A Fake Quibi Show Has Captured The Internet’s Curiosity Ahead Of The Service’s Reported Shutter Date

It’s not that Quibi, the about-to-die “quick bite” streaming service, never trended on Twitter. It’s that it only trended when the news about it was bad. Back in late October, a mere six months after launching, the company announced it was shutting up shop, with the death date set “around” December 1. The day before that proposed day, social media finally started talking about Quibi again — but it wasn’t even to mourn any of its many real shows, which still need to find another home.

On Monday, Twitter seized upon a Quibi show entitled Jack Sparrow House, whose Wikipedia page describes it as a reality television show concerning “fourteen Jack Sparrow impersonators in a single family home who were eliminated if they broke character.”

Would you watch a show about Johnny Depp-in-Pirates of the Caribbean impersonators, especially if each episode was a mere 10 minutes long? Of course you would. Alas, it was not to be. Not only is Quibi about to shuffle off this mortal coil, but Jack Sparrow House never existed. It was some yukster’s dumb Wikipedia joke. Here’s some more of its absurd Wiki description:

“Quibi head of content Colin Davis described the show as ‘more of an endurance contest than a true talent competition.’ Quibi head of brand and marketing Megan Imbres described the show as ‘the source of a significant amount of litigation.’ Three contestants were kicked off the show after separate public defecation incidents and one contestant was forced to withdraw upon discovering the house was within 500 feet of an elementary school.”

Quibi wasn’t without worthwhile shows. The Anna Kendrick sex doll show was one. The Reno 911 revival was another. The short-form streamer content may have struck a nerve in another age, when people once again are able to leave their homes and kill time waiting on lines. Its radical form of narrative storytelling may get to be explored again, in a better tomorrow.

But for now, people have little but jokes for a streamer that never took off, whose owners wasted over a billion dollars to get nowhere. And they couldn’t enough of a show that, despite being fake, seemed like the perfect distillation of what Quibi was, in its too short life.

And people had jokes about Quibi itself.

Some pointed out that Quibi’s Twitter account is currently locked to non-followers.

And there were those who sincerely mourned the many writers, directors, actors, crew, etc. who believed in Quibi as next-level content, and whose hard work may not have a home for quite some time.

In the meantime, enjoy Quibi while it lasts — if you ever signed up for it in the first place. If it’s not gone first thing December, it still won’t be around by the time the 45th American president formally concedes.