Detroit is Tubi Town: How the streamer became a hub for locally made movies and TV shows

DETROIT — It’s a quiet, spring-like day on a recent Monday afternoon as cars rush by on Woodward Avenue outside Unorthodox Club, an unassuming Detroit nightclub near Seven Mile.

But inside, there’s drama with a capital D, and tension is mounting as yet another turf war over the club’s ownership rights is set to erupt between rival parties. It’s all part of the storyline of “The Dirty D,” the tawdry Detroit soap opera that is filming episodes for its third season, which is set to debut in April on Tubi.

It might not have the luster or star power of a network production, but inside the landscape of Tubi, the free streaming service that boasts a viewership of more than 74 million monthly users, “The Dirty D” is a hit. Since its debut in 2022, the show has earned a growing fan base that dials up the drama for its double-crosses, streetwise storylines and steamy sex scenes, which render it for mature audiences only.

“The Dirty D” is part of a rich ecosystem of independent productions filmed in the Motor City using Detroit-based, and largely Black, actors and crews. Those shows and movies, which also include “McGraw Ave.,” the “First Lady” series and more, have given the city a growing reputation among the service’s creatives and consumers.

Detroit is Tubi Town.

“We are definitely No. 1,” says Lisa Brown, creator of “The Dirty D,” of Detroit’s position in the hierarchy of Tubi. “Every time I’m on the Tubi homepage, it’s nothing but Detroit movies. We’re like the Hollywood of independent films, honestly.”

Hollywood is, of course, home to many independent films, but Brown’s statement speaks to how far outside the machine Detroit operates, and the truly independent nature of many locally made projects and productions.

Tubi gives them a home and an audience that reaches far beyond the city limits.

Diezel-powered

Plug “Detroit” into the search bar on Tubi and you’re met with dozens of results, titles such as “Detroit Dreams,” “Queen of Kings,” “Her Husband’s Enemy,” “The Spot 313,” “The Detroit Cable Connection,” “Black Men Don’t Cheat,” “Born Cursed” and many more.

Several of those star Kaamel Hasaun, who goes by the nickname Diezel. He’s appeared in more than 20 projects in 2023 alone, most of which were hosted on Tubi. He has become so ubiquitous on the streaming service that famous football coach and former athlete Deion Sanders dubbed him “The Denzel Washington of Tubi.”

Hasaun says Detroit’s Tubi rise started during the COVID-19 pandemic when Hollywood’s pipeline slowed, and people turned elsewhere for entertainment, and Detroit was there to answer the call.

“Once the world stopped and people were forced to find entertainment, that’s when we really started making noise out of the city, and we’ve been able to capitalize ever since,” says Hasaun, the younger brother of Detroit rapper Trick Trick.

“Now we have people paying attention to us, and they look forward to our work. We have recognizable faces now.”

As Detroit was cranking out shows and movies — made for a fraction of the budget of a typical Hollywood production — they found a home on Tubi, which launched in 2014 and has steadily grown into a streaming powerhouse that boasts a library of more than 200,000 movies and TV episodes.

That cache of content includes everything from popular series such as “Project Runway,” “Kitchen Nightmares” and “Lonesome Dove” to movies such as “American Graffiti,” “Donnie Darko” and “Showgirls.” But dig past the studio offerings and box office hits, and there’s a tier of local productions from names such as Dennis Reed II, Murda Pain and Kamal Smith, many with plotlines revolving around crime, cheating spouses or street life, which have put Detroit on the Tubi map.

“It’s not by accident that Detroit has a handle on this,” says Hasaun, who is a part of the “The Dirty D” ensemble, where he plays Boom, a no-nonsense bouncer at the titular nightclub. “Master Dragon,” a martial arts comedy he wrote, directed and stars in, is set to premiere on Tubi this month.

“There’s just something special here; there always has been, and I’m glad to be a part of it.”

Cool and buzzy

Tubi has a rising profile in the streaming world. In January, its share of the total TV viewing pie was 1.5%, up from 1% a year ago, according to Nielsen’s The Gauge report. That puts it behind services like YouTube (8.6%), Netflix (7.9%), Prime Video (2.8%), Hulu (2.7%), Disney+ (1.9%) and Peacock (1.6%), but ahead of Max (1.3%), Roku Channel (1.1%), Paramount+ (0.9%) and PlutoTV (0.7%).

Josef Adalian, who covers TV for New York Magazine’s Vulture, says Tubi — which was acquired by Fox Corp. in 2020 for $440 million — has a reputation as a cool, buzzy brand in the streaming world.

“Tubi has a sort of cachet about it that the other free streamers don’t have,” Adalian says. “You can find everything on Tubi, and people love the variety. They’re not trying to curate their brand as sharply as, say, an HBO. They’re not looking for shows that are going to serve big audiences. They’re looking for a lot of shows that can get a whole bunch of audiences really excited about coming back to Tubi all the time.”

Adalian says Tubi has a bit of a rogue feel and compares it to the early days of the Fox network. “It kind of gives you this experience of just wandering through a video store and randomly seeing some cool stuff you didn’t even know was out,” he says.

