Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers for “Terri Joe: Missionary in Miami.”
Generation Z (Gen Z) comedy “Terri Joe: Missionary in Miami” was released on Jan. 30 of this year. The movie follows viral Tiktok character Terri Joe (Kelon Campbell) as she flees her small Louisiana town and heads to Miami in search of what she believes will be Christian refuge — a moral safe haven where she can justify her unapologetic behavior, reaffirm her faith, and distance herself from the dangerous criminals she’s inadvertently provoked.
Who is Terri Joe?
According to PAPER Magazine, the fictional character Terri Joe is a devout Christian, white, heterosexual woman who appears on TikTok Live usually four nights per week, roughly between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. CET. Terri Joe rose to fame through her interactions with Tiktok Live cohosts, during which she often engages in flirtatious banter, rapid-fire insult or “roast” sessions, and fully improvised in-character comedic riffing. The film incorporates Terri Joe’s established online persona directly rather than reinventing the character. The irony — and the foundation of the character’s humor — lies in the fact that the creator behind Terri Joe is the opposite of nearly everything she claims to be. The character was intentionally created by Campbell to exude a performative prejudice against Black and LGBTQ+ people — a deliberate exaggeration he uses to parody, rather than endorse, those perspectives.
Terri Joe meets the real world
The film adapts this persona into a satirical narrative that begins in rural Louisiana and then moves to Miami, where Terri Joe’s rigid worldview collides with a series of increasingly absurd situations. Her dynamic with local criminal Beau Taylor (Chase Garland) and his crew of Bob variations — Bob Anne Taylor (Katie Keene), Bobby Taylor (Dylan Bougis) and Bobford Taylor (Adam D. Crain) — establishes the movie’s tense tone. Melodramatic stakes propel Terri Joe toward Miami and into the orbit of her party-girl cousin Jeorgia Peach (Kelon Campbell), another character frequently played by Campbell on TikTok Live. Once in Miami, Terri Joe is thrust into environments that challenge the identity she clings to, with her surrounded by people who embody everything she claims to oppose.
Rather than relying solely on plot twists, the movie uses Terri Joe’s encounters — from nightlife chaos to casual racism — to explore the contradictions between her professed beliefs and her actual behavior. Her interactions with various communities’ members, including Black, Latino, Asian and LGBTQ+ individuals, become opportunities for the film to critique the prejudices she frames as religious conviction. These scenes are exaggerated for comedic effect, yet they gesture toward the real tensions the character embodies.
Even Terri Joe’s confrontation with her “Twilight”-esque vampire cousin Amethyst (Kelon Campbell) — who reveals that she was a victim of kidnapping and assault — becomes a pointed challenge to Terri Joe’s moral rigidity. Rather than offering empathy, Terri Joe condemns her cousin, placing the blame on Amethyst herself for ending up in those circumstances. In doing so, she exposes the limits of the simplistic judgements she often imposes on others. The movie extends this critique through one of its more spiritually infused comedic bits, in which Terri Joe is rescued during a moment of suspense by a mysterious, handsome Latino man (Andrew Romano) she previously encountered during a family cookout. After driving her to the church she has been desperately seeking, he hands her a business card that identifies him as “Jesus Christo” before vanishing in a dramatic fashion.
From livestream to big screen
As one of the first projects developed by Tubi’s Stubio’s initiative, the movie experiments with how internet-born humor translates outside of the spontaneous, chaotic environment that is the internet. Terri Joe’s appeal on Tiktok depends on immediacy, such as her unpredictable roasts and the way she responds to cohosts in real time. The film leans into that energy while also exploring what happens when a character built in fleeting livestream moments spawns into a structured cinematic world. This initiative signals Tubi’s larger effort to cultivate online creators capable of turning their digital followings into feature-length films. It reflects a broader strategy built on experimenting with internet personalities and testing how their chaotic, short-form appeal can be reimagined within a structured cinematic format.
Although primarily comedic, “Terri Joe: Missionary in Miami” incorporates several earnest moments that grapple with themes of race, sexuality and morality. These moments underscore the tensions embedded in Terri Joe’s character, particularly those rooted in religious misunderstanding and prejudices framed as biblical authority. Together, the film’s comedic framework brings these deep-rooted issues into focus, showing how misinterpreted religious beliefs can reinforce harmful assumptions while also shaping moral outlook.