Quarterlife Solutions

I’m excited for the debut of the show ‘Quarterlife’ on NBC tonight.  Here is a great article by from the LA Times about the show and the history it made on it’s way to NBC.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/webscout/2008/02/14life.html

Here is the full story as seen in the LA Times:

 ’Quarterlife’s’ improbable third quarter

The story of “Quarterlife,” which premieres tonight on NBC, has been more about the ambitions of the show’s creators, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, than about the show itself. This drama about being young in a confusing world is in many ways the tale of two TV-makers being confused in a young person’s world. 

“Quarterlife” — which Mary McNamara reviews in today’s paper, and which I wrote about in November — began as a pilot for ABC way back in 2004, when YouTube was still a far-off twinkle in some nerd’s eye.  For one reason or another, “1/4life” didn’t make it to prime-time, forcing Zwick and Herskovitz — who wanted to keep their idea alive — to figure out another approach.

What they came up with sounded pretty good on paper:  an “Internet show,” complete with a main character who’s also a video blogger — and all wrapped in a real-live social network.  If that wasn’t cutting-edge television, then kiss my grits.

But despite a good deal of hype, some newfangled trimmings, and a partnership with MySpace, “Quarterlife” never quite crossed the Web’s success threshold: it didn’t go viral. The episodes on MySpace tended to hover around 100,000 views over their lifetime, with maybe another 50,000 or so each from each episode’s YouTube incarnation.  (For reference, a semi-well known YouTube blogger named KevJumba scored 450,000 views this week when he posted a video about how he broke his shin and had to “get a cast that extends up to my unmentionables.”)

The strangest turn happened when, very soon after the writers strike started, Herskovitz and Zwick sold the show to a content-strapped NBC.  “Quarterlife” had quickly come full circle — imagined as a TV show and then reimagined as an Internet show, it was now being re-reimagined as an Internet show that beat the odds to make it onto TV.

Will the show work on NBC, even though it didn’t really work online?  In a recent essay for Slate, Herskovitz waves away the question: “We’ve already won the main victory, no matter what happens.”  In this case, the main victory is not making a hit show, but getting a network TV deal that gives him “100 percent ownership and creative control.”

In the same piece, he blames the show’s Internet failure on the Internet — and the people who use it:

Even the most brilliant accomplishments on the Internet are essentially cold. Google has changed the world, but you don’t snuggle up to it. YouTube is a giant carnival, filled with freaks and mountebanks, a place to gawk and laugh and get bored. Certainly not a place to feel anything.

And because the Internet was invented by “geeks, engineers, and boys” who …

don’t naturally select for emotionality (they’d rather play video games) or exploration of inner life (they’d rather watch porn) or being in deep relationship with other people (they’d rather build Web sites till all hours), the Internet is singularly devoid of these colorations of humanity.

But, Herskovitz seems to imply, “Quarterlife” transcended the Internet’s emotional paucity.  For its fans, “the show and the Web site had come to represent an environment they couldn’t find anywhere else, that supported their dreams and addressed their fears, and in which they could recognize their truest selves.”

Times critic McNamara did not reap the same psychic benefits.  “Quarterlife,” she writes, “may be the most relentlessly traditional, nay, even nostalgic show to ever air on television.”

But at the end of the day, it’s the audience — not TV executives, not the cold-hearted Internet, and not us critics, who will write the next chapter of “Quarterlife.”  Just as it should be.

Thanks for stopping by! For more articles and quarterlife resouces please visit www.quarterlifesolutions.com and www.uploadexperience.com

Thank you!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 26th, 2008 at 5:29 pm and is filed under Quarterlife Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.