ATLANTA — November 1, 2026 —
A Stone Thrown Alongside
A parable is a stone. The word comes from the Greek parabolē: para, "beside," and ballein, "to throw." It means something thrown down next to your life so you can see your life more clearly.
Jesus threw parables at crowds, at priests and at his own disciples, and they landed hard. They were never meant to be comfortable. They were meant to hit.
That is the working definition behind Parable House, the new studio from Anthony "Tony the Maverick" Brown, and SCANDALONE, its first series. Each episode takes a story from Scripture that the church has often made safe, and throws it back with its original weight. The scandal stays in. So does the grace.
Born Into Scandal
"I was born into scandal," Brown says. "People told rumors about me my whole life."
The rumors had a source. Brown's mother was a prostitute who was incarcerated 55 times over the course of her life. His father was a criminal and a pimp. Brown grew up inside the sex industry and lived through abuse as a child in that world.
"My parents were the kind of people Jesus spent his time with, the ones everyone else walked past," he says. "The Bible saved my life because it isn't about people who have it all together. It's full of people whose mistakes should have counted them out. I'm one of those people."
Brown is the original founder of Maverick City Music, the worship collective that broke Christian touring records, and he grew its YouTube channel to 3 million subscribers in three years, the No. 1 channel in Christian music. He has spent much of the last decade working with underprivileged children and incarcerated people in the Black community. With Parable House, he is telling the stories that carried him.
Season One: Three Stones
Episode 1 — ZEALOT. Saul of Tarsus hunted the followers of Jesus, people who had shared meals and synagogue benches with him. He approved as Stephen was stoned to death, then dragged believers from their homes to prison. Yet God chose the persecutor as "a chosen instrument" (Acts 9:15) to carry the message to the Gentiles, the people who were never supposed to have a shot. SCANDALONE tells his story as an epic of violence, guilt and the nightmares that follow him to the road to Damascus.
Episode 2 — MAGDALENE. At a dinner, a woman breaks a jar of expensive perfume over Jesus while the men in the room call her unclean. Jesus answers that wherever his gospel is preached, what she did will be told in memory of her (Matthew 26:13; Mark 14:9). SCANDALONE's telling makes her Mary Magdalene, a woman from the brothels of Magdala. Many of the people in that room already knew her scent. When she broke the jar, the smell filled the room, and everyone who had been in her bed remembered. The perfume of her trade becomes the offering Jesus ties to his whole story.
Episode 3 — BARABBAS. The night Jesus is born, another boy named Yeshua is born upstairs in the same inn. His mother calls him son of the father: Bar-Abbas. Raised in Herod's fighting pits beside his twin brother, Judas, he grows into the name a crowd will one day choose over Jesus.
"A prostitute and a murderer," Brown says. "Those are the two people the story says you can't tell the gospel without. That's the provocation of SCANDALONE."
All three episodes are rated-R period epics, written and directed by Brown and shot in the visual tradition of Gladiator, The Revenant and Noah. The first five minutes of each episode are streaming now in the Parable House app. Mary Magdalene narrates the season.
Why Now
"Church people already know these stories. We just made them safe," Brown says. "I'm throwing them back the way they were thrown the first time. If you've ever felt too far gone for God, SCANDALONE is for you. You're in good company."
About Parable House
Parable House is a studio for films drawn from Scripture, built for phones and big screens alike. It focuses on Black, multicultural and globally minded storytelling. Its stories are provocative, cinematic retellings about people the world wrote off and grace refused to. SCANDALONE is its first series, and its writers' room is open to Black and brown writers and filmmakers.
About Anthony "Tony the Maverick" Brown
Anthony Brown is the original founder of Maverick City Music, a six-time Grammy-winning producer and a 13-time Grammy nominee. He is the founder of UN/CULTURE and of the sister studios AfroShonen and Conjure House. He calls Atlanta home, and he credits Scripture with saving his life.
Media contact: admin@tonythemaverick.com · Instagram @tonythemaverickk
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