If TV Rots Your Brain, What Kind Of Damage Can Quibi Do?

In Everything Bad Is Good For You, Steven Johnson argues against the conventional wisdom that TV and video games make us dumb. Written on the eve of the iPhone and a pivotal shift in how we would consume media, it feels as if the book is from 1996. But at the time, irreverent TV shows like The Simpsons appeared relatively unsophisticated to a generation that grew up reading literature when they wanted intellectual stimulation.

Little did we know how highbrow we were, compared to where we are today. The average attention span is now shorter than a Goldfish, and mainstream entertainment is easier to identify by its conventions than the size of its audience. Linear TV still exists, but just barely. Defenders of the medium emphasize its current prestige, which rejects what defined TV in the first place. It was never HBO; it was just TV.

Echos of traditional media still persist in the form of Hulu and now Quibi, which is more than just another inane made-up word predicated on domain availability and existing international trademarks. The platform repurposes the short-form video format that’s more commonly associated with YouTube than network TV, but they scraped the bottom of the intellectual property barrel for this one.

Quibi’s content lineup makes the much-maligned Apple TV+ look as prestigious as the Cannes Film Festival. Two Quibi shows stuck out in particular. They’re both from MTV. There‘s a reboot of Ashton Kutcher’s Punk‘d with Chance The Rapper as host. And then there‘s Singled Out. Remember Singled Out? It was a dating show hosted by a comedian who later got exposed at the height of Me Too and a former Playboy Playmate who became an infuriating spokesperson for the anti-vaxx movement. (But let‘s not talk about herd immunity right now, shall we?)

If Quibi feels like an uninspired cash grab, you’d be right. Longtime studio exec, producer, and co-founder of Dreamworks, Jeffrey Katzenberg founded the company. That’s not shocking given the apparent parallels between launching a $2 billion movie studio like Dreamworks and the $1.75 billion launch of Quibi. (Make no mistake, both are super impressive feats.)

To succeed with Quibi, Katzenberg delegated chief executive responsibilities to Meg Whitman. She’s best known as the former president and CEO of both HP and eBay, as well as a defeated Republican gubernatorial candidate for the State of California.

It’s worth noting that Whitman set a record by spending more of her own money than any other candidate on any other campaign in US history, but she still couldn’t buy the election. The woman makes Mike Bloomberg look frugal. Whitman’s failed bid for governor might eventually serve as a better parallel for Quibi than Dreamworks. I mean, how much money can you throw at a thing until it’s clear that it was never meant to be?

Whitman and Katzenberg were born in the 1950s, so what business do they have spearheading a platform targeted at millennials? Sure there are precedents; mainstream culture has always been prescriptive, but the internet was supposed to move us beyond such an old-school model. (And that’s what’s so obnoxious about Quibi, it’s a traditional media attempt to appropriate the online culture that has almost defeated it.) Given all the generational conflict in the last year, do we really need boomers dictating what millennials should and should not watch?

Katzenberg’s proud of hiring “over-confident” youngsters to create content for his platform. He boasts about his mercenary team and how they‘ve reached a whole new plateau of creativity by shooting video that works just as well in portrait mode as it does in landscape mode on a smartphone. That’s dandy, but what’s Spielberg‘s take? His former Dreamworks co-founder rejected Roma as cinema because it premiered on Netflix! What would he say about an iPhone 8?

Quibi is patronizing, and that’s why it’s so polarizing. Yet if you scroll through Twitter, some people are into it. It has the familiar sheen of Must See TV on NBC, which triggers our nostalgia for Friends, and Seinfeld, and maybe even Mad About You. But for others, Quibi feels like a calculated attempt to say, “We know you. You’re more lowbrow than you think, you can’t focus on any one thing for more than ten minutes, and we’re going to hook you like the junkie you are.”

In the same way JUUL removed the friction of lighting a cigarette, an episode of Quibi is always right there in your pocket for quick consumption. It might not rot your brain like TV or scar your lungs like vaping, but it’s hard to imagine Quibi has any redeeming qualities whatsoever.

And for that reason, it will likely be a huge success.