The ranks of talent signing on at Quibi keeps on growing.
This time it’s Will Forte and Kaitlin Olson joining Jeffrey Katzenberg’s short-form platform. The duo will star in a comedy series entitled “Flipped,” which hails from Funny Or Die.
Forte and Olson will play chronically underemployed couple Jann (Forte) and Cricket Melfi (Olson) who are self-proclaimed home renovation “experts,” more than confident they are television’s next great home design celebrity duo. The series follows the clueless pair as their dreams of basic cable fame and glory are derailed when they get themselves kidnapped by members of a drug cartel (played by the eye-catching trio of Andy Garcia, Eva Longoria, and Arturo Castro) and are forced to renovate their sprawling homes.
“Flipped” was created and written by Steve Mallory and Damon Jones. Both serve as executive producers on the project alongside Ryan Case, Joe Farrell and Jim Ziegler. Ryan Case will direct with Steve Burgess on board as a co-EP and Adrien Finkel and Whitney Hodack as producers.
The prospective show is one of dozens in the works at Quibi, which is slated to launch in April 2020.
The company is attracting A-list talent across the board, and has announced a slew of projects including Steven Spielberg’s “After Dark,” a horror series users will be able to watch only between sundown and sunrise local time. Other partners include Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, Sam Raimi, Jason Blum, Steven Soderbergh, Catherine Hardwick, Anna Kendrick, Doug Liman, Laurence Fishburne and Stephen Curry’s Unanimous Media. Quibi also has ordered shows featuring Tyra Banks, Chrissy Teigen, Don Cheadle and Idris Elba as well as a remake of MTV’s “Punk’d.”
Led by former DreamWorks Animation chief Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman, Quibi has raised $1 billion from investors including major Hollywood studios and is seeking to raise another $500 million ahead of its launch.