do House of the Dragon, which I haven’t bothered with, but I’m told some people like it. I can’t say for sure that Truth Seekers was the thing that set the two of them up for more big prestige projects like those, but there’s no rule that says I can’t believe that. And, of course, Malcolm McDowell is a legendary actor, so you know he’s going to bring his particular brand of old British snark and bring it well.
I went into Truth Seekers when it first hit Prime 5 years ago thinking it was going to be a fun comedy in the vein of Hot Fuzz. But it is so much more. Not only are there properly scary moments that will get your blood up, it turns out to be one of the most touching series I have seen in a long time. There is such an amazing openness and bigheartedness to this show that is hard to put into words, but you don’t just know it when you see it, you feel it. From the lonely young, agoraphobic Helen making a connection with the lonely elderly Richard helping to alleviate both their loneliness at the same time to Gus’s kind manner in dealing with just about everyone, including the little old lady who sabotaged her own cable so she could have an excuse to reach out to a real human being. I’ve seen this show six or seven times by now because it’s one I keep coming back to; despite the frights, its warmth has turned it into a comfort show for me. One where people who care about each other find a way through grief and loneliness together and they learn to reach out to one another, all while stumbling on to a massive conspiracy involving a whole hell of a lot of murders and the promise of eternal life after death. Even after all those viewings, I still can’t not cry at the end of the second episode. When you get there, you’ll understand why, but I wouldn’t dare deprive you of experiencing that moment of pure beauty for yourself.
As the show draws to a close, there are harrowing and heartwarming moments in equal measure. There is so much unexpected depth to a show that seems as silly as this one does at first glance. I mean, we’re talking about ghosts and spirits and eternal life dimensions. I didn’t expect a show that still has the ability to the make me cry this many times into watching it. I didn’t expect a show that would be so moving when it’s about a ghost-hunting cable repair guy going up and down the English countryside, installing 6G coverage and finding beasts and phantasms. How could it possibly be so good, so affecting, so memorable, and so overlooked? Truth Seekers is happy to serve up laughs, scares, and heartrending moments one after another in a way that feels both balanced and earned. You end the show as crestfallen as you are hopeful. And, in my case, changed. No, I’m not suddenly going to start believing in ghosts or the afterlife or anything paranormal (in the fiction of the show, there is no ambiguity; ghosts are real, there is some sort of areligious afterlife or spirit world where people get trapped), but Truth Seekers is about a lot more than ghosts. Every single one of the main characters is living in a little bubble that keeps them from connecting with other people. Which is ironic when your protagonists work for a telecoms company ensuring connectedness for all its customers. Gus is grieving his wife Emily still. Helen is almost a total shut-in because of her anxiety and agoraphobia. Elton jumps from job to job, sometimes after as little as a few days, making it so he can’t make friends with anyone because he’s not around long enough. Richard is also grieving and living an isolated life in Gus’s house. Astrid is lost, her only companions the angry spirits chasing her. But throughout the show, one way or another, they all manage to find each other and in that, they find new ways to deal with the weight they carry. And, on top of that, they also manage to do some really cool stuff and in a very real way, save a lot of people from very violent ends.
As much as it is this show’s heart that won me over, it really does offer a lot more than just that. It’s a show about caring and empathy without being melodramatic or sanctimonious. It’s that rare thing that a show or any piece of media is this good at everything it sets out to do. It’s funny when it wants to be, it’s scary when it wants to be, and it’s heartfelt when it wants to be. And there’s even some good action as well. It remains a travesty that Truth Seekers never got a second season and the proper ending it deserves, but the end of the first does work well enough as an open-ended conclusion to the series that I can almost convince myself that it didn’t need another season (with all the cancelled shows I’ve loved over the years, I’m used to this particular shade of self-deception; I’m looking at you Lodge 49, Firefly, Terriers, The Tick, and others). Though its cancellation still hurts, the journey we did get to undertake with these lovely characters deserves to be shared and celebrated. This 10 episode series averages about half an hour an episode and is available for streaming on Prime Video. And I don’t normally do this, but I would love it if you check it out, because I have been looking for someone to discuss it with for five years and have found very few who have seen this real hidden gem.