Tubi, which is an ad-based service, pays creators based on the number of views those ads generate. Projects aren’t directly loaded onto Tubi; they go through production companies like L.A.-based Homestead Entertainment or Houston’s UCult Network, which handle many local projects.

Detroit podcaster Randi Rossario debuted the first season of her talk show, “The Randi Rossario Show,” on Tubi in 2023 and is getting ready to launch her second season. Rossario’s husband, J.T. Maples, says the show is likely to generate a six-figure payout from Tubi when their first quarterly check rolls in.

“Having a platform like Tubi is second to none,” Maples says. “They’re the most accessible for producers on our level, the self-starters, versus the bigger production companies and the bigger celebrities that have the accessibility to get into a Netflix, a Hulu, and platforms like that. Tubi gives the independent creators the same-level dynamic of a platform as a Netflix or a Max.”

Maples says the rise in local content production has given Detroiters a new avenue to showcase their talents.

“You have promoters, musicians, club and restaurant owners who have migrated their skill set into producing high-quality Tubi productions,” he says. “It’s really dope for the world to see how well Detroit hustles.”

Film incentive holdover

Bill Swift has been a part of the local film industry since he took a 12-week course on film set construction back when the Michigan film incentives program was introduced in 2008. He saw the local industry get leveled when the incentives were pulled in 2015, and he’s watched the rise of independent Tubi projects in their place.

“Tubi opened up that door for indie filmmakers to say, ‘I don’t have to wait for the big boys; I can do something with a smaller budget and make a quality film without having to jump through all the hurdles of the other companies,’” says Swift.

But there’s also a stigma with low-budget productions — at one point they would have been straight-to-video, now they’re straight-to-streaming — and a perceived reduction in quality that comes with them, he says.

“So many people have this idea that just because they see so much of it, they say, ‘Hey, I can do that, too,’” he says. “Then you get this influx of material that is less-than-standard because people just believe that if you have some sort of a camera, a house you can film in and people that say they want to do this, then you start filming stuff. And then the bar gets lowered.”

The plus side of the local productions, he says, is opportunity. Swift has transitioned to acting — he plays the police captain on “The Dirty D,” and he may be the only character on the show who has not yet assumed the rights to the nightclub — and he’s also a writer, having punched out seven scripts, including his passion project, which calls on his background as a veteran of the Iraq war.

He sees the current local movement as a holdover, or a continuation, of the promise the film incentives initiative brought to the area.

“The good thing was it gave people here a taste, and I believe that’s why we’re sitting where we are now,” he says. “Some folks just didn’t let go.”

Getting ‘Dirty’

On the set of “The Dirty D,” Brown watches the action unfold on a pair of monitors in front of her as a crew of more than a dozen people shuffle around in between shots.

It’s a busy atmosphere, but it’s convivial and professional. Brown has hair and makeup people touch her up between shots — a perk, she says, of being in charge on the set.

Tubi doesn’t share viewership figures for individual shows, but Brown says based on her payouts, “The Dirty D” likely has an audience of more than 1 million viewers. (It’s large enough that the show was portaled to Peacock, where it was added in late 2023.)

Brown and her crew have watched the show’s popularity rise through social media, where she says fans follow the cast’s every move — “Oh my God, it’s literally like we’re Kardashians,” she says — and auditions for the third season drew more than 600 applicants, not just from Michigan, but from around the United States.

Brown says she emptied out her bank account to make her first movie, “He Played Me,” in 2021. At the time, she says she had never heard of Tubi, but the movie was uploaded to the service and became a hit, and since then, she’s written and directed several movies that have landed at the service, including “These Men for Everybody” and “He Played Me 2.”

“The Dirty D” — which traces the ins and outs of a Detroit nightclub, its owners and its employees — came from wanting to expand her storytelling, and with a series, she could write an ongoing story and not worry about wrapping things up in a two-hour time frame. She was originally inspired by the Detroit-set Tubi series “McGraw Ave.,” a gritty crime series set in a rough Detroit neighborhood, and she says the first season cost about $110,000 to produce.

Brown says the show has caught on with audiences because of its relatability.

“As a writer, I don’t water things down. If this guy’s sleeping with this woman’s sister, that’s what’s going to happen,” she says. “Nothing is taboo to me. Where a lot of other filmmakers stay away from certain things because they’re scared of what the backlash could be, I don’t write like that. I write very real. I write very gritty and I write true things that can happen, and I just think people relate to that.”

“Messy” is the word she uses to describe “The Dirty D.” “It’s a very messy series, but Detroit is a very messy city,” she says with a laugh.

That “messy” series is set to roll out three episodes in April and another three later this year to finish out its third season.

The author-turned-filmmaker is encouraged by the activity she sees in town and says Tubi is giving the city a chance to shine.

“When I first started, it wasn’t all these other filmmakers. But now everyone is into film. So I don’t know if this is going to be something temporary, or if it’s here to stay,” Brown says.

“But Detroit, we have our own culture here, and I think it spills over into the movies we make. A lot of other cities admire us because of what we put into our movies, and I think it encourages more creativity and more industry.”