Quibi announces 50-strong slate of launch titles that sound like fake 30 Rock shows
The day is upon us at last, dear readers: No more scouring the internet for press releases, no more consulting with oracles, no more picking through Reese Witherspoon’s trash. (Or, you know, our carefully curated round-up of shows.) The full launch line-up for phone based content streamer Quibi is here, in all its “That sounds like a show they would make up to make fun of on 30 Rock” glory. And although the “QUICK. BITES!” service doesn’t launch until April 6, we now have definitive proof of the 50 daily series, unscripted programs, and movies-cut-into-chunks—their description, not ours—that will be available for viewers when the launch day arrives.
Shows like Murder House Flip (not to be confused with the scripted Flipped, starring Will Forte and Kaitlin Olson), in which “ high-end renovation experts” Mikel Welch and Joelle Uzyel set out to do exactly what it says on the tin, i.e., figure out ways to make new buyers love your house so much they won’t mind all those terrible things that happened to the Johansson family in the upstairs bathroom. On a similarly absurdist bent, there’s also Tituss Burgess’ new show Dishmantled, in which, well…Let’s let them tell it:
Each episode starts with the cannon-blasting of a mystery food dish into the faces of two blindfolded chefs. They’ll use their culinary prowess to identify the exploded dish and then race against the clock to recreate it. Whichever chef comes closest to the original dish wins a cash prize.
Amazing.
Admittedly, not all of the shows are “Nicole Richie raps about the environment” (Nikki Fre$h), or “Reese Witherspoon yells ‘Yass, queen!’ while watching a praying mantis bite the head off her mate” (feminist-minded nature show Fierce Queens). There’s also stuff like the Liam Hemsworth/Christoph Waltz Most Dangerous Game adaptation, as well as regular news updates and a daily ASMR show to help take some of the edges off of thinking about Tituss Burgess’ high-powered food cannon. But for every legitimately interesting-sounding music docu-series (&Music) or Sophie Turner-starring survival drama (Survive), there’s another series about a guy traveling around Italy, telling you about his favorite shapes of pasta (literally, Shape Of Pasta) or a variety of programs scavenged from the MTV backlot like Singled Out or Punk’d.
What’s most interesting about the line-up, though, is what’s not there: Several of Quibi’s most high-profile projects, including Steven Spielberg’s Spielberg After Dark, Zac Efron’s “You are alone with Zac Efron on an island” series Killing Zac Efron, and the Reno 911! reboot, don’t appear to have been ready for the launch. There’s no word yet on when these shows might arrive, but at least we finally have our guarantees that Quibi will be sufficiently filled with distractions that we might not notice their absence, for at least a bit.