Netflix’s grand adventure into interactive TV was always going to struggle. There’s the problem of cost to overcome with shows such as Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Cat Burglar and the interactive Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: Kimmy Vs the Reverend, as it isn’t cheap to write or film every possible branching variation of every possible decision. There’s also viewer passivity – it’s hard to mindlessly enjoy a show if it keeps pestering you to play along. And perhaps most importantly of all, there’s the problem of narrative satisfaction. Why would you, an idiot viewer, tired, bored and clueless, be better equipped to tell a story than the people who do it for a living?
But perhaps Netflix has cracked the formula? This morning, deep in the bowels of its sub-menus, the service quietly launched Trivia Quest. It’s a multiple-choice quiz, with no bells or whistles, and its simplicity may point the way forward.
You may have played something like Trivia Quest before. If you have, this will either be because you’ve played Trivia Crack, the phone app upon which the show is modelled, or because you’re old enough to remember playing Bamboozle! on Teletext. Either way, it couldn’t be more basic. A question appears on-screen. You pick an answer from four possible choices, then you do the same thing 11 more times and the show is over.
Sure, the game tries to justify its existence. There’s a storyline of sorts – a kind of sentient cartoon sword has kidnapped your friends, and the only way to break them out of their cages is by answering questions – but at the heart of it, it’s really just a gussied-up version of the general knowledge quiz machines you find in pubs. I played today’s game, and the whole thing was over in about four minutes. I got full marks, too, but I don’t like to brag.
Which isn’t to say that it couldn’t be better realised. When my kids saw Trivia Quest, they all but lost their minds with how relentlessly cute and cartoonish it was. This wasn’t a surprise, because visually it looks like it has been designed to appeal to young children. So you can understand their disappointment when one of the first questions was about the 2002 biographical film Frida, a movie they are not well acquainted with. Nor have they seen Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which hampered their ability to answer a later question.
Despite this, I have a feeling that Trivia Quest will find a loyal audience very quickly because, in a masterstroke of scheduling, new episodes are available daily. Netflix has struggled with this model of delivery before – people didn’t exactly turn out in droves for Chelsea Handler’s thrice-weekly talkshow – but a daily quiz is something else entirely. Crosswords are daily. Sudoku is daily. Wordle is daily, for crying out loud, and Wordle is a sensation.
You could argue that Trivia Quest is Netflix’s Wordle. You couldn’t possibly base an entire evening around it in the way that you could with, say, Narcos. It’s too brief for that. But it could be the first thing you do when you look at Netflix. It could become an instinctual part of people’s routines. Switch on, wind down by using your general knowledge to free some cartoon blobs from a talking sword for a couple of minutes, then on to the serious stuff.
Was this the endgame all along? Did Netflix go to the colossal expense of creating Bandersnatch just to ease viewers into the idea of eventually using Netflix as a general knowledge app? Will Netflix realise the profitability of a short daily quiz and stop funding your favourite show as a result? Let’s hope not. Trivia Quest is a fun way to pass five minutes of your time, but it isn’t the future of entertainment.