Even Roku has started deleting shows, which is bad news for old Quibis
The Reaper has come once again for some shows that managed to survive the death of Quibi
As if the old Quibi shows hadn’t been through enough, Roku has begun deleting some things from its library of Roku Originals—a platform that was largely set up to give the salvaged Quibi shows somewhere to go after their home service was scuttled—and most of the victims are old Quibis. According to Deadline, Roku has started dumping “select existing licensed and produced content” from its platforms (like the Roku Channel) as part of what sources told Deadline is a “regular review of programming.” Which is to say that this recent trend of deleting “content” is apparently now a “regular” thing to do.
As for what’s getting deleted, not all of them survived the Quibi quillapse only to get wrecked by Roku, like Zoe Lister-Jones’ Slip, a comedy about a woman who travels to alternate universes, and comedy-mystery show Panhandle. The former was actually made by Roku, while the latter was co-produced by Spectrum (the cable company) and moved to Roku after its premiere.
Quibi shows getting the axe include Most Dangerous Game, which featured Christoph Waltz and Liam Hemsworth, plus Quibi/Roku’s Reno 911! revival (the show’s official eighth season) and a bunch of unscripted shows like Titus Burgess’ Dishmantled, Murder House Flip, Moving The Needle, Eye Candy, and Surprise We’re Pregnant. Deadline’s sources say that Roku still intends to produce new original shows, it just doesn’t want to waste space on these shows anymore.
Variety has a more comprehensive list of impacted shows, and it includes Kiefer Sutherland’s The Fugitive remake, Sophie Turner’s Survive, Anna Kendrick sex doll comedy Dummy, and Idris Elba’s Elba Vs. Block.
For those who don’t recall, Quibi was a streaming service that launched exclusively on phones in the early days of the pandemic. Its name stood for “quick bites of content,” since each episode of a Quibi show was meant to be pretty short, and you could watch it while in a waiting room or whatever. The platform launched with a lot of originals, to its credit, which appeared to be lost until Roku started resurrecting them. Now some of them will lost again anyway, which is perhaps a fitting final fate for anything associated with Quibi.