The First 15 Minutes of Quarterlife

Right off the bat, I didn't commit to watching the entire hour-long network debut of Quarterlife. Fifteen minutes was the most that I figured that I could handle.

It's not be a very sporting way to review a brand-new network TV show, it's true. But really, it's more than fair; Quarterlife the network television show isn't just a brand-new NBC brainchild finally hitting the post-writers strike schedule.

Quarterlife in fact started in November of last year as the online project from Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the brains behind the previous melodramas thirtysomething and My So-Called Life. And based on how much struggle is required to finish a single episode of Quarterlife on the Web, 15 minutes for the feature-length network cut seems generous.

The new show essentially picks up where Angela and Jordan left off, with Heskovitz and Zwick using the same pacing and aesthetic, the same moody musical interludes and the same contrived relationships.

Each episode runs online without any advertising, and in conjuction with — wait for it — the Quarterlife social networking site and forums. Now, incredibly, because of the success online, as of last night NBC will be airing the shows on television as well. Certainly some will find the very idea of a show starting online then getting picked up by a network mind-blowing, a show that even sells itself. In a video interview with NBC's Ben Silverman, Herskovitz introduces the show thusly:

The idea of Quarterlife, of being in your twenties, the idea of trying to get your life started, the idea of trying to be a creative person, of being passionate about things... it's just the perfect Internet project; it's about people in their twenties, the Internet is in the plot to it...

An Internet show about young people with the Internet in the plot? What can be more of a twentysomething show than that!?

Not surprisingly, the writing, characters and composition in Quarterlife are all as original as starting yet another social networking site and as groundbreaking as, well, starting another social networking site after that. If you watched episode 11 ("Compromises") online, you might have done like me and quit after just 1:19 as the plotline of artistic expression v. professional requirement became too thin and boring to continue. The same weak scripting made it onto the network. "Are you going to tell everyone to buy hybrids?" actually asks the hippie. "The Internet is wicked slow," actually says the nerd. "Blah, blah, blah, postmodern," actually says the film maker. They wear T-shirts with slogans, get drinks from their bar-tending friends, struggle to conform to the wacky white collar world and they publish their insecurities on the net! They're also all thin and all white and all have flawless skin, because that's just how television is.

In reality, twentysomethings, young adults who have been raised their entire lives to ignore crappy programming and the exploitation of advertising, are now starting to come up with their own new alternatives to the same old same old. And it's refreshing to see these new innovations emerging from the new video opportunities afforded by the web. It's equally as disheartening, however, that the forces of network TV find ways to try and throw the same crappy programming and advertising back at us.

If there's a silver lining to this story, it's that viewers didn't buy the hype; Quarterlife got NBC's worst ratings for its time slot in at least 20 years, according to Nielsen Media Research.

So I tried to be fair. But I didn't even make it a quarter of the way through Quarterlife before moving on to something more creative and passionate from twentysomethings on the Internet.