Here’s what’s happening in the world of television for Monday, April 6. All times are Eastern.
Top pick
Dispatches From Elsewhere (AMC, 10:15 p.m.): We’ll get to the latest platform vying for your eyeballs and dollars in just a moment, but first: “Cave Of Kelpius” follows last week’s episode, and it seems like this one might be for the shippers. As Liz Shannon Miller said in last week’s recap of the episode “Everyone”: “If you’re a hopeless romantic, then you know there’s rarely anything as fun as rooting for two characters to kiss, and this is the second episode in a row where Simone and Peter have seemed just on the edge of… something… and then nothing happens. This is a pattern that will hopefully change by next week.”
Quibi: Today also brings the launch of Quibi, short for the “quick bites” of programming for mobile. The platform contains mobile-based shows featuring celebrities from Jennifer Lopez to Joe Jonas to Chrissy Teigen to Reese Witherspoon to Chance The Rapper (there’s a lot more celebrities, we just can’t get over all those names together) Quibi has 20-plus shows out now, and we’re providing bite-sized reviews to match these bite-sized selections. Along with scripted shows—sorry, “Movies In Chapters”—the service also offers documentaries like the affecting I Promise from producers LeBron James and Marc Levin, unscripted game shows like Gayme Show!, and daily news shows. Look for our complete guide to what’s available at launch—and worth your time—on the site later today.
Should I get it? Quibi is a pretty low investment at the moment, with a 90-day free trial. However, there’s a Hulu-esque payment system: $4.99 a month for shows with ads, $7.99 for without. (No word on whether the ads are bite-sized as well.) As mentioned, you can’t watch the content on a TV or on laptop: You can only do so on your phone (and iPad/tablet, which is important for squinters like us). It could prove to be a nice distraction from switching between news sites, and it’ll have a lot better production value than your friends’ Instagram stories. You could conceivably finish all this content in one day, though. It was made as an on-the-go service, to potentially watch when you’re stuck in line at the grocery store. Of course, now we’re too focused on staying six feet away from everyone to look at our phones—then again, those lines do wrap around the block a few times…
Regular coverage
Better Call Saul (AMC, 9 p.m.)
The Plot Against America (HBO, 9 p.m.)
Wild card
Never Too Small (YouTube): A video channel featuring tiny apartments and interviews with the architects who built them. The series is based in Australia, which is where several of the episodes are set, but it’s expanded to Europe and Asia in recent episodes, and includes a variety of architects with clients of varying taste. Kind of like Netflix’s The World’s Most Extraordinary Homes, but with a smaller footprint. The sunlight, greenery, and art of this apartment is one of our favorites:
18 Comments
When I was a boy during the Great Quarantine, I asked my dad if he’d get me a subscription to Quibi. “You want some Quibi? Quibi-in’ so annoying!”
It’s the service we need in this slow paced world of excessive free time.
Yeah, this would have fared much better in the Before Times when people were out and about waiting for the bus or in line for a food truck taco.
I’m sure I’m just not the target audience, but Quibi (the basic concept of which I think is fine) sort of torpedoed itself with me by throwing so much content out all at once that I can barely even remember if any of the shows I heard about sound interesting (the only one I can even remember without looking at a list is the one with Will Forte), and by apparently insisting that I have to watch it on a mobile device, instead of sitting in front of my computer like a civilized person. “Watch it the way we want, not the way you want” is complete bullshit.
Why would I want to watch something on my 65″ TV with or my 27″ monitor, both with 5.1 sound, when I could watch it on a 5″ screen with tinny speakers or ear buds?…is something I’ll never say.
To be fair, here’s a quote from Katzenberg: In an interview with Vulture last summer, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg explained why the company wasn’t bothering to design a version of the service optimized for bigger screens. “Nobody has made [premium] content that was native to, and only for, the phone,” Katzenberg said. “We want to do one thing which no one else is doing and see if we can do it really great.”So… I can understand that, as long as their focus on making content that is “native to, and only for, the phone” allows them to do something that you couldn’t do in other formats. From what I’ve seen, there’s nothing particularly different or strange about Quibi’s shows that makes use of the format. When you’re limited to a 5-6″ screen, you presumably would want to film differently than you would when you’re filming for a computer monitor or TV screen: lots of closeups, or something like that.Maybe “no one else is doing” it because there’s no real value to doing it? Constraining yourself to small screens might breed some kind of creativity but I can’t recall having read any quotes from Katzenberg (or anyone else involved with Quibi) that gives any kind of explanation as to why exactly this limitation is going to be useful.
It’s like watching a bullshit YouTube clip randomly on your phone, but literally only on your phone and with a subscription fee.
As mentioned, you can’t watch the content on a TV or on laptop: You can only do so on your phoneLets see what piracy has to say about that!
Why pirate. Has Quibi never heard of screen mirroring?
Well, that adds another layer of reencoding to what may already be fairly low-bitrate videos, so there’s that.
I guess. Though if you’re ok with watching videos on your phone, quality probably isn’t your main priority.
Sure, but of course the idea in question here is specifically getting copies of the videos so that one doesn’t have to just watch it on one’s phone!(In fact, at home here I have a 4K monitor that can swivel an entire 90 degrees, so could watch them at full size on it, if Quibi would deign to let me.)
Did you know that Aetheric Pirates get a +2 on all rolls when bored or quarantined? It’s not a loophole, it’s their Power.
I’m skeptical of the idea of Quibi in general, but I checked out the first episode of Sam Raimi’s “50 States of Fright” (“The Golden Arm (Michigan)”) and kind of liked it. Some comments:1) The “10 minute episode” isn’t really an issue. I’m not sure how other shows will do it, but “The Golden Arm” is broken up into three chapters of ten minutes each, so basically the length of a normal show.2) The conceit of “50 States of Fright” is that each story will focus on local mythology of each state. I’m not sure “The Golden Arm” really does that for Michigan. It’s a version of a story that dates back centuries. Maybe European settlers brought the story to Michigan, but I was hoping for more state-specific stuff. We’ll see how the other entries fare.
If they’d done The Werewolf of Grosse Pointe, I would have been all over it.
I know Quibi is designed for phones, but usually I can still Chromecast things from my phone to my TV. I hope they still have an option for that.
Is Quibi paying the AV Club for coverage? The flood of Quibi stories is odd.