Ephraim Lisk Signs Landmark Scripted Development Deal with BAFTA-Nominated Director Stewart Kyasimire for High-Concept Family Dramedy Dr Abu: The Legacy
Ephraim Lisk and Create Anything are transforming a character watched more than three billion times into an ambitious scripted comedy drama, using performance, cinematic craft and new technology to place one young actor across generations of the same family.
The new scripted development partnership transforms the globally recognised Dr Abu character into a high-concept family dramedy spanning multiple generations through performance-led age-transformation technology.
Most television projects begin with a script, then spend years searching for an audience.
Dr Abu: The Legacy begins somewhere else entirely.
It begins with a character already recognised around the world, a creator with a direct connection to millions of viewers, and an audience that has watched his work more than three billion times.
Now, 23-year-old actor, writer and creator Ephraim Lisk has joined forces with BAFTA-nominated filmmaker Stewart Kyasimire and Create Anything to take Dr Abu beyond the limits of the social feed and build an original scripted television world around him.
The result is not a longer sketch.
It is an ambitious, multi-generational comedy drama about fathers, sons, identity, expectation and the complicated inheritance that passes through a family.
At its centre is a remarkable performance proposition. Lisk will embody different generations of the Abu family, moving between adolescence, fatherhood and old age while performing opposite different versions of himself inside the same dramatic world.
Through a new production workflow combining performance, cinematography, Blackmagic RAW and DaVinci Resolve’s Neural Engine, the project allows the same actor to carry more than half a century of one family’s story.
A young creator became famous playing an impossible father.
Now he will play the son, the father and the generations that made them both.
The project retains the draft’s central factual foundation, including Lisk’s reported audience of more than three million followers, over 3.1 billion views, the multi-generational performance concept, the internet blackout premise, the Blackmagic Design workflow and Create Anything’s development relationship with Banijay UK.
A family show beneath the scale
His formidable confidence, endless qualifications, rigid expectations and distinctive approach to fatherhood quickly turned him into far more than a recurring online character. Dr Abu became instantly recognisable, not only to younger audiences but to parents and families who understood the character from very different perspectives.
The comedy travelled because the character felt specific.
Audiences recognised the pressure behind his advice, the affection hidden beneath his authority and the generation of parents for whom achievement was never simply personal. It was evidence of sacrifice, survival and progress.
But Dr Abu: The Legacy begins where the familiar comedy usually ends.
It asks what exists beneath Dr Abu’s certainty.
What was he like before he became the father everyone recognises? What happened to shape his ideas about success, respect and masculinity? What does it mean to be raised beneath a personality so large that it threatens to consume your own?
And what happens when the son expected to continue the family legacy decides that he wants to define it for himself?
The project expands Dr Abu into a complete family and social world, with stories capable of moving between comedy, emotional drama, cultural tension and high-concept entertainment.
Rather than simply adapting existing sketches, Kyasimire and Create Anything are constructing a new narrative architecture around the character.
The original digital work is the foundation.
The series is the world being built upon it.
A creator forced offline
The story unfolds against the disruption of a major internet blackout.
For most people, losing the internet would create inconvenience.
For creators whose identities, careers and influence have been built online, it represents something much more serious.
The platforms disappear.
The audience disappears.
The numbers disappear.
Characters who have spent years shaping their public identities are forced into an analogue world where followers no longer provide status and carefully managed personas become impossible to maintain.
For Dr Abu and Ephraim, the blackout removes the distance between them.
Without screens, platforms or an audience to perform for, the father and son are forced to deal directly with one another. Old family expectations return, tensions rise and parts of Dr Abu’s history begin to surface.
The blackout therefore operates as more than a comic device.
It gives the series a continuing dramatic engine, taking personalities born in digital culture and placing them inside a world where identity must be negotiated face to face.
The internet created the phenomenon.
Its disappearance reveals the family beneath it.
One actor. Multiple generations.
The project’s most striking creative challenge belongs to Lisk himself.
Audiences already know his ability to move rapidly between characters, voices and points of view. Dr Abu: The Legacy pushes that ability into a more demanding dramatic form.
Each generation must feel like a complete human being rather than a variation of the same comic performance.
The son carries the frustration of being raised beneath the Dr Abu name.
The father carries the confidence, fear and cultural expectations that created it.
The older generation carries the history that neither of them completely understands.
Lisk must distinguish them through posture, rhythm, voice, emotional temperature and the way each character occupies the frame.
The production’s age-transformation workflow supports that performance rather than replacing it.
Captured using Blackmagic cameras and Blackmagic RAW, the material is developed through DaVinci Resolve to retain the detail of Lisk’s expressions, timing and physical choices while transforming his appearance across different stages of life.
The process allows different generations to appear together within the same sequence, including moments in which Lisk performs directly opposite himself.
