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    Quibi, Short-Form Streaming Service, Quickly Shuts Down

    Quibi, the beleaguered short-form content company started by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, announced on Wednesday that it was shutting down just six months after the app became available. The mobile streaming service offered entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks intended to be watched on phones by people on the go, but it struggled to find an audience with everyone stuck inside their homes during the pandemic.Despite raising a combined $1.75 billion in cash from each of the Hollywood studios, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and other investors, Quibi will wind down its operations and begin selling off its assets. It had searched for a buyer for the company but found no takers.“Quibi is going to go down as a case study at Harvard Business School on what not to do when launching a streaming service,” Stephen Beck, the founder and managing partner of the management consultancy cg42, said in an interview.The news of Quibi’s shutdown was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Katzenberg announced the news to his 200-person staff on Wednesday afternoon. Quibi did not give an exact date for when the app would no longer be available.“The world has changed dramatically since Quibi launched and our stand-alone business model is no longer viable,” Mr. Katzenberg said in a statement.Ms. Whitman added that while the company had “enough capital to continue operating for a significant period of time, we made the difficult decision to wind down the business, return cash to our shareholders and say goodbye to our talented colleagues with grace.”Quibi produced more than 100 original series, along with offerings like news from NBC and CBS, and sports programming from ESPN. Marquee names like Steven Spielberg, Sam Raimi, Antoine Fuqua, Jennifer Lopez and Chrissy Teigen were involved. But it struggled to attract subscribers from the start and those who did tune in groused that Quibi wasn’t giving them what they wanted. Consumers complained that the programming couldn’t be watched on television sets (something that became more important with people stuck at home) and they criticized the app’s inability to allow them to share content on social media, a feature that could have helped generate word-of-mouth excitement.Quibi is also embroiled in a lawsuit with Eko, a tech company that accused Quibi of misappropriating trade secrets and infringing on a patent for the technology that allows viewers to shift seamlessly between horizontal and vertical viewing on a phone. The activist hedge fund Elliott Management has committed to funding the lawsuit.And as the pandemic continued for months, the company’s backers began looking for a return on their investment.One major challenge in trying to orchestrate a sale was the fact that Quibi doesn’t own any of its content. In an attempt to lure the brightest lights in Hollywood, Quibi offered each of its partners sweetheart deals where Quibi would pay both to produce the content and then to license the programming for an exclusive two-year period. After that two-year term ended, Quibi would still be able to show the programming on its app, but the content creator would be allowed to stitch together the short episodes into a television show or a film and resell it to another buyer.“Katzenberg created something that was beneficial to content creators,” said Michael Goodman, an analyst with Strategy Analytics. “But when push came to shove, the market spoke that chunking up premium content is not what consumers want. They like short-form video: news clips, sports clips, beauty. There is a market for that. It’s just not a premium market. It’s not a new lesson but a lesson that has to be continually taught over and over again.”Despite its shortcomings, Quibi did win two Emmy Awards last month, for the actors Laurence Fishburne and Jasmine Cephas Jones in the series “#FreeRayshawn” from Mr. Fuqua. Two of the company’s other shows also scored nominations: “Most Dangerous Game” starring Christoph Waltz and Liam Hemsworth, and a reboot of the comedy “Reno 911!”“We continue to believe that there is an attractive market for premium, short-form content,” Ms. Whitman said in the statement. “Over the coming months we will be working hard to find buyers for these valuable assets who can leverage them to their full potential.”Hollywood is marveling at the pace of Quibi’s demise. The company’s advertising campaign for its April introduction included a series of commercials featuring characters facing imminent death, whether by quicksand or from a zombie bite. They all had about “a Quibi” before disaster struck. In the end, the company’s life cycle didn’t last much longer. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Shuffle Along’ and Insurer Drop Pregnancy-Prompted Lawsuit

