Adam Rippon will serve up a daily dish of “useless” throwback celebrity moments for Quibi, the short-form mobile TV streaming service set to hit phones in the spring of 2020.
The former Olympic ice skater will host “This Day in Useless Celebrity History,” produced by Hearst Magazines’ originals division, for Quibi’s Daily Essentials news and entertainment lineup. Rippon will take viewers on a ride down memory lane, revisiting stars’ breakups, makeups and other outrageous events from the early 2000s to the present day.
Rippon promises that the celebrity rehash show for Quibi will be “a witty retrospective look at pop culture.” The show is scheduled to run Monday-Friday and premiere in April 2020. Each “day in history” will coincide with the actual calendar date that the event occurred.
“There are so many great moments to choose from, and I’ll be there breaking it down for Quibi’s viewers and reminding them of all the drama we’ve lived through together,” Rippon said in a statement.
In 2018, after taking home a bronze medal with the U.S. skating team at the Winter Olympics in South Korea, he won Season 26 of ABC’s “Dancing With the Stars” with dance pro Jenna Johnson. An outspoken advocate for LGBTQ rights, Rippon recently launched his own YouTube channel featuring a weekly celebrity interview show, “Break the Ice with Adam Rippon,” and his memoir, “Beautiful on the Outside,” will be published Oct. 15.
Other partners in the mix for Quibi’s Daily Essentials lineup include NBC News, BBC Global News, CBS’s “60 Minutes,” ESPN, TMZ, and Telemundo.
Headed by founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman, Quibi plans to launch its service April 6, 2020, priced at $5 monthly for a version with ads and $8 for an ad-free tier. The company’s theory is that it can attract a subscriber base of smartphone-centric millennials for its premium, bite-size programming.
The L.A.-based company, bankrolled to the tune of $1 billion, has lined up projects from entertainment A-listers including Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, Steven Spielberg, Sam Raimi, Jason Blum, Steven Soderbergh, Trevor Noah, Catherine Hardwick, Anna Kendrick, Doug Liman and Peter Farrelly.
The pact with Quibi builds on the production slate of Hearst Originals, which expanded its West Coast presence earlier this year with the opening of a 20,000-square-foot studio at the Santa Monica Airport. The division currently produces more than 50 original series, collectively generating an average of 1 billion video views per month. Hearst Originals is headed by Brian Madden, Hearst Magazines senior VP, consumer revenue and development.