Quibi, the Incredible Shrinking TV Set

The need to break movie-length stories into sub-10-minute, self-contained installments has had effects that can be seen across all four series. (On Tuesday, four episodes of each were available.) The premises are not subtle. In “Survive,” Turner plays a woman who — mild spoiler alert — is about to commit suicide in an airplane lavatory when the flight goes down in the wilderness, giving her a new lease on life.

“Flipped” stars Will Forte and Kaitlin Olson as a pair of reality-TV wannabes who finance a home-renovation show with the drug money they find stashed in an abandoned house. “When the Streetlights Go On” is a high school murder mystery with “Wonder Years”-style narration, while “Most Dangerous Game,” with Waltz and Hemsworth, is the latest retelling of the original short story by Richard Connell about humans hunting humans.

All of the shows scan quickly — you catch on to who’s important and what they’re like within an episode or two. That doesn’t mean they move quickly, though. Situations and stories are two different things, and the staccato rhythm of the short episodes appears to get in the way of moving the stories forward. In each of the shows, the main plot seems to be just getting underway, or about to get underway, after close to 40 minutes.

The reason for that, it seems fair to say, is less a failure of execution than a failure of imagination at the beginning of the process. Rather than explore new storytelling forms suited to the cellphone — the way Snapchat and the users of TikTok do — Quibi, on the evidence of these early shows, is taking conventional dramatic formulas and simply rendering them into bite-size videos. That may be exactly the business plan, but as an artistic strategy it’s headed nowhere.

In the absence of any interesting ideas about how to exploit the small screen or the short form, the shows employ similar strategies — narration is popular, as are woodenly expository conversations, particularly in “Most Dangerous Game.” (Waltz, as the mysterious recruiter of prey-for-pay, makes his share of the dialogue convincing.)

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/arts/television/quibi-shows.html