Quibi? Well, if you insist ...
It's yet another subscription service, which started April 6 with two dozen TV shows (to start). The twist being that episodes are somewhere between six and nine minutes each. 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 young-adult eyeballs with easily consumed content in all genres — dramas, comedies, reality shows, documentaries. It's 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 or riding in the back seat of a Lyft. Quibi says: Fill all that headspace with Quibi!
After spending the weekend surfing through the service's initial shows, it's difficult to deny that Quibi is on to something. This 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 distraction that our phones became.
People love TV more than ever, but they often find the portions too big. 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. Its shows glide past with such efficiency (in horizontal or vertical display, your choice) that it almost feels silly to take notes on them. They are expertly diced, refined and edited in a way that convinces a viewer that it's easier to keep watching than to click away.
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 center. Still intending to kill herself (and convincing her doctor otherwise), Jane boards a flight home. Even though she has 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. She screams at him as he tries to convince her to get up and go on. Thus concludes the third episode (out of an 12). I suppose she musters desire to live.
Hemsworth wants to beat death in Most Dangerous Game, an action-thriller in which he plays Dodge Tynes, a financially desperate Detroit real estate developer who has just learned he has a brain tumor — and no health insurance. He signs up to be the prey in a high-dollar human hunt, overseen by a mysterious game master (Christoph Waltz of Inglourious Basterds), with the promise of a big payoff if he can survive. By the third episode, the hunt is on, with the odds stacked against the hero. It's not outstanding TV, but it does have the polish of some of those elaborate advertisements that BMW and others tinkered around with back when internet marketing was new. Now it just bills itself as entertainment.
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. They acquire a dilapidated ranch house in the middle of a desert and, during their demolition phase, find several hundred thousand dollars behind the drywall. Said cash belongs to a drug cartel and, well, the funny fuse just won't light.
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?
Executive producer Jennifer Lopez's Thanks a Million is a treacly but interesting charity show in which a celebrity performer surprises everyday, deserving people with $100,000 in cash. (Lopez kicks it off; additional episodes feature Kevin Hart, Nick Jonas and others.) The catch, Lopez tells her recipient (in the first episode, it's a San Diego single mom with a daughter who has cerebral palsy), is that they have to give half of the money to another deserving person. "It's important to look for any opportunity to express gratitude," Lopez explains. "It's about paying it forward."
Dishmantled, a cooking competition, feels like a show from someone else's reject pile. Hosted by Tituss Burgess (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), it features two chefs who must don hazmat 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.
Weekend on 04/23/2020