Richness of character abounds on ‘quarterlife’ on TV
Published 2:18 pm Tuesday, February 26, 2008
So here we see the future of television.
And the richness of its past.
The new show “quarterlife” is filled with people worth caring about, leading relatably evocative lives, building visceral relationships, then screwing them up royally and aching till our hearts break with theirs. Just like the classic dramas of television’s earlier years.
And yet, this show started life on the Internet.
Don’t let the hype scare you, or bewitch you. Let “quarterlife” stand on its own merits as a TV drama, when NBC airs the show at 10 tonight. It certainly can.
The look is different, yet somehow the same, whether you’re watching on the tube or the laptop. Handheld cameras and sometimes even i-cams capture the interactions and introspections of 20-something Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch) and five of her friends and roommates. Yet even when Dylan asks a cutting-edge question to start the show — “Why do we blog?” — she’s essentially wondering why humans write journals, or chat on phones, or ponder to-be-or-not-to-be. The presentation style isn’t the thing. The emotions are.
And those are raging. Dylan asks questions of herself by gazing into her laptop-cam as a modern mirror into the soul. Then she posts her ramblings at a Web site called quarterlife.com — which just happens to exist in real life, created for this show not as a promotional vehicle so much as a social networking venue. Fans can watch and discuss the “quarterlife” Webisodes that premiere online, eight-minute minidramas that become segments of NBC’s hourlong version. But they can also post their own videos and personal comments in “channels” such as art, activism, money and medical care.
You can tell without being told that “quarterlife” comes from the makers of “thirtysomething,” ABC’s acclaimed late-’80s drama in which young family and career folks struggled to come to terms with their lives. Producers Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick also shepherded ABC’s ’90s fave “My So-Called Life,” in which a 15-year-old tried on various personalities and perspectives to see which fit.
Drop the focus up or down a decade, and you are here. Now it’s “quarterlife” that has the brooding idealist, the artsy dude, the golden boy, the pretty girl — all of whom are suspiciously in touch with themselves as they mope how they aren’t. Life is still a bit too handy in drama, but hey, even Shakespeare wrapped it up in a couple hours.
Yet this is the sort of intimate exploration to which network TV isn’t so kind in these days of closed-end procedurals, sprawling “Lost”-like adventures and goopy “Grey’s Anatomy” soaps. So Herskovitz and Zwick took their latest project online. They weren’t necessarily aiming to get themselves back on TV, Herskovitz writes in a current Slate article, but to explore how the Web could “actually engage the emotions of an audience.” Yes, it’s nice that NBC, in the throes of a writers’ strike, offered to televise the “quarterlife” vibe.
But Herskovitz seems more excited in Slate about the ways in which online quarterlifers share around the show in gut-check ways. Herskovitz enthuses about creating “an environment they couldn’t find anywhere else, that supported their dreams and addressed their fears.”
And the “quarterlife” series, too, offers an especially hopeful kind of exuberance, even a glowing warmth to the friendships, that shines brighter than previous shows.
Now “quarterlife” takes the time to find those — whether on TV or online, where new Webisodes premiere at quarterlife.com at 9 p.m. PST Sundays and Thursdays.
