The grand dame of literary fiction is ready for a revival
Shows on new service Quibi will have episodes of no more than 10 minutes. Stuart Heritage reports
You subscribed to Sky. You binged on Netflix. And now the next stage of television evolution is upon us, with Quibi. Despite sounding like the noise you make when you wobble your fingers between your lips, Quibi is currently the talk of the television industry thanks to its huge-name signings and focus on short-form entertainment.
The biggest Quibi participant so far is Steven Spielberg, who is writing a horror series split into episodes of 7-10 minutes. But there are plenty of other names: Sam Raimi, Guillermo del Toro, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Feig to name a few.
This influx of A-list talent can only mean one of two things. Either Quibi is going to be such a revolutionary game-changer that the most important filmmakers in the world are lining up to get in on the ground floor, or they’ve all realised that Quibi is run by Hollywood mega-producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and know that they’d junk their careers by turning him down.
Now, it’s hard to say which of these is true, given that nobody has seen any of these Quibi projects yet, but my money is on the second one. After all, it is far from certain, given how many platforms are already chipping away at our disposable income, that people will sign up for a service that sounds highly experimental and will only be available on smartphones. And the day that anyone
initiates a water-cooler chat with “Did you see Veena Sud’s [director of The Killing, also signed up] visual haiku on Quibi last night?” is frankly the day that I build a rocket ship and blast off for the freezing solitude of space.
But maybe – just maybe – I’m wrong. After all, Quibi (it’s short for “quick bites”) is no slouch in financial terms. So far the platform has raised a billion dollars. Clearly, its eyes are set on nothing but a complete rewrite of how we consume entertainment. Katzenberg himself calls Quibi the
Steven Spielberg’s new horror series will restrict your access so you can only watch it at night-time
“third generation of film narrative”. And everything will be designed to be watched on the go. Like Spielberg’s horror series, every show will have episodes – Katzenberg calls them “chapters” – of no more than 10 minutes, allowing users to snack on them during the day. And this is a good thing, because it tracks with how the industry is going. After years of doling out flabby seasons of prestige drama, comprising 13 meandering hour-long episodes, Netflix has finally discovered the benefit of cutting things to the quick. Its sketch show I Think You Should Leave, for example, will almost definitely go down as one of the best shows of the year, and that’s partly down to how brief it is. There are just eight episodes, running at a little over 15 minutes each. It’s a concentrated, bulletproof way of delivering comedy, and the whole thing is magnificent.
If Quibi can make the next I Think You Should Leave, its success will be all but guaranteed. But then again, maybe it doesn’t need to. Right now, its commissioning strategy seems to involve just flinging any old idea at the wall to see what sticks. From a purely statistical point of view, one of these shows has to work. And if it does, it might change the way that television is made forever. Spielberg’s show in particular sounds fascinating – it restricts your access to it so you can only watch the episodes at night-time.
Katzenberg has also been keen to mention users aged between 25-35 as much as possible; and for good reason. That’s an audience young enough to welcome change but old enough to demand quality and pay for it (Quibi starts at $4.99 a month, for 125 “pieces of content” per week). He also seems to be drawing a line between Quibi and the army of irritating vloggers who clog up most of the adolescent internet. Quibi as a platform might sound horrible but if Katzenberg gets it right, then its snackable content might be the next big thing. If he doesn’t, then he’s just spent a billion dollars inventing Youtube.