Quibi quickly wears out its small-screen welcome
“How much money can you throw at a thing until it’s clear that it was never meant to be?” asked Theo Miller in Forbes.com. Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenburg’s $1.75 billion new streaming service, stumbled out of the gate last week when its first celebritypacked crop of 6- to 10-minute shows was savaged by critics who already were questioning the wisdom of making the snackable content viewable only on phones. In creating the debut lineup, Quibi’s programmers “scraped the bottom of the intellectual property barrel,” coming up with, among other trash, a reboot of Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d— now with Chance the Rapper as host—and Chrissy’s Court, in which model Chrissy Teigen takes on the role of Judge Judy. The whole project instantly felt like a calculated attempt to play to viewers’ weaknesses, “and for that reason”— though I hate to say it—“it will likely be a huge success.”
Granted, “Quibi doesn’t make sense amid the pandemic,” said Nicole Nguyen in The Wall Street Journal. You can’t yet watch its shows on a TV screen, can’t fill hours with any of them, and you can’t even take and share a screenshot on social media to dish about with your friends. But in a postshutdown world that includes commutes and routine waits, the middling content might not matter. “All Quibi needs to do is to mildly amuse you when you’re at your most bored.” And besides, it exceeded expectations by attracting 1.15 million subscribers in its first week, albeit with a 90-day free trial. Still, “if the future of entertainment is to be fast and snackable, it shouldn’t so depressingly remind the viewer of last century,” said Spencer Kornhaber in TheAtlantic.com. Like network-era
TV, Quibi traffics mostly in sex, violence, and stereotypes and has already afflicted me with “the sort of soul-deep burnout I haven’t felt since middle-school sick days spent on the couch with Regis Philbin.”