Television Notes: Quarterlife

November 19th, 2007

Quarterlife

Quarterlife is a web-only show that due to the writer’s strike, has been picked up by NBC for broadcast television early next year. Its basic description is a raw look at life from the viewpoint of twenty-something Dylan, a sullen female armed with a black MacBook and a blog. I gave it a shot and watched the first few webisodes.

Dylan’s roommates are BFF Deborah with big ears, glasses, and a lame hair style, and Lisa, a beautiful, blond, and brainless bartender and aspiring “B” actress. Next door are film-school neighbors Danny and Jed whose current ambition is a car commercial, and with Andy whose current position is caged by triple-monitors and racks of nerd-stuff.

Their expected stuck-in-first-gear lives are quite vapid and superficial – a posse of adolescent narcissists, struggling through life because they haven’t realized – part of the point is the struggle. Dylan wonders why the cruel world doesn’t appreciate talent, not realizing that adulthood means you don’t change the world, the world changes you – or eventually explains that you suck.

But I believe Quarterlife reveals much about the use of technology by the younger generation:

Technology as expression: Dylan, a classic introvert, presents a head-scratching contradiction about a silent type who divulges everything online. But she’s basically a quiet artist using her chosen medium (blogging) to make some sense of the world around her, and may have to choose between her chosen medium and her friends.
Technology as commerce: The filmmaker neighbors work in a more socially acceptable medium but are out for the bucks – the show’s most egregious product placement occurs at a car dealership while they film a commercial.
Technology as a filter: There’s a parallel between Andy, hostage to computers, and Dylan hiding behind her laptop screen. To cope with a sucky life, you can force it into a controlled environment, or hide beneath waves of entertainment.

Then there’s the technological sea-change surrounding the program. Quarterlife is available online – which is the best place for it. The vapidity of the characters benefits from the short form: just when the banality becomes annoying – the webisode is over.

Next is the writer’s strike (partially about online revenue) and NBC, looking for replacement content, has picked up Quarterlife for broadcast television. Bloggers write about this show starring a blogger. The website is a social network that Dylan and her friends would join. It’s so meta it might explode onto itself.

So in the real world, we have NBC (technology for commerce) using Quarterlife – centered on the romantic appeal of Dylan (representing technology as expression) – to advertise to target audience that generally avoids broadcast television (technology as a filter).

The idea of technology as expression even seeps into the words written by Marshall Herskovitz, the producer of Quarterlife, in regards to the writer’s strike.

We’ve created a project called “quarterlife” — a series and a social network — that we own and control, and we had to give up our TV deal in order to do it… We’ve worked very hard, and spent a great deal of our own money, to make it as good as anything we’ve ever done on television. And we’ve gotten calls from every guild and virtually every producer we know, all of whom are curious to see if this little experiment can succeed. Because if it does, it will prove that there’s a way to independently produce, finance and distribute ambitious content on the Internet. And if we can do it, others can do it.

Is this marketing-speak? Is Dylan a surrogate Herskovitz? Beats me.

I guess what I’m saying is the events surrounding Quarterlife are possibly more entertaining than the show itself. So for right now – I’m following (and enjoying) both.

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