EXCLUSIVE: Demascus, the sci-fi comedy series from playwright Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm and Better Call Saul exec producer Mark Johnson, has finally find a home.
The six-part series will premiere on Tubi after the Fox-owned free streamer struck a deal with AMC Networks.
This comes over two years after AMC Networks canceled the show ahead of its launch as part of a wider cost-cutting drive.
Demascus was created by Chisholm, the playwright behind Hooded: Or Being Black for Dummies and Br’er Cotton, who also wrote on FX’s LA Clippers drama Clipped. It follows an eponymous character, a 33-year-old Black man on a mission of self-discovery using an experimental reality-bending technology. It explores the “gulf between Black male perspectives”.
Okieriete Onaodowan (Station 19) plays Demascus with Janet Hubert (The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air), Caleb Eberhardt (Judas and the Black Messiah), Shakira Ja’nai Paye (Single Drunk Female) also starring with Martin Lawrence in a recurring role.
Demascus will premiere on Tubi on August 7 as a Tubi Original. It is the latest original series for the service, which is behind upcoming animated series Breaking Bear, which features the voice talents of the likes of Brendan Fraser, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Annie Murphy, Josh Gad and Elizabeth Hurley, and YA films featuring the likes of Xochitl Gomez, Chase Hudson and Asher Angel.
The deal was brokered by Benin Mtume from Tubi’s Content Acquisition and Partnerships team with AMC Networks’ SVP of Global Content Sales Mark Dee-Shapland.
The series was originally part of AMC Networks’ “scripts-to-series” model. A writers’ room was opened in August 2021 before the show was handed a series order in February 2022. Production was complete by the time it was canceled in January 2023.
Chisholm served as co-showrunner alongside American Crime and For Life’s Kirk A. Moore. It was exec produced by Mark Johnson and Myki Bajaj from Gran Via Productions. Johnson is the man behind hit AMC series Breaking Bad and prequel Better Call Saul, who oversees the Anne Rice universe, which includes Interview with the Vampire and Mayfair Witches, for AMC Networks, as well as the upcoming Talamasca and new anthology series Great American Stories, which launches with The Grapes of Wrath. He recently extended his deal with the company.
“We’re excited to introduce audiences to Demascus — a bold, genre-bending blend of comedy and sci-fi that challenges conventions as much as it entertains,” said Samuel Harowitz, SVP of Content Acquisition and Partnerships at Tubi. “At Tubi, we champion stories that surprise, provoke, delight and resonate deeply with engaged fandoms, and Demascus is exactly the kind of original storytelling we’re proud to spotlight.”
“Through his titular character Demascus, Tearrance Chisholm asks one of life’s simplest questions: What does it take to be a good man? And he answers it with some of the most surprising and nuanced revelations one could expect,” added Mark Johnson. “We thank AMC Studios for sharing our belief in this seriocomic series and Tubi for its steadfast conviction that it belongs on the air.”
