(The pilot is embedded above for catching up. If the embed fails, it’s at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC8KsZniulw.)
Glitch Productions marked Halloween with a one-line message and a teaser: “The Smiling Dead returns with a very special release in March 2027.” The Smiling Dead are the crew at the heart of The Gaslight District, Nick Szopko’s supernatural crime comedy about a family of undead gangsters in a town where dying is a minor inconvenience and the real trouble is anything you can’t wriggle out of. The pilot went up on YouTube in April 2025, so by March the fans will have waited nearly two years for more. For a show about people who refuse to stay buried, that’s practically on brand.
The delay has a fairly mundane explanation. Glitch, the Sydney studio behind The Amazing Digital Circus and Murder Drones, said early on that more Gaslight was in production but would take a while, because the team had to finish Digital Circus first. It didn’t help that the internet, abhorring a vacuum, spent part of 2025 insisting the story would carry on as a comic instead. Note the careful wording of the new announcement, too. Glitch says “a very special release”, not “episode two”. Fan wikis have already pencilled in a second episode for March 2027, and that’s the likeliest reading, but until the studio says so it’s fair to leave room for a special, a double bill or some other surprise from the crypt.
Szopko, better known online as PartTimeSeagull, reportedly spent years developing the show before Glitch got involved. Along the way it shed its original title, The Smiling Dead, reportedly so it wouldn’t be confused with Smiling Friends, and gained Screen Australia funding. It’s also the first Glitch series with uncensored strong language, which suits a cast of corpses with grievances. It’s part of a wider and rather heartening trend: creator-led genre animation built for YouTube, outside the old studio machine, with an audience big enough (Glitch’s channel has more than 20 million subscribers) that a single pilot can sustain two years of theorising.
Indie animation runs on a different clock from television. Seasons are measured in years, and an episode lands when it’s ready rather than when a schedule demands it, a bit like the old Hammer production line run in reverse. Two years is a long time to keep a corpse fresh, but if anyone can manage it, it’s the Smiling Dead.
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