Watch What Crappens - Listen Now: The Big Flop

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Every big moment starts with a big dream. But what happens when that big dream turns out to be an even bigger failure?Each week on Wondery’s new podcast The Big Flop, host Misha Brown is joined by different comedians to chronicle some of the biggest failures and blunders in pop culture history. Each episode will have you thinking to yourself, why in the world did this get made?!This is just a preview of The Big Flop. You can listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts, or at wondery.fm/thebigflop.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey everyone, it's Ben and it's Ronnie and we're from watcher crap ends and we want to share a new podcast that we think you'll really love called the big flop All right now I want you to picture Steve Jobs tinkering with the computer in his garage Beyonce practicing dance moves in her childhood bedroom Bethany Frankl trying her first skinny margarita Every big moment starts with a big dream But what happens when that big dream turns out to be an even bigger failure? Each week on the big flop,

host Misha Brown is joined by different comedians to chronicle some of the biggest failures and blunders in pop culture history. Each episode will have you thinking to yourself, why in the world did this get made? From box office flops like Cats, The Movie, to Action Park, New Jersey's infamous theme park that was the backdrop to countless injuries, many lawsuits and rides so wild it became known as Class Action Park.

Or a quibi, that short form video platform with an even shorter lifespan. It was a recipe for disaster from the start, and its creator, Jeffrey Katzenberg, even got the idea from the diventi-cog. It's a story of spectacular failure with lots of surprises along the way. We're about to play a clip from the Big Flop. Enjoy the Big Flop on the Wondry app or wherever you get your podcast.

You can listen to the Big Flop early and have free on Wondry Plus. Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts today. Wondry! Wondry! Wondry! Wondry! Wondry! Wondry! Wondry! Wondry! Wondry! It's October 2020. today.

It's October 2020, an actor Thomas Lennon is sitting but naked on a bucket. He's filming a scene for his new movie Reno911, it's a wonderful heist. Here's Lennon on AV Club. I had my pants completely down and I was pretending to poop in a bucket. on AV Club. Do you remember Reno 911? It was that instant classic when it premiered on Comedy Central in 2003, and now 17 years later, they're shooting the revival for a brand's new streaming platform called Quibi. Quibi claims it's a brand new way to watch TV and movies, Hollywood quality content in

10 minutes or less, only available on your phone. The idea came from some of the biggest names in Hollywood and Silicon Valley. The app seemed to have everything going for it. But right in the middle of a take, Thomas Lennon starts to notice whispers among the crew. Everyone's suddenly uncomfortable. And it doesn't seem to have anything to do with his butt. When we finally cut everybody's like, hey, the quidies doesn't exist anymore. I was like, oh, that was weird. Because all the thing that the pooping on the bucket was definitely this was for Quibby, so.

If you think that's undignified, then just wait until you hear about the rise and fall of Quibi, which lasted less than a year before it kicked the proverbial poop bucket. The short form streaming service Quibi, the startup is shutting down after just six months in operation. This was the hot new thing in Hollywood, a short form, but now stunningly short-lived streaming service. Still, how is it that with so much star power, Quibi, the billion dollar promise, could possibly flop?

From Wondery and At Will Media, this is The Big Flop, where we chronicle the greatest flugs, fails, and blunders of all time. I'm your host, Misha Brown, social media superstar, and your wife's gay best friend, at Don't Cross a Game Man. And today, we're talking about the short life of the short form platform, Quilly.

[♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ And here to help me tell the tale of this ill-begotten union of Hollywood and tech is Conor Ratliff, comedian and host of the podcast Dead Eyes, and Matt Bellasai, comedian and host of the new Wondering Podcast Disantel. Welcome to the show, guys. Thank you for having me. Conor, what is your personal experience with Quibi? Well, I knew a couple of people who had either auditioned for Urban Cast of Friend of Minds, Zach Cherry

was in a Quibi that I don't remember if it ever got released or not. And I don't believe I had any experience with Quibi while it existed. And then post Quibi, I watched a few things on the Roku channel that work Quibi. Matt, we asked you earlier about your connection with Quibi offline. And you said you felt like you're the only comedian who didn't have a Quibi show. And that you absolutely did not watch a single second of it.

No disrespect to all of the wonderful people involved. Well, I have gone far enough into the black hole that is Quibi. So for a lot of people in 2020, there was basically no daylight between finding out that Quibi existed and finding out that it had gone up in flames. But the Quibi story actually begins much, much earlier. And to understand Quibi, we first have to talk about the Da Vinci code, Dan Brown's best selling novel. Okay. Obviously. Right? Yeah. So it's around 2011. And Hollywood super producer Jeffrey Katzenberg picks up the mystery thriller like so many other people. And as he blasts through it, he has an epiphany.

He realizes that the best thing about the Da Vinci code is apparently how short the chapters are. I had no idea we were going to start there all the way back. Listen, he's got a point. Well, fast forward to 2018 and Katsenberg, because of this, wants to create a subscription based smartphone only streaming platform for shows that are only six to nine minutes long. Here he is talking at Axios is smarter, faster, revolution conference. Listen, I don't think people have as many 30s and 40 minutes today.

I think that giving them the convenience, if they got 10 minutes, they can read a chapter or two. If they've got an hour, they can keep going. By the way, I would say there's not a single thing lesser about the DaVinci code other than the length of the chapters. We're going to disagree on that, but that's okay. You can listen to the big flop early and add free on Wondry Plus. Get started with your free trial at

Wondry.com slash plus.