from “le détroit” · the strait
Layla McMurtrie and Deonte Bell ride the downtown loop with strangers and creatives, and every conversation runs on two questions: what's moving you, and what's your next stop.
The best talk show in Detroit tapes on a train.
PPL Movin' is filmed aboard the Detroit People Mover, the elevated loop that runs 2.9 miles through downtown and stops at thirteen stations. Layla McMurtrie and Deonte Bell ride it with strangers, artists, and people building something in the city, and every conversation opens and closes on the same two questions. What's moving you? What's your next stop?
McMurtrie is an arts and culture reporter and the founder of The Vision Detroit, a nonprofit. Bell is her bandmate. The two of them turned the ride into a set, and the show has become the reason a lot of people have ridden the People Mover for the first time in years. Nxkflix, a visual artist and videographer who met Bell at a fashion show, shoots it.
The format owes something to Subway Takes, the New York show where a stranger on the train defends an opinion until the host either agrees or does not. Detroit's version inverts the premise. Instead of hunting the spiciest take, PPL Movin' asks people what they are working toward, which is a harder thing to answer honestly while an elevated car makes a slow circle past the Renaissance Center.
The setting is doing real work. The People Mover opened in July 1987 and has been circling downtown ever since, thirteen stations up on the elevated track with some of the best windows in the city. Riding it costs nothing. PPL Movin' uses that loop as a stage, and the show makes an argument without ever stating it: the ride Detroiters pass under every day is a genuinely good place to have a conversation.
The city is coming along with it. Erica Alexander, communications manager for the Detroit Transportation Corporation, has been working out a quarterly permit so the tapings can keep running on a regular schedule. A transit system that spent decades defending its ridership numbers now has a group of twenty and thirty somethings making the case for it in vertical video, for free, to an audience that is now riding it to see where the next episode gets filmed.
That is the part worth sitting with. Detroit has argued about the People Mover's future for most of its life. Two musicians and a videographer skipped the argument. They got on, brought a microphone, and asked people what they were working toward.
New episodes go up at @pplmovin on Instagram, with the show also on YouTube and TikTok.
One dispatch a week. No tracking, no filler. Free, always.