Tubi Saves Canceled Show

Damascus is coming back. The sci-fi comedy has found a home two years after its cancellation, Deadline reports. 

The six-part series will premiere on Tubi. The Fox-owned free streamer struck a deal with AMC Networks for the show after it was canned amid large budget cuts.

Created by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm, the playwright also responsible for Hooded: Or Being Black for Dummies and Br’er Cotton who also wrote on FX’s LA Clippers drama Clipped, follows an eponymous character, a 33-year-old Black man on a mission of self-discovery using an experimental reality-bending technology. The series explores the “gulf between Black male perspectives.”

Okieriete Onaodowan (Station 19) plays Demascus. The show also stars Janet Hubert , Caleb Eberhardt, Shakira Ja’nai Paye. Martin Lawrence also has a recurring role. The series was originally part of AMC Networks’ “scripts-to-series” model, where a writer’s room was created for sci-fi series on an invitation only basis. 

“The universal question of ‘who am I?’ is taken to the next level in this exciting and innovative project from Tearrance Chisholm and Gran Via Productions,” Dan McDermott, president of original programming for AMC Networks and AMC Studios, said at the time the writer’s room opened. “We’re thrilled to give Tearrance the opportunity to explore this visionary project and further develop Demascus’ heartfelt story in the writers’ room, and obviously our long history of successful collaborations with Mark Johnson add another layer of excitement and anticipation to this development.”

Demascus will premiere on Tubi on August 7 as a Tubi Original. The streamer recently launced 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.

A forgotten NBC sci-fi drama, La Brea, which aired for three seasons on the network, was also brought back on Tubi. The series chronicles a sinkhole in the middle of Los Angeles at the La Brea Tar Pits that pulls thousands of people, vehicles, and buildings into the crater, which turns out to be a portal to the year 10,000 BC, and the survivors have to figure out how to get back to the present.