073 - A Heartbreaking Valentineversary
Remembering my old game show on its unfortunately timed Yahrzeit
SAVAGE QUESTION: What once-ubiquitous, internationally-renowned, viral pop cultural phenomenon abruptly shut down just one month before the entire world did, on Valentine’s Day, 2020?
ANSWER: HQ Trivia
February 14, 2020 wasn’t merely a rough day for lonely hearts.
For the two dozen or so former colleagues who had managed to remain employed at Intermedia Labs — the New York City-based startup that initially created the Hype mobile app, which later spawned the standalone Hype Quiz (HQ) app and the interactive game shows (HQ Trivia and HQ Words) that live-streamed within it — it’s hard to imagine a more heartless way to have been treated on that particular Valentine’s Day.
At around 3pm on that Friday — the start of what anyone would have reasonably expected to be a relaxing and love-filled holiday weekend — Intermedia’s CEO Rus Yusopov called an emergency all-hands meeting at his company’s Soho office to announce that after a planned acquisition had fallen through, Intermedia had run flat out of money, and effective immediately, HQ would cease operations. All employees and contractors were instantaneously terminated, without being given even the slightest comfort of actionable information regarding the status of payroll, benefits, or the possibility of severance.1
Happy V-Day! Enjoy your long weekend… which has now been indefinitely extended beyond Monday’s Presidents’ Day observance! Try not stare too far out into the futureless void!
I remember getting a call about this calamity while sitting in traffic for the Holland Tunnel heading into New Jersey — for reasons most likely involving thrift shopping. By this point, I had been almost a full year removed from the madness and morale-sucking morass that was late-stage HQ, and it had been two years since the app had reached peak growth, as measured by monthly installs (2 million in February 2018, compared to 67,000 in January 2019).
The summer of 2018 had been fraught with conflict between founders, boardroom drama, and rapidly declining audience numbers that triggered Rus’ ouster as CEO in September and the installation of co-founder Colin Kroll in his place. Three months later, Colin was found dead in his apartment from an accidental drug overdose2, opening the door for Rus to be reinstated as CEO shortly thereafter.
When a well-timed offer to host a new, RedZone-style live baseball show at MLB Network3 fell at my feet in March 2019, promising not only the dream opportunity to share a dressing room with the likes of Pedro Martinez, Jim Thome, and John Smoltz — childhood idols and all-time greats of the game I love more than I’m ashamed to admit — but also the prospect of twice the pay for half the work of my increasingly joyless HQ Trivia hosting duties, I gratefully jumped into the life raft.
But even then, facing a nightly, three-hour shift on live television from Monday-Friday, I didn’t want to fully cut ties with the community of HQties I helped build from the ground up — and had genuinely loved entertaining nearly every night for almost two years. Willing to sacrifice one of my precious weekend off-days from MLB, I petitioned Rus and his Executive Committee to consider a revised employment arrangement whereby I would continue hosting HQ Trivia on Sunday nights. Sundays had long been established as the marquee episode of the week, drawing the largest audiences while awarding the grandest cash prizes.
Reason might suggest that a media company — faced with the crisis of losing its star talent and “face of the franchise,” whose on-camera presence was a contractual condition of nearly every sponsorship deal the company had brokered with its brand partners (to the accumulated tune of $15 million) — would bend over backwards to mitigate a potentially existential threat and avert a disastrous news cycle around the host’s departure.
Alas, “reasonableness” was one of many qualities found to be dangerously lacking among the Masters of the HQniverse.4
Following a valiant but unsuccessful attempt by my reps to negotiate a fair agreement in good faith with the Executive Committee — and even despite a personal appeal to Intermedia’s board members in a deeply felt and difficult-to-write email (published, for the first time, below) — I was officially terminated by Intermedia Labs on April 5, 2019.
Reports of my exit trended on Twitter for three days.
.
April 1, 2019
To the Board of Intermedia Labs,
On this first day of April 2019, I am thinking back to April 2017 when I received a phone call out of the blue from Nick Gallo, an old friend from my intern days at The Onion, asking if I’d like to audition to be the host of a “game show for your phone” that he had been developing with the founders of Vine. By April 2018, that show - first called Hype Q and then HQ - had grown from a whimsical notion to an international phenomenon, averaging well over 1 million live nightly participants from around the world, defying and disrupting conventional media genres, and changing my life in immeasurable and irrevocable ways.When HQ began, I wasn’t given an operating manual or guidebook. The camera flicked on, the stream went live, and I started talking... calling the players “HQties,” referring to questions that knocked out the majority of contestants as “savage,” adopting a song lyric from my favorite band as the show’s signature “nitty-gritty” catchphrase. For nearly two years, I’ve poured my heart and soul into HQ, and in the process, given HQ its heart and soul; constituting its DNA with every quirk of my personality, every Seinfeld and Simpsons reference, every nod to 90s baseball players lingering in the corners of my peculiar, pop-culture-addled brain. Nothing in my 12-year entertainment career has meant more to me personally and professionally than my involvement with HQ, and nothing would make me sadder than having my ties severed with it so abruptly and unceremoniously now.
