Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, who spent eight seasons of Game of Thrones as Jaime Lannister, is swapping the Kingsguard for the paranormal. He will star in an eight-episode MGM+ series based on The Black Tapes, Terry Miles and Paul Bae’s 2015 horror podcast, Reactor reports.
Coster-Waldau plays Dr Richard Strand, “a brilliant psychiatrist with a mysterious past” who teams up with “the obsessed, relentless scientist Alex Regan to debunk paranormal cases of hauntings, possessions, disappearances, and sinister legends — the infamous black tapes.” Naturally, the pair do not get to stay sceptical for long. They “uncover a hidden occult world behind our own and must unravel a centuries-old apocalyptic conspiracy,” which is the sort of thing that happens when you keep a library of cases you cannot explain. Nobody has yet been cast as Alex.
Miles and Bae are writing and executive producing, with John Rogers (Leverage) and Jennifer Court of Kung Fu Monkey Productions, and Kearie Peak of Peak Pictures. Filming is due to start in January 2027; there is no premiere date yet. Rogers describes it as “a unique blend of truly unsettling horror and puzzle-box conspiracy mystery.”
The podcast was one of the hits of the 2015–16 audio-fiction boom, along with Welcome to Night Vale and Limetown, presenting itself as a true-life documentary series and leaving a fair number of listeners unsure whether it was. That trick will be harder to pull on television, but the format it is built on is an old and sturdy one. A believer and a sceptic, a filing cabinet full of the unexplained and a conspiracy that goes all the way up: it worked rather well for The X-Files, and Strand’s job is basically Scully’s with a nicer office.
It is also not the first time someone has tried to get the tapes on screen. Bloody Disgusting reported an NBC adaptation some years ago that never surfaced, so the real mystery may be whether this one makes it out of the archive.
Join the conversation (0)