CONFIRMED
MGM+ has ordered a TV adaptation of The Black Tapes, the cult 2015 horror podcast, with Nikolaj Coster-Waldau in the lead role, Deadline reported on October 26, 2026. The eight-episode supernatural investigation series comes from the podcast’s original creators, Terry Miles and Paul Bae, with Leverage’s John Rogers on board as showrunner. For anyone who spent 2015 pausing their commute to stare nervously at nothing, this one is real.
What we know
Deadline, reporting the MGM+ announcement, says the network has greenlit The Black Tapes as a supernatural horror investigation series. The Playlist describes it as a straight-to-series order, so there is no pilot stage to clear first.
According to TV Insider, which relayed the official MGM+ description, Coster-Waldau plays Dr. Richard Strand. He is a brilliant psychiatrist with a complicated and dark past who teams up with Alex Regan, an obsessive scientist, to investigate and debunk paranormal phenomena. Podcast fans will recognize that dynamic: a skeptic whose whole job is explaining away the creepy stuff, paired with someone who keeps pulling on the threads.
The writing room is stacked with people who know the material. Deadline reports that Miles and Bae are writing the adaptation alongside John Rogers. MGM+ Studios produces. The executive producers are Miles and Bae, Kearie Peak of Peak Pictures, and Rogers and Jennifer Court of Kung Fu Monkey Productions.
Deadline says production is scheduled to begin in Vancouver in January 2027. The series will stream on MGM+ in the US, UK, Ireland, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands and Latin America.
In the MGM+ statement carried by Deadline, Michael Wright, global head of MGM+, said the series crafts a story around the cultural fascination with the unexplained.
As for the source, The Black Tapes premiered in 2015 from Miles and Bae. Collider reports it ran three seasons and 30 episodes before ending in 2017. Deadline says the podcast has passed 60 million downloads in the 11 years since launch.
What we don’t know yet
There is no premiere date. Deadline is explicit that none has been reported, so treat any date you see floating around as guesswork until MGM+ says otherwise.
We also don’t know who plays Alex Regan. The coverage so far names Coster-Waldau as the only cast member.
How closely the show follows the podcast is another open question. Fictionhorizon points out that the official description gives Alex Regan a different profession from the podcast version, which suggests the series is reworking at least some of the source material. How far those changes go is unclear.
One more thing to keep straight: headlines calling this an “X-Files replacement” (Collider) or comparing it to Paranormal Activity (AOL) are those outlets’ own framing. MGM+ has not described the show that way.
What it means
This is not the first attempt to bring The Black Tapes to the screen. Deadline notes that an earlier version was developed at NBC in the 2018-19 cycle, written and executive produced by Bae, Miles and Mathew Arnold. It never made it to pilot. A straight-to-series order at MGM+ is a much firmer commitment than that development deal ever was.
Keeping Miles and Bae in the writers’ room matters. The podcast worked because of its slow-burn, case-of-the-week structure with a darker mystery humming underneath, and the people who built that rhythm are the ones adapting it. Adding Rogers, whose Leverage experience is all about ensemble procedural storytelling, makes sense for a show built around investigations.
Coster-Waldau as a skeptic with a buried past is a smart fit on paper. He is great at playing men who are a little too sure of themselves, which is exactly what you want in a debunker before the tapes start getting to him.
With cameras rolling in January 2027, the next things to watch for are casting news for Regan and, eventually, an actual release window from MGM+.