Some time ago, comedian Tom Segura teased on his YMH Studios podcasts that he’d decided to self-finance and shoot a mystery video project, with further details to be disclosed at a later date. And at long last, they’re beginning to emerge, as Segura has disclosed to Deadline his sale to a streaming service of a pilot in which he’ll star.
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“We…produced a pilot that we sold to one of the streamers…We financed it, we produced it, wrote it,” Segura shared during a Zoom call late last week. “This was a hundred percent like the podcast way of thinking, which was like, ‘Just make the thing.’ So we just made it, spent a fortune doing it, but I think for the right reasons. And I think they’ll probably make an announcement about it soon, maybe when the strike resolves. But we’re very excited about it, and we’re continuing to do more things in that lane.”
While there are no further details yet as to the pilot’s plot, and Segura said he wasn’t “at liberty” to share which streamer bought it, there’s a good likelihood that it’s been set up at Netflix, given the comic’s history with the platform. Segura launched to global stardom in the comedy world with Netflix’s 2014 unveiling of his special Completely Normal and has set each of his other four specials there in the years since — including Tom Segura: Sledgehammer, which will be available for streaming starting July 4th.
In conversation with Deadline ahead of the new special’s release, Segura also confirmed that he has “two features” in the works — one that’s set up at a studio, and one that is currently being shopped. One of these projects in active development, he confirmed, is Fat Astronauts — a sci-fi comedy emerging from a concept by his longtime friend and 2 Bears 1 Cave podcast co-host Bert Kreischer, which Kreischer first shared with fans in 2020. “The draft that we got is so funny right now,” Segura said vis-à-vis Fat Astronauts, in which he’ll presumably star opposite Kreischer. “I don’t even know if I’m allowed to say that, but that one is very funny. I mean, we’re working with one of the funniest writers ever on that.”
Back at the height of the Covid pandemic, Kreischer pitched Fat Astronauts on 2 Bears as follows: “Me and Tom are sent to space because they’re going to start building moon colonies on the moon. But they want to know how many to build, and they’re going to sell them to regular Americans like me and Tom. So they send us to the space station with all the things we like — booze, food, weed, p*rn stars. And they’re like, ‘We want to see if your lifestyle translates to space living, or if you die.'”
Continued Kreischer, “We get up there and we find out we f**king love it. We don’t want to come back. We sabotage it so they can’t get us out, so that we’re locked up there.” (View the entire segment at the link below.)
Segura’s pilot sale and film development bring him closer to the fruition of a longtime goal. He’d expressed interest in filmmaking over the years, while appearing an actor in a number of high-profile projects, and had to this point satisfied this aspect of his creative ambitions through the creation of pre-recording video content for the live editions of his Your Mom’s House podcast, which garnered a major audience in the thick of the pandemic.
In terms of new projects, Segura also last week teased further expansions to his podcast network. Just recently, he and his wife and fellow comedian Christina Pazsitzky launched First Date, a romance-themed pod of shorter length hosted by comedian and content creator Lauren Compton. And soon, the comic said, we’ll see the launch of Not Today Pal, a long-discussed (though previously untitled) new pod hosted by The Sopranos alums and friends of YMH Studios, Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Rob Iler. “That comes out next month,” Segura revealed. “Then, we might have another one coming out about a month later.”
For our full interview with Segura, check back early next week.
