It’s been exactly two weeks now since I binge watched Amazon’s Simon Pegg / Nick Frost collaboration Truth Seekers, and I still don’t know what to make of it. Off the bat there are 2 things I can say with certainty (3 actually but put a pin on Alex DeLarge for now): it was nothing I expected it to be, and I loved it. I just… don’t know what to make of it. Closest I could come up with so far is calling it a Scooby Doo & X-Files Mash-up written by the dudes who did Shaun of the Dead.
Gus Roberts (Nick Frost) is the number one technician in a major UK telecom provider called “Smyle” (…yeah, I got nothing), who moonlights as a YouTube-posting paranormal investigator, meaning he mostly narrates legends surroundings places that are said to be haunted. when he’s not mourning his departed wife and taking care of the old man, Gus trains a new company recruit, Elton John (just roll with it) who has a knack for stepping into actual paranormal activity. The new pair soon becomes a trio when a young woman seeks refuge in their service truck from something straight out of my childhood TV set that offered very little certainty as to what we were watching thanks to its state-of-the-fart rabbit ears.
My expectations were of a complete farce where abundantly obvious take-downs and references would be interspersed with potty comedy. What I got is straight-up realistic, relatable and completely human characters, the kind I could run into any day of the week at Wal-Mart. This isn’t a sitcom, it’s your life, if you stumbled onto the very stuff you browse for every time you should be doing something productive instead. The humor is existential, the dialogues are completely natural, and there is nary any low-browery in sight. The most ridiculous element by far if Simon Peg’s mind-bending toupee, whose reason for being ends up clever if you stick it out to the end.
That would be the aspect that made me fall for it: most of it makes little sense until it does. Most of it feels episodic -Gus and his crew investigate the haunting of the week- but then in the end it is… and it’s not. It’s both and neither. It calls back to Television of the 70s and 80s while melting it seamlessly into the serial nature of the binge-watch generation. Even better is that I could sense, somewhere in the corner of my mind, that it DOES contain buckets of pop-culture references that were done too well or were simply too obscure -for me- to distract from the overall sheer amazement I felt from liking it.
There IS one huge distraction, both a source of immense glee yet dire heartbreak: Malcolm McDowell, as the semi-senile patriarch. He always improves immeasurably any project he boards, but said projects more often than not aren’t worthy of such a talent’s time. I hear you, folks, Vincent Price and Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee made tons of B movies that are now incontestable classics, but three-quarters of the man’s filmography is the former and never the latter (first person who says Moon 44 gets an atomic wedgie, that movie is PUTRID). That’s the heartache half; the glee part is that he steals every single scene he’s in, looking like he’s having the time of his entire life, and it’s impossible not to giggle for him.
Also needing a strong mention because it felt like oodles of cherries on a perfect sundae, the cast includes my hall-pass crush Kelly MacDonald, the soundtrack and theme piece are the stuff of instant cult-classics, It felt very refreshing that Nick Frost played a) a smart guy, and b) the main character, while partner in crime Simon Pegg this time takes the back seat and shows up just to remind us he exists. Again though, ride it out until the end, for things, and people, are never what they seem.
Every year I build a playlist for Halloween, movies mixed with on-topic episodes of shows I like, to watch or stream or just play in the background while I go about my October 31st. Mark my tomb, next year I’m re-bingeing Truth Seekers, Season 1 if a second hasn’t been gifted us by then.
The Canuck Critick 