Nikolaj Coster-Waldau Leads MGM+’s ‘The Black Tapes’: Everything We Know About the Horror Podcast Series
Ten years ago, a fake documentary podcast about a skeptic and his locked cabinet of unexplained videotapes convinced a lot of listeners it might be real. Now it is finally getting a body. MGM+ has handed The Black Tapes a straight-to-series order of eight episodes, and it has a genuine star at the center: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, the man who spent eight seasons as Jaime Lannister, is playing Dr. Richard Strand, the psychiatrist whose whole job is proving ghosts don't exist.
It is a big swing for a streamer that has quietly become one of the better homes for TV horror, and it is a second chance for a project that already died once at NBC. Below: everything confirmed about the series, who is making it, how a 2015 audio drama became one of horror podcasting's defining hits, the long and bumpy road to the screen, and the real question hanging over the whole thing: how do you adapt a story that never actually finished?
Is There a Trailer?
Not yet, and there won't be for a while. Cameras don't roll until January 2027, so there is no footage, no first-look still of Coster-Waldau as Strand, and no teaser. When MGM+ releases official video, we'll add it here. In the meantime, the best preview is the source itself: all three seasons of the original podcast are still free on podcast apps, and they run about 35 to 50 minutes an episode.
The Details: Everything Confirmed
MGM+ made it official on Monday, October 26, 2026. Here is what the announcement and the trades that covered it lock down:
- Order: a full series pickup, eight episodes, no pilot stage.
- Star: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Dr. Richard Strand, a psychiatrist with a mysterious past who investigates paranormal cases in order to debunk them.
- His partner: Alex Regan, described as an obsessive, relentless scientist. The role has not been cast. (Note the spelling: the press materials use "Regan," while the podcast's host was "Alex Reagan.")
- The story: Strand and Regan chase hauntings, possessions, disappearances and local legends, and their debunking work drags them into a hidden occult world and a conspiracy with apocalyptic stakes that stretches back centuries.
- Writers: podcast creators Terry Miles and Paul Bae are writing the adaptation with showrunner John Rogers.
- Executive producers: Miles, Bae, Rogers, Kearie Peak of Peak Pictures and Jennifer Court of Kung Fu Monkey Productions. MGM+ Studios is the studio.
- Production: filming starts in January 2027 in Vancouver, British Columbia.
- Premiere date: none announced.
MGM+ global head Michael Wright pitched the show as a story built around "our cultural fascination with the unexplained," and said the team wants something both provocative and hugely entertaining. The casting itself leaked a few days early: scooper Daniel Richtman reported it to his Patreon subscribers, and Dread Central ran it over the weekend before the network confirmed it.
Photo: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
Who's Behind It
Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
Most of the world knows him as the Kingslayer, but Coster-Waldau's horror résumé is older and better than people remember. He broke out in Denmark in Ole Bornedal's 1994 morgue thriller Nightwatch ( Nattevagten ), a film good enough that Hollywood remade it a few years later with Ewan McGregor, Patricia Arquette, Nick Nolte and Josh Brolin.
His biggest horror hit came in January 2013 with Andy Muschietti's Mama , the Guillermo del Toro-produced ghost story in which he played opposite Jessica Chastain. It was a monster for its size: built on a reported $15 million budget, it opened to $28.4 million domestically, finished at $71.6 million in North America and grossed about $148 million worldwide, per The Numbers. Its success also helped put Muschietti in line for It. Since Thrones ended he has stayed busy on TV, most recently playing William the Conqueror in the BBC One and Prime Video drama King & Conqueror , and he is an Emmy nominee.
The casting is smart for a specific reason: Strand only works if the audience half-trusts him and half-suspects him. Coster-Waldau spent a decade making a charming, arrogant, possibly monstrous man into the most sympathetic character on television. That is exactly the muscle this role needs.
Terry Miles and Paul Bae
The creators aren't handing the show off; they're in the writers' room. Miles in particular has built an entire shared universe out of Pacific Northwest Stories, the audio label behind The Black Tapes. Its sister show Tanis launched in October 2015 and ran five seasons and 60 episodes through 2020, and his 2017 podcast Rabbits , about a deadly alternate reality game, became a novel in 2021. All three live in the same fictional world, which matters a lot if MGM+ ever wants more than one season.
John Rogers
The showrunner pick is the surprise. Rogers is not a horror guy. He co-created Leverage , which ran five seasons on TNT from 2008 to 2012 and was revived as Leverage: Redemption in 2021, and he developed TNT's The Librarians. Before TV, he co-wrote the disaster movie The Core and relaunched DC's Blue Beetle comic in 2006 with the Jaime Reyes version of the hero.
What Rogers does know is the "team of specialists works a case every week while a bigger mystery builds" format, and he knows how to run a show on schedule. That is the format The Black Tapes lives in. The open question is whether he can keep the dread intact when his natural register is wit.