    A prominent Broadway producer and Lloyd’s of London have fought in court for four years over whether Audra McDonald’s 2015 pregnancy, which was cited as the cause for closing the musical she was starring in, qualified as an “accident” or “illness” for insurance purposes.In a filing last week, the parties agreed to drop the case.The production, “Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” and Lloyd’s, the insurance company, filed a one-paragraph stipulation in New York State Supreme Court, declaring the case “discontinued.”Neither the show’s lead producer, Scott Rudin, nor Lloyd’s would comment. A spokeswoman for McDonald said the actress had not been informed of the development and had nothing to say.The case began in 2016, when the production filed suit against Lloyd’s, asserting that McDonald’s unexpected pregnancy, at age 45, forced an “abandonment” of the musical, which closed at a loss.The show, as is common in productions led by stars, had purchased insurance to cover the possibility that McDonald would be unable to perform due to an accident or illness; Lloyd’s denied coverage, saying a pregnancy was neither an accident nor an illness. The show claimed it had suffered damages in excess of $12 million, which was its capitalization costs.Ever since, the parties have been fighting in court over what aspects of McDonald’s health, going back many years, were or were not disclosed to the insurer. Many of the documents were filed under seal, but it’s clear that the back and forth was not pleasant: among other things, the parties argued about the relevance of English law, filing deadlines, and word counts. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Utopia’ Review: Charles L. Mee’s New Play Is a Frothy Escape

    Quick etymology lesson: The word utopia comes from the Greek. It means “no place.” So maybe it makes sense that Charles L. Mee’s new play “Utopia,” produced by San Francisco’s Cutting Ball Theater and streaming through Nov. 15, feels so untethered. A whimsical ensemble drama, a dance performance and an online gallery show, it is so dissevered from the terrestrial that it melts into pixelated air.“Utopia,” directed by Ariel Craft, begins with a girl (Chloe Fong) and her mother (Michelle Talgarow), framed in separate screens, about to enjoy breakfast.“What are we doing here?” the girl asks.“Making a life,” her mother answers.“Out of croissants?”Later, reading up on the show, I would learn that this sequence, like every sequence in the play, took place in a cafe. I didn’t guess this because the backgrounds, decorated with art from Creativity Explored, an organization that supports people with developmental disabilities, are so obviously domestic. I also didn’t recognize the three other twosomes as fellow patrons. I suppose Don Wood’s waiter should have tipped me off. Instead I wondered how he had made his way into people’s homes.In duets and the occasional monologue, the characters discuss love, Mee’s typical preoccupation. Occasionally the screen shifts to movement sequences — shot at a park, a beach, an overlook — choreographed by Katie Wong of RAWdance. Mee has had a long relationship with dance, dating back to his early work with the director Martha Clarke and stretching forward to a current collaboration with Anne Bogart and Elizabeth Streb. But here the dance — angular, eventful — rarely seems in dialogue with the cafe conversations.In terms of form, Mee, a historian by training, favors a composite approach. His collagelike works borrow liberally from books, newspaper articles, internet chitchat. This obsessive quotation can seem indulgent. But his decoupage style mirrors the way so many of us absorb information now — online, with multiple tabs open, trying to make some sense out of all the confusion.“Utopia” seems somewhat less dependent on secondary sources. But Mee’s own words don’t lend the show much substance. A meditation on “eudaemonia,” or “the good life,” it belongs, frothily, to Mee’s cycle of Heaven on Earth plays. The actors enjoy themselves — dancing with a lamp, adopting a British accent, slinking through a door frame in a femme fatale get-up — but that pleasure doesn’t always extend past the screen. This is a softened ice cream sundae of a play, with accumulated sweets puddling onto the plate.The dialogue, a bouquet of near non-sequiturs, tends toward the precious:“I love you like a cicada.”“I won’t say how many shoes I’ve got, but I have no regrets about any of them.”“Sometimes I think I would like to take you in my arms and we would lie down on the back of a chicken and fly up into the clouds.”Craft’s direction, too, has an air of calculated eccentricity, like a musical sequence in which one performer plays an accordion and another an egg beater, while a third toys with a child’s ball. The show concludes with a 20-minute dance sequence.“Utopia” can be enjoyed as respite, a candy-coated breather from the horrors just outside our window — or rather indoors, in aerosol droplets. But this play, commissioned and written before the pandemic and the recent Black Lives Matter protests, dances out of step with the moment. Mee’s vision of a perfect future elides difference entirely. The pairs provide a bright assortment of races, ages, genders, sexual orientations and body types. None of that influences the action or enters the chitchat.Maybe that’s utopian for some. The current conversation, however, isn’t about negating difference, but about acknowledging that all lives haven’t mattered in the same way. Should an imagined heaven on Earth — or even just heaven on Vimeo — erase that?UtopiaAvailable through Nov. 15; cuttingball.com More

