You've Been Quibi'd
I decided to see how deep the rabbit hole goes. What I saw changed me.
“Everything happens so much”
— Horse Ebooks
Hello, one and all. If you’re reading this, it’s because you’ve somehow decided to pay money to subscribe to this newsletter. Maybe you were just being kind. Maybe you like my writing and want more of it. Maybe you were enticed by the promise of discussion on The Wire. That’s all coming. But today we’re starting with the exact opposite of The Wire. We’re starting with the noisiest, least purposeful movement in the history of television. I thought this might be mildly amusing, but what I found was so bizarre that it had to be written about to be believed.
Let’s get Quibi’d.
The mobile video platform Quibi (short for Quick Bites) was founded by Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Whitman is a former CEO of eBay and has done a bunch of boring business stuff so I assume she runs that sort of stuff, which no one cares about. It’s Katzenberg where the juicy stuff is.
I’ve written about Katzenberg for this newsletter before, but here’s an overview of the guy: after working together at Paramount, the new Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner taps him to run the film studio over there. Katzenberg could politely be described as a maverick at Disney. He was integral to the Disney Renaissance in animation in the 90s, with his fingerprints all over The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. He was also, to put it politely, a lot. His tastes were known to be very crass and commercial, with his love of Diet Coke only matched by his desire to make every film full of marketable and saleable elements. The Pixar team had to fight against Katzenberg’s wishes to make Toy Story a musical largely just because you can make money selling the soundtrack. After falling out with Eisner, he left Disney to co-found Dreamworks and run the animation division that brought us such timeless, tasteful classics as the Shrek and Madagascar franchises. The Katzenberg aesthetic is loud, brash, consumerist, and doesn’t care if it upsets your precious artistic sensibilities. Having said that, the man is clearly talented at what he does.
He was always right in step with the way Hollywood was going. The trend where animated films have big name celebrity voices? He basically invented that. He was right at the forefront of the move to computer generated animation, first with Disney’s Pixar partnership then calling the shots at Dreamworks. It’s no surprise, then, that he wants to get in on the streaming action. It can’t just be a straightforward service. He’s not going to work within the system of a major corporation. This has to be something totally new, reinventing the wheel while maximising the profitability.
Enter Quibi.
When you open the Quibi app, you’re hit with an array of huge cards advertising its various shows. It feels like wherever you click, you’ll be zipped into some kind of programme. Autoplay is, of course, the name of the game when you finish an episode. Quibi has so many different kinds of shows, coming at you so fast, that it’s like entering an alternate universe of entertainment. Everything is broadly the same, but something is slightly off. They’re all about 8-9 minutes long and they come at the same time, so you can zip between a trashy reality show and a serious drama without blinking. It takes the experience of channel surfing in the middle of the night and makes it digital.
The shows I watched were all united in this kind of fakeness. Take Barkitecture for example. Yes, it’s called Barkitecture. Each episode sees the duo of Tyler Cameron (presented here as a contractor, though the internet tells me he’s a former contestant on The Bachelorette) and Delia Kenza (actually an interior designer) visit celebrities’ houses and build dog houses for their pets. Hence the name. The first episode featured Joel McHale wanting to pretend he was in a comedy skit about bad reality shows instead of having to actually be on Barkitecture. If this all sounds like a fake show from 30 Rock, then you already know exactly what to expect.
Gayme Show (another very subtle pun) is about what you’d expect from the title. Here hosts Dave Mizzoni and Matt Rogers, both cis gay men, invite to straight male contestants to compete on questions of their “gay knowledge” to earn the title “Queen of the Straights”. Helping the contestants each week is a different “Wise Queer” (but for one exception, minor cis gay male celebrities and prominent drag queens) and a [usually straight] “Woman Who Gets It” (which might tell us who the secret real target audience is) such as Ilana Glazer or Rachel Bloom. It’s the kind of thing where what gets considered “gay” is a totally desexualised world of glitter, rainbows and actresses. It’s the kind of show embraced by a culture that rejected something like Looking, which was very directly about men having sex with other men, as not “feeling gay” enough. This has all the superficial queer trappings but none of that scary sex stuff. None of it at all relates to any of my experiences as a queer person, but maybe that would be fine if the format worked properly. As it is, every episode is a game show with exactly one round.
The Shape of Pasta is a totally fine version of a premise that sounds so stupid just saying it out loud. Chef Evan Funke travels to Italy to learn of secret traditions of different pasta shapes as though it’s some convoluted genre franchise mythology. “It's been said that there are hundreds of documented pasta shapes known to the world”, the opening monologue reads. “But there are hundreds more that the world doesn't know. Brilliant shapes and traditions that are hidden in forgotten towns". Each kind of pasta is in danger of being “forgotten” as handed down traditions die out, but don’t worry. Evan promises to “save” these traditional family dishes by taking them to his restaurant in Los Angeles and charging a fortune for them. Yay, gentrification!