Photo: John Rogers via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
The Backstory: A Podcast That Fooled People
The Black Tapes premiered on May 21, 2015, and its trick was the format. It sounded like public radio. Host Alex Reagan (voiced by Lori Henry) presented herself as a journalist making a documentary about people with interesting jobs, and she landed on Dr. Richard Strand (voiced by Christian Sloan), a famous skeptic offering a cash prize to anyone who could prove the supernatural. Strand had a set of cases he couldn't explain, kept on black-labeled VHS tapes. Reagan wanted to watch them. Things got worse from there.
A year after Serial made true-crime podcasts a phenomenon, that true-crime cadence was the perfect costume, and plenty of first-time listeners weren't sure whether they were hearing fiction. The Guardian praised the way the show folded math, music theory and history into clues about a possible demonic invasion. The numbers followed: by the count cited in coverage of this week's announcement, the podcast has passed 60 million downloads.
The run itself was short and strange. Season 1 had 12 episodes in 2015, season 2 had 12 more in 2016, and season 3 wrapped with just six episodes in fall 2017, 30 in total. The creators announced a fourth season in March 2018. It never arrived. In January 2020, the finale was quietly relabeled a "mid-season finale," and Pacific Northwest Stories hasn't released new audio since 2021. Fans have been left hanging for nine years.
The Long Road to TV
This is attempt number two. In December 2018, NBC took the podcast into development as a drama, with Miles and Bae executive producing alongside Emerald City co-creator Matthew Arnold and Entertainment 360, and Universal Television attached. The network floated it for the 2019 season. It never made it to a pilot. By the AV Club's account, the version now at MGM+ has been in development since 2019, which means it took roughly seven years to get from "we're working on it" to a series order and a lead actor.
By the Numbers
- 60 million+ podcast downloads since 2015
- 30 episodes across three seasons (2015 to 2017)
- 8 episodes ordered by MGM+
- 2 networks that have tried to adapt it (NBC in 2018, MGM+ now)
- $148 million worldwide for Mama , Coster-Waldau's last big horror lead, on a $15 million budget
- January 2027 start of filming in Vancouver
Analysis: What This Really Means
MGM+ is building a horror brand on purpose
MGM+ has spent years struggling to stand out against the giants, and its one undeniable breakout is a horror show. FROM is in its fourth season, has been renewed for a fifth and final run, and just jumped into Netflix's top 10 after landing there in October. With FROM heading for its ending, MGM+ needs its next "what is going on in this town" obsession. The Black Tapes is built for exactly that audience: a mystery box with a case-of-the-week engine, so viewers get answers every episode while the bigger puzzle keeps them hooked. Putting a recognizable star at the top tells you the network is treating this as a tentpole, not filler.
The podcast-to-TV track record is mixed
Audio horror has been a farm system for TV for a while, and the results cut both ways. Netflix's Archive 81 , adapted from a 2016 podcast and produced by James Wan, debuted in January 2022, earned an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes, logged about 128 million hours viewed in its first few weeks, peaked at No. 2 in Nielsen's streaming chart, and was still canceled after one season that March. Homecoming gave Prime Video a prestige hit with Julia Roberts; Limetown with Jessica Biel came and went on Facebook Watch. The lesson is that a podcast's fan base gets you sampled, not renewed. The show has to work for people who have never heard an episode.
The real challenge: the format and the ending
Two things made the podcast special, and neither transfers cleanly. The first is the fake-documentary frame: the dread came from the possibility that it was real. A scripted series with a movie star can't fool anyone, so the show has to find a new way to unsettle people. Notably, the press release reframes Regan from a journalist into a scientist and makes the pair investigative partners, which reads like a deliberate move away from the faux-doc approach toward something closer to The X-Files , the comparison nearly everyone reached for this week.
The second is the ending, or the lack of one. Listeners have waited since 2017 for answers. That is a liability and an opportunity at the same time. Miles and Bae can finally finish the story, and TV gives them the budget and runway to do it. But if the series lands on another cliffhanger and doesn't get a second season, fans of the podcast will have been left hanging twice. The best thing MGM+ could do is let the eight episodes close a real chapter.
What We Still Don't Know
- Who plays Alex Regan. That casting is the next big announcement, and it matters as much as Strand.
- Whether Nic Silver, the podcast's producer character (voiced by Miles), or anyone from Tanis shows up.
- Who directs, and whether the series keeps any found-footage or documentary elements.
- A premiere date. With filming starting in January 2027, a late-2027 debut is the earliest realistic window, and 2028 is entirely possible.
- Whether the show follows the podcast's plot or uses it as a launching pad, and whether the podcast's unfinished ending finally gets resolved.
Bottom Line
This is the right star, a smart home and a story that has waited nine years for a real ending. The concerns are real too: a showrunner with no horror on his résumé, a format that loses its best trick on screen, and a podcast-to-TV pipeline that has burned fans before. But Coster-Waldau playing a confident man slowly losing his certainty sounds like the kind of performance that carries a show, and MGM+ has already proven with FROM that it will let a slow-burn mystery breathe.
So tell us: did you listen to The Black Tapes back in 2015, and is Jaime Lannister the right Richard Strand?
Related on The Horror Feed
Header photo: Nikolaj Coster-Waldau at Cannes 2018 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added.
Recent STories