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    New Yorker Suspends Jeffrey Toobin After Zoom Incident

    The New Yorker said Monday that it had suspended the staff writer Jeffrey Toobin after a Zoom call last week among employees of the magazine and WNYC radio in which he reportedly exposed himself.“I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake, believing I was off-camera,” Mr. Toobin said in a statement about a report on Monday by Vice. “I apologize to my wife, family, friends and co-workers.”“I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” he added. “I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me.” In a text message, he declined to elaborate.A spokeswoman for The New Yorker, where Mr. Toobin has worked for more than 25 years, said in a statement that Mr. Toobin “has been suspended while we investigate the matter.”Mr. Toobin is also a senior legal analyst for CNN. The network said in a statement that Mr. Toobin “has asked for some time off while he deals with a personal issue, which we have granted.”Mr. Toobin is the author of nine books, including “The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court,” “The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court” and “Too Close to Call.” His book “The Run of His Life” was adapted for television as the FX series “American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson.”His latest book is “True Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Investigation of Donald Trump.” Doubleday, which published the book, did not immediately respond to an inquiry about Mr. Toobin. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 4, Episode 5 Recap: Just Boys

    Season 4, Episode 5: ‘The Birthplace of Civilization’“This country loves a man who takes what he wants. Unless that man looks like you.”Of all the monologuing that’s been done this season on what America means — on this show, targets have to endure an earful of philosophizing before taking a bellyful of lead — Josto Fadda’s words to a cell packed with Cannon’s men underlines the most important theme. “Fargo” has presented the power struggle between Kansas City crime syndicates as the story of America, how different tribes gain a foothold in the “alternate economy” before they gain legitimacy and acceptance in mainstream society. But African-Americans are a special case, and this week’s episode finally makes that resoundingly clear.For weeks, we’ve been treated to watching the diminutive Josto, a man literally too small to sit in his father’s chair, be outmaneuvered by his younger brother Gaetano, who’s arrived from Italy with the conviction that brute force is the best way to settle a gang war. (Or a substandard cup of coffee, for that matter.) What Gaetano doesn’t fully grasp is that a more indirect form of power is at his disposal — and at the disposal of any American who isn’t Black. With just a little arm-twisting, Josto gets Odis to lead a police raid on a jazz club, and it’s no coincidence that Leon and Lemuel, the targets of Gaetano’s failed hit, are swept up in the dragnet.“Avisto,” he tells Gaetano. “That’s how it’s done.”The Faddas probably didn’t need a cop on the payroll. A simple phone call would have done the trick. Nevertheless, Josto understands that the Faddas have a significant institutional advantage over the Cannons, a legitimate ally in the fight over illegitimate business. Five episodes into the season, it’s obvious the Cannons are the better organized and more cohesive unit: Loy’s strategy so far has been mostly to stand back and allow the Faddas’ leadership vacuum to hobble them without his assistance. And that internecine battle continues this episode, too, as Josto is warned about an influx of Italian muscle loyal to his brother. But the Faddas, by virtue of the color of their skin, have more tools at their disposal.In the meantime, many of the other shoes from last week are dropping. Loy makes the Smutnys aware that he knows they used money stolen from him to pay off their debts to him. And so for the Smutnys, unfavorable interest rates are no longer the worst consequence of borrowing money from a mob syndicate. Loy wants the deed to the mortuary and the location of the lesbian outlaws who ripped him off. Meanwhile, Deafy does some arm-twisting of his own to get the same information from Ethelrida, which leads to a situation in which multiple parties descend on the fleabag hotel where Zelmare and Swanee are holed up. Loy finds them first.