Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/CNN Creative Marketing/YouTube
HQ Trivia was a sensation that skyrocketed to success and pop-culture ubiquity as fast as it crashed and burned, making it yet another Icarus-like story of a tech triumph turning to failure.
Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia is mostly a nostalgia trip to a few short years ago, designed to explain what the hell went so horribly wrong with the game show. The cautionary tale is a familiar one. But it’s told with enough flashy verve and humor, along with a gossipy bombshell audio recording, to play as a breezy non-fiction look back at a phenom that had its 15 minutes—or, at least, enough time to get through an evening’s worth of quiz questions—in the smartphone spotlight.
Glitch: The Rise & Fall of HQ Trivia is a saga about foolishness and strife that has itself become mired in controversy, courtesy of Alyssa Bereznak, who claims that director Salima Koroma’s CNN documentary, which premieres Mar. 5, borrows heavily from her own similarly titled podcast, Boom/Bust: The Rise and Fall of HQ Trivia.