If these, in name and premise, feel like the sorts of shows that are playing in the background of other shows, you’re not wrong. There’s a distinct Due North-like uncanniness to it all, as though Quibi is less a creative enterprise than a world-building exercise for the simulation-glitch we’re all living through.
Even the comedy—Quibi’s most promising vein, given the vast online ecosystem for sketch and scripted shorts—feels like the sort of fare that slips into vapor over a season or two on Comedy Central. There’s Flipped, in which Will Forte and Kaitlin Olson, both sketch and sitcom veterans, play a deeply delusional couple who want to become home-renovation TV hosts, but stumble into deeply predictable trouble along the way. Mockumentary Nikki Fre$h stars Nicole Richie as a funhouse version of herself who decides to become a mommy-focused, eco-conscious rapper. This week brings Agua Donkeys, a sort of Workaholics-meets-Lodge 49 about two career pool cleaners in Utah (based on a 2018 Funny or Die short).
Somewhat disquietingly, all this only scratches the surface of the platform. Documentary series from LeBron James, Lena Waithe, and Reese Witherspoon; celeb-studded human-interest shows; a robust news and news-adjacent category, with daily quick hits about everything from entertainment gossip to current events to gaming: Where Netflix was a flywheel of growth and Disney+ launched with a massive back-catalog play, Quibi gives you all the surfeit (and sense) of an aimless Wednesday-night channel-surf.
Yet, for all this stuff, there’s little to set any of it apart. Waithe’s docu-series You Ain’t Got These is an enjoyable, if not groundbreaking, look at sneaker culture; Nikki Fre$h ably guts Goop culture with the dull blade of self-parody. But at large, Quibi falls into limbo between the fusty old world it’s fleeing and the shiny young user-generated paradise it’s running toward.
Some of that is the nature of the quick-bite proposition. In a WIRED feature earlier this year, founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman swore up and down that eight-and-a-half minutes was the perfect narrative beat. Sure, 15 eight-minute episodes might add up to the equivalent of a two-hour movie, but even their tiny engineered cliffhangers lose their propulsion over the 24 hours before the next installment. Some of it is the surprisingly linear UI of the product itself. Where YouTube encourages browsing, letting you peruse while you watch the show, Quibi’s all-or-nothing full-screen viewing leads to a hamstrung experience: Once you start watching something, there’s no way to know what the next episode might be, or really anything else, without backing out and then tapping your way into the show’s dedicated page. As for the platform’s much-vaunted “Turnstyle” technology, which responds to your phone’s orientation with optimized landscape or portrait views, the vast majority of shows reward vertical viewers simply with tighter close-ups. The result feels much more like the pan-and-scan compromise of showing a widescreen movie on a 4:3 TV.
Perhaps most troubling of all, Quibi’s basic-cable aesthetic adds to the streaming industry’s unwitting re-enactment of “old” television’s balkanized sensibility. Apple TV+ is a gleaming, if risk-averse, paean to HBO-style storytelling; CBS All Access and Peacock, the latter of which launches this week, give you all the zing of an old-guard linear broadcast network; Amazon shoots for the FX-AMC prestige play. That leaves a lot of white space on a DVR’s “guide” view—which Quibi is storming in to fill. (It’s even stranger, then, especially when no one is anywhere but home, that there’s currently no way to watch Quibi on your TV; the app disables Chromecast and Apple TV mirroring, though Whitman has said that functionality was always part of the plan.)