But by far the strangest thing on the platform is Anna Kendrick vehicle Dummy. Kendrick stars as Cody, a Los Angeles comedy writer in a very frank and sexually honest relationship with her older, more successful writer boyfriend Dan. Here’s where it gets weird: Dan is into a lot of strange fetishes that he and Cody are happy to discuss, one of which is owning a sex doll. In a way too high concept twist (a theme for Quibi), the sex doll turns out to be alive and conscious. Unbeknownst to Dan, Cody and “Barbara” form something of a friendship.
Now here’s the thing about Dummy: the show was created by Cody Heller, who also has an older, more successful boyfriend called Dan. But he’s not just any Dan. He’s Dan Harmon, creator of Community and Rick and Morty, known for being a genius writer and something of a creep. If you know who he is, you know what I mean. And if you know what I mean, a shiver just went down your spine at the thought of watching a show about Dan Harmon’s weirdest fetishes discussed in graphic detail.
The worst part is that Dummy is by far the most interesting thing I saw on Quibi. I don’t think Heller is a bad writer, and it has the occasional jokes that land. It’s about something that makes you feel unclean when you think about it, but it’s at least something real, from someone writing about her actual lived experience. Everything else is just constant noise. Remember how The Rise of Skywalker felt like it was throwing every single Star Wars thing you ever liked in your face in a desperate attempt for your approval? Quibi is like that, but instead of Star Wars, it’s “everything in existence”. Katzenberg is turning a big dial that says “contemporary pop culture” on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right. You like pasta? Well here’s THE COMPLEX MYTHOLOGY OF EVERY KIND OF PASTA EVER!
Celebrities are at the heart of it, of course. Katzenberg loves his Hollywood friends. He built an animation studio to rival Pixar by trading thoughtful storytelling for big names shouting one liners. Quibi might be the ultimate expression of this and also its undoing. Every show is about someone with a marketable name, be it a director (Sam Raimi), actor (Sophie Turner) or host (Chance the Rapper). It loves the cult of celebrity, but at the same time it has this perverse desire to humiliate them by putting everyone in the most ridiculous shows conceived. It’s locked every famous person in a cage to do stupid show tricks, and expects you’ll pay money to gawk at the spectacle. It’s dangerous to predict the end of anything, but Quibi does feel like the dying breath of this celebrity culture. They’re so desperate to keep hold of your attention that they’ll do anything for you to watch.
To be fair, it’s not just gawking at celebrities, even if it is mostly that. We’re in the middle of a pandemic, and keeping people informed has never been more important, so there’s Answered by Vox. If you’ve spent any time reading Vox’s style of explanatory journalism, you know exactly what to expect here, and it’s basically just that. Or, if your head hurts from all the screaming in the other shows, there’s The Daily Chill. This show “takes you on meditative journeys with breathtaking scenery from around the globe, soothing ASMR sounds, and calming visuals that will bring you to a place of deep relaxation”, and it’s here where I have to call bullshit on the whole thing.
Coronavirus has blown everything out of the window, but Quibi was designed for the “in-between moments” in daily life. Getting the train to work? Watch a Quibi show. Waiting in the hallway for a meeting? Chew on a quick bite. You get the idea. Neoliberalism has so effectively monetised our day to day existence, working people dry from 9 to 5 then getting them to consume in the evening, that there’s not a lot of meat left on the bone. These in-between spaces are the only time left where people aren’t actively engaging in capitalism, so Quibi sees a chance to sell everyone more content. All of it is so loud and desperate to constantly stimulate the viewer that the simple act of having five minutes’ peace during a stressful day can be abolished. It would drive everyone mad, but then capitalism has never caused a problem it can’t pretend to solve. After Quibi has helped give you a headache from consuming in ever more parts of your day, it will sell you a remedy to all that consumption in the form of The Daily Chill. They broke you, and now they’re selling you a prescription.
The only good news I have is that Quibi feels like the last gasp of a dying system. Katzenberg and Whitman are obviously being ridiculous when they put all the blame for the product’s struggles on Covid-19, but it might be the final nail in the coffin. If crises cause struggling systems to truly collapse and make way for something else, then Quibi is absolutely the most desperate attempt to maintain the status quo produced by modern Hollywood. Watch it now and be part of history before it’s taught in schools as a relic of a failing world.
Great piece! That gay show sounds horrifying.