NO QUIBBLES
Don’t be quick to dismiss Quibi. It might be on to something, Hank Stuever writes.
Quibi? Well, if you insist ...
It’s yet another subscription service, launching with two dozen TV shows (to start), the twist being that episodes clock in somewhere between six and nine minutes each.
Quibi has officially launched in the United States and Canada, and is now available for download in the Apple App Store and Google Play Store.
Quibi is currently offering a 90-day free trial for a limited time — just sign up at Quibi.com before the end of April. Quibi will cost $4.99 with ads and $7.99 without ads.
Quibi’s founder is Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg. The first batch of shows features an array of big names (Liam Hemsworth, Sophie Turner, Chrissy Teigen, Jennifer Lopez) and fast ideas.
The point is to lure youngadult eyeballs with easily consumed content in all genres — dramas, comedies, reality shows, documentaries. It’s television for people who’ve never owned one, meant to be viewed mainly on phones or tablets, in the chunks of time that one might otherwise spend noticing one’s surroundings — waiting in lines, riding in the back seat of an Uber or forced to engage in random small talk. Quibi says: Fill all that head space with Quibi!
Critics tempted to pan in nine words, including: blech.
However! After spending some time surfing through the service’s initial shows, it’s difficult to deny that Quibi is on to something. This clever, fun-size format is probably what Youtube and Facebook should have devised when elbowing their way into the streaming TV game, because it so easily comports to what we already know about the ceaseless distraction that our phones became.
People love TV more than ever, but they often find the portions too big. (You want me to watch six seasons of one-hour episodes?) Or there’s some other daunting barrier to entry besides the time investment, such as sitting down and paying attention. Quibi gets rid of all that.
Even if your interest may wane, your eye notices that there’s only 90 seconds left, so you might as well finish this episode. Repeat cycle, mindlessly, until you’ve finished a whole series.
But are Quibi’s shows any good? Objectively, they’re not that great, so far. But they are fast (and sometimes furious) and, if the game has become one of quantity over quality (thanks, Netflix), then Quibi cannot be written off as merely some strange experiment in modern entertainment packaging. The frenetic format feels spot-on, even if Quibi’s launch is taking place amid a global pandemic that requires us to stay home and try to calm down, for once. Designed for people who are always on the go, it will instead be greeted by an audience that has nowhere in particular to be.
Survive is one of Quibi’s two marquee scripted dramas. It stars Turner (Game of Thrones) as Jane, a suicidal young woman coming to the end of her stay at a psychiatric rehab centre. Still intending to kill herself (and convincing her doctor otherwise), Jane boards a flight home. Even though she’s met a cute seatmate,
Paul (Corey Hawkins), Jane retreats to the plane’s bathroom to take an overdose of pills.
Thankfully, what seems like a dreary and possibly hapless series that glamorizes suicidal ideation instead shifts into the tried-and-true plane crash survival story. Yes, the airliner smacks into a snowbound mountain peak. Paul and Jane are the only survivors. He’s determined to live, but she still wants to die.
Hemsworth, meanwhile, definitely wants to beat death in Most Dangerous Game, an action-thriller in which he plays Dodge Maynard, a financially desperate Detroit real estate developer who has just learned he has a brain tumour — and no health insurance. Instead, he signs up to be the prey in a high-dollar human hunt, overseen by a mysterious game master (Christoph Waltz of Inglourious Basterds and Spectre), with the promise of a big payoff if he can survive the game.
Elsewhere on Quibi’s menu, there are more disappointments than delights. A comedy called Flipped stars Will Forte (The Last Man on Earth) and Kaitlin Olson (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) as a delusional couple, Jann and Cricket, determined to become the next house-flipping stars on an Hgtv-like network.
Plunging in, they acquire a dilapidated ranch house in the middle of a desert and, during their demolition phase, find several hundred thousand dollars stacked behind the drywall. Said cash belongs to a drug cartel and, well, the funny fuse just won’t light. The characters, as written, don’t deserve the sort of commitment that Forte and Olson bring to the party. It’s a dud.
Or is it? As both a critic and a viewer, I find that Quibi’s structure too easily invites a snap judgment. It renders the hard work of making a TV show into a more ephemeral experience, putting a trap door beneath its creators, writers and performers and then handing us the button so we can hastily decide whether to drop them or not.
Watching Quibi makes me feel less like a viewer and more like a network executive who is trying to decide which pilot episodes get the green light and which don’t. These all feel like shows that could be, or might have been. Have they already been passed over by another network? As a critic, knocking them can feel somehow unfair.
Dishmantled, a cooking competition, definitely feels like a show from someone else’s reject pile. Hosted by Tituss Burgess (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), it features two chefs who must don haz-mat suits and blindfold goggles so they can have a classic entree shot at them from a cannon, where it explodes all over them.
Tasting the bits of debris, they have 30 minutes to re-create the dish, whatever it was, for a panel of judges. It’s a little gross, a little weird and perhaps not as much fun as the creators may have hoped. But, strangely, what happens in Dishmantled is much like the experience of working one’s way through Quibi’s lineup. It all just sort of bursts open, and from tasting the pieces, I get the feeling there’s a network in here somewhere.