“Dying’s too easy,” Loy tells Zelmare and Swanee. “You owe me and I’m putting you to work.”And with that, Loy’s leadership philosophy crystalizes a little. Perhaps his thinking is Smutny-specific, but he’s not the type to let emotion overwhelm his decision-making, even when his anger does rise to the surface. (It’s telling that he gets angrier at his wife for criticizing his ability to protect their children than he does at the Smutnys for ripping him off.) Like Josto with the police, he seizes the opportunity to leverage power rather than lash out. His army could use some “invisible soldiers.”Yet societal forces are stacked against him. Gaetano does indeed learn something from his brother when Josto gets the police to do his bidding: There will be no legal consequences to shooting a Black man in the streets. Doctor Senator isn’t pleased to see Gaetano and Constant Calamita (Gaetano Bruno) replace the consigliere in their regular diner meetings, but he’s not intimated by their more heavy-handed approach to negotiations, either. This proves to be a fatal mistake. These are white men with the police at their disposal and more muscle coming into town. They can act with impunity.The death of Doctor Senator is, nonetheless, a big shock, because there was never a moment when he didn’t seem entirely confident in his actions. Perhaps the real lesson from his Nuremberg story was that he should never feel that he is in control, even when he has successfully gotten the goods from a Nazi war criminal. He saw Gaetano and Constant as “just boys making a mess,” not as imminent threats to his life. How Loy’s thinking is changed by the death of his right-hand man remains to be seen.3 Cent Stamps:One Coen brothers reference in this episodes: Several crates of guns are driven away by “Treehorn Trucking,” a nod to Jackie Treehorn, Ben Gazzara’s character in “The Big Lebowski.” (The surprise manner in which Doctor Senator is killed, with bullets penetrating his chest, recalls the death of Wade Gustafson in “Fargo,” but that’s a bit of a stretch.)Odis’s badge gives him power, but Loy and Deafy are both smelling weakness from him. Loy taunts him about his shameful past as a minesweeper in the war, in which his carelessness cost an officer his life, and Deafy keeps tracking his movements, knowing that he’s in cahoots with the criminal element.Why is Oraetta killing the patients under her care? The show suggests that maybe their agony is simply too deep an annoyance for her to handle.There are signs of racial harmony amid the discord here. Milligan is determined to protect Satchel, whose life depends on an arrangement between the Faddas and the Cannons that is currently falling apart. (Loy is less sentimental about his Italian “son,” but he does at least procure the boy a piece of chocolate cake.) And there’s some respect on Deafy’s part for Ethelrida’s intellect and civility, even while he’s trying to get information about her aunt’s whereabouts.I’m not the only one hoping “Fargo” dials back the quirks. More

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    ‘S.N.L.’ Takes on Trump and Biden’s Dueling Town Halls

    NBC’s news division came under fire this week for hosting a town hall event with President Trump on Thursday night that competed with a similar program that ABC had already scheduled with Joseph R. Biden Jr.But the conflicting broadcasts generated some content for NBC’s entertainment side, where “Saturday Night Live” lampooned the dueling events and took some satirical shots at the network for its role in the controversy.This weekend’s “S.N.L.”, which was hosted by Issa Rae and featured the musical guest Justin Bieber, began with a voice-over that promised a re-airing of the two town halls, calling NBC’s event “a thirst trap for President Trump.” Now, the voice-over said, the events would be presented as most viewers had originally watched them: “Flipping back and forth, trying to decide between a Hallmark movie and an alien autopsy.”The sketch opened on Mikey Day as the ABC moderator George Stephanopoulos, who explained that in his town hall, “The folks asking questions are half pro-Biden, and half anti-Trump.”He introduced Jim Carrey in his recurring role as Biden, who took the stage in a pair of aviator sunglasses and making his familiar finger guns at the crowd. Day asked him if he was ready to receive “softball questions from folks who are already voting for you.”Meanwhile, on the NBC side of the parody, Kate McKinnon introduced herself as “surprise badass” Savannah Guthrie and said, “If you were angry at NBC for doing this town hall, just let me get a few questions in and I think you’ll thank me.”She welcomed Alec Baldwin as President Trump, telling him, “We have lots of voters waiting to ask questions but I’d like to start by tearing you a new one.”In successive responses, Baldwin declined to distance himself from white supremacy (“I’ve always more or less condemned it,” he said), QAnon (“If anyone’s against pedophiles, it’s me, the man who was close personal friends with one of the most famous pedophiles on earth — rest in power, Jeffrey”) the Aryan Brotherhood (“They’re very pro-family, that’s