With bars and restaurants and multiplexes and legit theaters and everything else closed at the moment, we have of course been turning to the sweet infinity of streaming television, the great maw of the Internet, to keep us entertained. (Book reading has, of course, been outlawed for health reasons.) A few weeks into our screen bath, though, we’ve maybe begun feel as though we’re running a little low on content. Yeah, yeah, there’s still so much more available to watch, but do we really want to rewatch, like, Dexter? I don’t think we want to rewatch Dexter.
Wouldn’t it be great, then, if something brand-new came along? A whole new platform, full of uncharted content to engage, distract, and maybe even enlighten us? Such is the promise heralded by the arrival of Quibi, a new streaming service from mega-producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, CEO’d by former eBay chief Meg Whitman, and bristling with new scripted and non-scripted offerings. The hook is this: Quibi is short for “quick bites,” meaning each installment of its shows (I guess some could be called movies) are under ten minutes long, most hovering around seven to eight minutes in length.
Sure, many people aren’t commuting right now—a prime slot in one’s day for Quibi content, designed for exclusive use on smartphones and tablets, to be consumed—but plenty still are. And everyone is still taking trips to the toilet, or looking for a brief diversion from some pressing task or horrifying news story. So the timing is ripe as ever for Quibi, with all these little quickies there to help us weather the long siege.
Only, after spending a day or so sampling what’s going to be on offer when the service goes live on April 6, I’m not feeling very heartened about Quibi’s possibility. What I’ve seen so far feels, for the most part, devoid of any real raison d’etre. It’s a rambling assemblage of mere stuff, plain-looking and arbitrary. There is no big, grabbing Why that emerges when surveying the first salvo of Quibi content; it’s all just sort of there, broken up into awkward chunks and flitting quickly out of mind once you’ve moved on to the next equally forgettable thing.
Its best offerings so far are its reality programming. The drag queen artiste Sasha Velour, a RuPaul’s Drag Race victor and fan favorite, has a series about her impossibly hip drag revue, Nightgowns. That show at least has an informative structure, highlighting each act bite by bite, giving us a rousing performance at the end of every installment. It’s a mini-documentary that could live anywhere, really, but exists on Quibi just fine.