Roku's First Original Show Is Action-Thriller Cypher, And It Arrives This Month

Roku has confirmed the premiere date for its first ever original show. The action-drama Cypher hits the ad-supported Roku Channel on March 19, and the trailer has been released.

The series focuses on an cryptanalyst named Will Scott, who is recruited by the FBI to decipher a mysterious coded document. The trailer reveals that Scott is supposedly dead and leading a shadowy secret existence, but when he finds that the document is a hitlist with his name on it, things get very dangerous. Australian actor Martin Dingle Wall plays Scott, and it looks like a slick mix of explosions, code-cracking, and family melodrama. Check the trailer out below.

All seven episodes of Cypher will be released simultaneously onto the Roku Channel, which is free for anyone in the US or Canada with a Roku device. The series also stars Jaclyn Hales (Legion), Mary Helen Schmidt (The Thing About LA Is), Lauren Gravitt (Betrayed), and Brian Krause (Charmed). The showrunner is music video veteran Zeus Zamani.

The Roku Channel's exclusive content will be boosted later this year when the Quibi catalogue hits the service. The short-form video platform closed down last year after just eight months, and in January it was announced that Roku had signed a deal to acquire the streaming rights to most of its shows. These include the Most Dangerous Game, with Liam Hemsworth, Chrissy Teigen's reality show Chrissy's Court, the Sam Raimi-produced horror anthology 50 States of Fright, and the reboot of comedy series Reno 911.

Roku had a very big year in 2020. The company announced in January that it now had more than 51.4 million active accounts, which is up by 14 million across the whole year.