all I know”) and the Ku Klux Klan (“Your car breaks down, you call Triple-K”).Asked about his recovery from coronavirus, Baldwin replied, “I had a small fever. It was around 100. Celsius. But I did great. I never died, never saw hell or the devil. He never showed me a list of my sins. I was just alive and strong the whole time.”Chloe Fineman played Paulette Dale, the audience member who told President Trump that he had “a great smile,” and Ego Nwodim was cast as Mayra Joli, who nodded enthusiastically during many of the president’s responses.That brought out Maya Rudolph as Senator Kamala Harris, who said, “This is the last place I want to be, but somebody has to ask: What the hell is happening with that woman back there? Because I only nod that much when a waiter asks if I’ll be having mimosas at brunch.”Over at the ABC debate, Carrey was shown putting on a Mr. Rogers sweater while singing, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” to his audience.Back at the NBC debate, McKinnon was pretending to attack Baldwin with a chair in what had become a WWE-style WrestleMania match.Finally, the candidates offered their closing statements. Carrey said that, if elected, he would have only one scandal: “I will mistake Angela Merkel for my wife from behind and tell her she’s got a rockin’ caboose,” he said.Baldwin said to the audience, “Just ask yourselves America, aren’t you better off than you were four years ago?”In response, a cartoon map of the United States shouted, “No!”Commercial Parody of the Week“All these protests and civil unrest,” says a weary Everyman played by Beck Bennett. “It’s clear that people are hurting. But how can I help when I don’t even understand what some people go through every day? I wish there were an easier way.”In a voice-over, Kenan Thompson tells him that, in fact, there is: a new supplement, from the makers of 5-hour Energy, called 5-hour Empathy, that offers “five full hours of complete, intimate understanding of years of systemic oppression and ever-present racism.”“That’s great,” Bennett replies, sounding less than enthusiastic as he resists the voice-over’s repeated efforts to get him to actually use the formula. (“C’mon, man, I’m not a racist,” he protests at one point. “I’m voting for Biden, what more do you want?”) His wife, played by Heidi Gardner, offers her own excuses for avoiding the product (“I don’t need that,” she says, “‘Cause I’m a woman. So it’s the same”) before Bennett hurls himself out a window.Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on President Trump’s recovery from the coronavirus and the competing town hall debates that featured him and Biden.Jost began by saying:This week, President Trump held more coronavirus giveaways across the country as part of his herd immunity tour. He started in Florida and showed off how healthy his brain is by saying this. [a video plays of Trump saying, “They say I’m immune. I feel so powerful.”] Yeah, nothing says I’m off steroids like screaming “I feel so powerful” like Sloth from “The Goonies.” Then at a rally in Georgia, a congressman literally crowd surfed, I guess on the second wave of Covid. And yet somehow Trump seems to think he could lose the election. Listen to this. [a video plays of Trump saying, “Maybe I’ll have to leave the country, I don’t know.”] Hey, don’t make promises you don’t intend to keep. Because, by the way, no other country would accept you, because you come from America, which has way too many Covid cases. Though it would be very satisfying if this all ends with Donald Trump becoming an illegal immigrant. And to whatever country gets Trump, I just want to apologize, because we’re not sending our best or our brightest.Che continued:NBC held a town hall event with President Trump because, what can I say? We have a type. [an image appears showing Bill Cosby, Matt Lauer and President Trump] I’m starting to think you guys don’t like anything. Who were these town halls even for? Who’s still on the fence about this election? Whether you’re voting for Trump or Biden, you’ve definitely made up your mind and you’re probably not thrilled about it. These choices are so bad that Kanye’s running and people are like, Maybe? That wouldn’t have happened if we had actually good candidates. When Kennedy was running against Nixon, nobody was like, what about Little Richard?Visit From the Trump Children of the WeekIn a desk-side segment on Weekend Update, Mikey Day and Alex Moffat made their first appearances of the season as Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Day, as Donald Trump Jr., said to Jost, “I’ve been out on the campaign trail, super-spreading my father’s message. And Eric had his very first Zoom business meeting today.” Moffat, as Eric Trump, proudly declared, “I was muted.”They were joined by Chloe Fineman, who played their half sister, Tiffany Trump. “The media got all butthurt ‘cause I was partying maskless in Miami with a bunch of randos on a boat,” she said. “But I mean, I’m a stepchild named Tiffany. It’s kind of my job to get faded on South Beach.” More