The visual effect is significant, but the deeper purpose is dramatic.
The audience will not simply hear characters discuss legacy.
They will see it.
They can watch mannerisms pass between generations. They can see the younger man inside the father and the possibility of the father inside the son. They can witness patterns of behaviour repeating across time, even when the characters believe they are completely different from one another.
Technology makes the central theme of the programme physically visible.
Developing the actor behind the phenomenon
The collaboration began with an ambition to move beyond short-form success.
Lisk approached Kyasimire and Create Anything not simply to produce more Dr Abu material, but to develop the characters for the screen and establish himself as a serious actor capable of carrying work beyond the role that first made him famous.
For Kyasimire, the opportunity was immediately larger than adaptation.
Behind the comic precision and multi-character performances was an actor capable of carrying dramatic weight, emotional contradiction and a much larger narrative world.
Create Anything has therefore approached the project as both the development of a television property and the screen development of its leading performer.
“Ephraim has already achieved something extraordinary,” said Stewart Kyasimire, Series Director and Executive Producer. “He created a character independently, found a huge audience and built a relationship with viewers without waiting for the traditional industry to give him permission.”
“My job is not to take that achievement and make it look more expensive. It is to find the actor, the emotional truth and the television world inside it.”
“There is a much bigger performer here than people have yet been allowed to see. Across this project, Ephraim is moving between different ages, emotional realities and generations of the same family. The technology creates the possibility, but his performance has to make the audience believe it.”
Lisk added:
“Dr Abu changed my life, but I have always believed that there was more to the character and more to me as a performer.”
“Working with Stewart and Create Anything has pushed me beyond the rhythm of short-form content. We are thinking about where these characters came from, what they are afraid of, what they want from each other and what happens when the comedy becomes something deeper.”
“I am playing characters across generations and learning how to sustain them inside a real story. This feels like the beginning of the next stage of my career.”
A production company building around creator IP
The project also represents a different relationship between digital creators and traditional production.
Creators are often brought into television after the important decisions have already been made. They may appear as talent, presenters or promotional partners, while control over the format, production and long-term intellectual property sits elsewhere.
Dr Abu: The Legacy is being constructed differently.
Lisk brings the original character, performance, audience relationship and cultural instinct that made Dr Abu successful.
Create Anything brings scripted development, direction, cinematography, production infrastructure, commercial strategy and experience delivering work for major broadcasters and streaming platforms.
The production company is not simply servicing an expanded version of the online material.
It is developing the dramatic world, directing the performances, building the visual identity, designing the transformation workflow and creating the structure required for the property to sustain episodes, seasons and future stories.
The audience is also being brought into the process earlier than it would be in a conventional television development cycle.
The teaser, original scenes, transformation films, behind-the-scenes material and character releases are not separate pieces of content surrounding the project.
Together, they reveal the different dimensions of the property.
The teaser establishes the tone.
The transformation demonstrates the performance ambition.
The dramatic scenes prove the characters can sustain narrative.
The campaign demonstrates the strength of the audience relationship.
Instead of taking a document into a commissioning room and predicting that viewers may be interested, the team can build evidence publicly.
The world is being developed while the audience watches.
A family show beneath the scale
For Kyasimire, the project’s technology, audience numbers and commercial model all serve a more personal creative ambition.
“Underneath everything, we are making a family show,” Kyasimire said.
“I grew up understanding what a programme such as Desmond’s meant. It was culturally confident, warm, broad and genuinely funny. It centred a Black family without turning them into a lesson or treating their culture as a special subject.”
“Dr Abu is not trying to reproduce Desmond’s. It is a different family, a different cultural experience and a completely different generation. But British television has not created enough Black family comedy drama with that kind of mainstream confidence and reach.”
“We now have the opportunity to build a show that can speak to the generation watching on their phones, their parents watching beside them and the grandparents who recognise where many of these expectations began.”
The ambition is not to make culture easier to understand by making it less specific.
The ambition is to create a family precise enough to feel real and entertaining enough to travel everywhere.
The first look
The first teaser for Dr Abu: The Legacy introduces Dr Abu and Ephraim through a family therapy session in which the attempt to create understanding quickly begins to expose the distance between them.
It offers only a glimpse of the wider project.
Further releases will reveal Lisk’s age transformation, original scenes from the comedy drama, the internet blackout storyline and the scale of the family world being developed around the central characters.
The campaign begins with an audience that already knows Dr Abu.
Its purpose is to show them everything they do not yet know.
The young man before the father.
The son beneath the expectation.
The history behind the performance.
The actor beyond the character.
Most television searches for an audience once the programme is made.
Dr Abu: The Legacy begins with millions already watching, then asks how far the character, the performer and the world can go when matched with the ambition of a production company determined to build something larger.
A creator built the character.
Now they are building the legacy.
