Tubi is lighting up its push into adult animation.
The Fox-owned free, ad-supported streamer has acquired rights to “The Freak Brothers,” a stoner comedy series starring Woody Harrelson, Pete Davidson, John Goodman and Tiffany Haddish. Tubi will premiere the first two episodes on Sunday, Nov. 14.
“The Freak Brothers,” Tubi’s first original animated series, joins the streamer’s slate of more than 140 hours of original programming that it plans to roll out in the coming months, spanning genres and subgenres that it has identified as the highest-performing types of content.
The eight-episode animated series is based on Gilbert Shelton’s “The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cult-classic underground comics. The show is produced by WTG Enterprises and distributed by Lionsgate. Starburns Industries (“Rick & Morty”) and Pure Imagination Studios (“The Simpsons: Brick Like Me”) handled the animation.
“The Freak Brothers” follows four cannabis-loving characters — Freewheelin’ Franklin Freek (Harrelson), the paranoid Phineas T. Freakers (Davidson), man-child Fat Freddy Freekowtski (Goodman) and their cat Kitty (Haddish) — who wake up from a 50-year nap after smoking a magical strain of weed in 1969. In the show, they must learn to adjust to life with a new family in present-day San Francisco.
Following the Nov. 14 premiere, Tubi will release additional episodes from “The Freak Brothers” on Sundays (one per week) through the Dec. 26 finale. In addition to the four leads, “The Freak Brothers” stars Adam Devine and Blake Anderson, who are also executive producers, as well as Andrea Savage, La La Anthony and rapper ScHoolboy Q, playing an animated version of himself who finds himself surrounded by “The Freaks.”
“This comedy is 50 years in the making and we are thrilled to have it debut on Tubi as our first original animated comedy, marking a new step for Tubi as we expand our adult humor offerings,” Tubi chief content officer Adam Lewinson said in a statement.
“The Freak Brothers” is “the perfect complement to [Fox’s] Animation Domination [brand] and provides the ideal opportunity to not only grow Tubi’s audience, but take the animation genre to the next level in AVOD,” Michael Thorn, Fox Entertainment’s president of entertainment.
The series is executive produced by Courtney Solomon and Mark Canton, alongside producers Alan Cohen and Alan Freedland (“King of the Hill,” “American Dad”). Harrelson, Haddish, Davidson, Devine, Anderson, Shelton and Manfred Mroczkowski also serve as executive producers on the series.
The theme song for “The Freak Brothers” was created and performed by TDE recording artist Ray Vaughn. Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith, the Grammy-winning producer and founder of music label TDE, produced the music for the show and is an executive producer on the series, along with Mike Concepcion.
Fox Corp.acquired Tubi last year for $440 million. Tubi says it has more than 35,000 movies and TV series from 250-plus content partners, including every major studio — all free to watch, with ads. Tubi calls its personalized content-curation technology Content Intelligence, which it uses to inform programming strategy and provide first-party data about viewer behavior to advertisers.
Tubi claims it used Content Intelligence to greenlight original film “Corrective Measures,” a sci-fi actioner starring Bruce Willis and Michael Rooker, based on Grant Chastain’s graphic novel of the same name. Action is one of the most popular genres on Tubi; more specifically, Content Intelligence showed that action-thrillers based on graphic novels resonate with key audiences on Tubi. “Corrective Measures” is slated to premiere in spring 2022.
Separately, Tubi has launched the “Get More With Tubi” campaign in New York City to coincide with Advertising Week New York 2021. The campaign, which will run through Nov. 6, includes Big Apple-specific headlines alongside the “Get More With Tubi” tagline, including “More Romance Than Central Park,” “More Drama than Broadway,” “More Views than the Empire State Building” and “More Options than Wall Street.”
