The Besties in Haunted High brings YouTube scares to Tubi

Mackenzie Turner and Lael Hansen, the duo behind the kid-favorite YouTube channel The Besties, are taking their Halloween act to streaming. Their new scripted series, The Besties in Haunted High, will debut globally on Tubi this October, produced with creator studio pocket.watch. The move was reported by netinfluencer, which credits the exclusive to Deadline and details an episode order built directly around the pair's existing audience.

What the show is

The series leans into the season. The story strands Turner and Hansen inside their school during an empty Halloween dance that turns into a nightmare, and the only way out is to complete six games while a supernatural figure hunts them down. Each of the six episodes runs a half-hour, giving the pair room for something closer to traditional television than their usual uploads. According to Deadline's reporting, the show is based on the duo's joint YouTube channel rather than a script written in a vacuum, which means the characters, running jokes, and 3 a.m. challenge energy come pre-loaded for the audience that already watches them.

That audience is substantial. Turner and Hansen's channels reach over thirteen million subscribers combined, built on Roblox roleplays, energetic vlogs, and wild challenges that made them fixtures of kid YouTube. Their appeal is specific to a generation that treats creator channels the way earlier generations treated Saturday morning cartoons: as appointment viewing, just on a phone.

The studio behind the move

pocket.watch is structuring the project like a real television production. Turner is credited as an executive producer alongside the studio's chief content officer Albie Hecht and chief executive and founder Chris M. Williams. Turner, Hecht, and Carin Davis co-created the series from an original concept by Turner, and Hecht is directing. In a statement, Hecht praised Turner directly: "Mackenzie has built one of the most engaged fanbases in the creator space, and 'The Besties in Haunted High' reflects the caliber of premium, scripted storytelling her audience has been asking for." Turner and Hansen offered a joint statement of their own: "What started as a series our community fell in love with on YouTube is now reaching an even bigger audience through Tubi. Together with pocket.watch, we've turned it into a bold, creator-led series, free for everyone to watch."

Tubi is positioning the show as the kind of creator-led programming it wants more of. "The Besties in Haunted High is exactly the kind of storytelling that resonates with our audiences: authentic perspectives by creators that speak directly to their interests," said Rich Bloom, the company's general manager of creator programs and executive vice president of business development. The series will stream free, a meaningful detail for a show aimed at kids and families who may not want another paid subscription.

The creator-to-streaming pipeline

The Tubi deal is not the duo's only October move. Trade outlet What's on Netflix reports that a collection of The Besties episodes is also set to drop on Netflix on October 12, as the streaming giant continues what the outlet describes as an aggressive push into acquiring and curating YouTube talent. Taken together, the two deals show how streamers now shop for creators the way they once shopped for scripts: the audience comes first, and the content is built around it.

The franchise ambitions extend beyond video. Trade publication senalnews notes that the Tubi launch arrives ahead of a consumer products expansion, following the standard pocket.watch approach of pairing shows with merchandise for its kid-focused properties. A scripted Halloween series gives the studio a full fictional world to build that merchandise around, rather than a single viral format.

The show lands at a moment when children's viewing has already migrated decisively to creator-led content, and the platforms are following the eyeballs. For Turner and Hansen, who built their following one Roblox roleplay at a time, Haunted High is the clearest sign yet that the path from a YouTube channel to a scripted series is getting shorter.