Recently, another opportunity has come out of the blue - to host a nightly baseball show, Monday-Friday, for the next 6 months. As a massive baseball fan, this opportunity was too good to pass up, but in accepting the new position, it was my intention to remain connected with HQ in a meaningful capacity as host of its flagship Sunday night show and serve as the enduring “face” of HQ for publicity events. There are many examples of personalities hosting multiple shows across different networks simultaneously (Ryan Seacrest, Carson Daly, Michael Strahan, Steve Harvey), and I hoped a similar arrangement could be worked out for the next 6 months. Last week my representatives engaged in discussions with Rus and Nick about how to shape a new deal for my services going forward, in accommodation of my new schedule.
However, the proposal Rus and Nick have made, and the manner in which it was presented to my attorney, gave me the sense that they do not appreciate the value I have brought to the company and would continue to bring, even in a temporarily limited role. They intend to treat me like any anonymous contractor, dismissing the integral role I’ve played in the success of HQ to date. Given how I’ve so clearly gone above and beyond my mere hosting duties in these nearly 2 years with the company, I’m frankly shocked and terribly disheartened to hear just how little regard the Executive Committee seems to hold for my contributions.
Below you can find the initial offer from Rus and Nick in blue, my attorney’s fair and reasonable counter highlighted in yellow, and Nick’s response. I sincerely hope my tenure with this company can sustain through the end of 2019 and beyond, as we pursue greater progress and innovation in the live mobile space together. But if the Board is aligned with the Executive Committee on the ungracious offer put forth, then I really have no choice but to wish you all the best without me.
Respectfully,
Scott Rogowsky
Fittingly, the episode that would come to stand as my final sign-off from HQ Trivia (March 24, 2019) was co-hosted by a man no stranger to strained employer relations himself: Gilbert Gottfried.
Now here I was, ensnarled in a holiday-weekend rush-hour bottleneck, my mind on the pitchers and catchers who had recently reported to Spring Training — signaling the start of a new baseball season and, with it, my impending return to Secaucus for another year hosting ChangeUp on DAZN — when I was gut-punched by the unexpected news that a loved one had died.
Of course I loved HQ. I had poured myself into the show, taking it from those first internal test streams for the benefit of Intermedia’s eight employees to broadcasting to an estimated 5 million global contestants alongside Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. I infused every ounce of my creative DNA and comedic persona into the personality of the show, fusing my identity with the brand’s. I was a literal human face built into the user interface, a living “brand voice” speaking directly to the product’s millions of customers on a twice-daily basis. It’s only hitting me now how much I had become the anthropomorphized premise of a Black Mirror episode.
I can’t say I was too surprised that HQ had finally succumbed to the long-festering cancer it had inherited from its founder — a man who single-handedly steered a company once valued at $100 million straight into the ground, leaving hardly a penny to flip to its faithful staff for good luck on the way out.
But despite the writing that had long been on the wall, and despite the fact that HQ had felt dead to me for quite some time before the coroner’s report made it official, I still found myself struck by a profound sadness at the news.
I was sad for my former co-workers, so callously left up shit’s creek without a paddle… so heartlessly treated on the one specific day we’re meant to have a heart.
I was sad for the part of my psyche that — like the battered partner in an abusive relationship — had remained stubbornly attached to HQ, foolishly clinging to a faraway fantasy of reconciliation and return, now suddenly annihilated.
I was sad for the hardcore HQties who had stuck it out until the bitter end.
Learning of the ignominious circumstances surrounding HQ’s dying days, and knowing how avoidable its death truly was, my sadness mixed with righteous anger. We had caught lightning in a bottle — disrupting the tech, media, and mobile gaming industries, creating the future of television and bringing it vividly and defiantly into the present. We had been a beacon of light and a safe harbor of joy for millions of people around the world — reuniting estranged families, bonding offices and classrooms, uniting a fractured and divided society forced to contend daily with destabilizing political and economic forces.
And just like that, it was all gone. They really blew it.
February 14 also happens to be the anniversary of my first kiss, cemented twenty-five years ago today in the Scarsdale living room of one [NAME REDACTED], as the 1999 Chris O’Donnell vehicle The Bachelor flickered on the television in front of us, unnoticed. Copped my first feel that night, too.
If you miss those heady days of HQ Trivia, come find me on Savvy. I’m doing the live, interactive game show thing all over again, and if you ask me, it’s even better.
May the memory of HQ be a blessing for us all — just as the memory of [NAME REDACTED]’s soft lips and perfect tits remains a blessing for me.
Recollection presented here is based on publicly available reporting and first-hand accounts I received at the time from freshly axed employees.
Later determined to be the cause of a fentanyl-tainted supply traced back to an illicit operation whose dealers were ultimately prosecuted.
Produced for streaming platform DAZN, the show was called ChangeUp, and the story of its brief, absurd existence would easily fill 400 pages in a book all its own — and will certainly earn a chapter or two in my eventual memoirs.
Others include but are not limited to: confidence, decisiveness, integrity, humility, empathy, loyalty, reliability, accountability, fundamental operational competency, basic human decency…
Really beautifully written! I imagine there is much you will do differently with Savvy. But curious if there is anything you actually want to emulate about HQ? (Beyond just the app experience and the concept itself!)