'Quarterlife,' coming soon to a bigger screen near you

NBC has made official the scuttlebutt that it would pick up the web series Quarterlife and air it on old-fashioned TV. The showbiz trades are reporting that the show, which now airs on MySpace as well as on its own site, will premiere on the network early next year, giving NBC one more piece of original programming should the writers' strike last a while.

The show comes from well-regarded producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, who will reshape the 36 eight-minute installments of the series into six standard TV hours. NBC will also have DVD rights and stream the show on NBC.com. Meanwhile, new episodes will continue to debut on the show's MySpace page every Sunday and Thursday.

Herskovitz insists the sale to NBC is not a strike-breaking deal: The writing was completed before the strike, NBC had a right-of-first-refusal deal in place a while back. Maybe most important, Zwick and Herskovitz own the show outright, and their company, which isn't part of the Writers Guild-opposing Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, is free to negotiate a separate (and presumably better) deal with the guild.

That's the business-y part of the whole thing. So, is Quarterlife any good? Judge Part 1 for yourself:

quarterlife Part 1

I have a confession to make. I've often had a hard time getting into Zwick-Herskovitz shows and their brand of exquisitely rendered angst. I liked My So-Called Life just fine -- I think I was just far enough out of high school for all that stuff not to sting -- but I never really took to thirtysomething or Once and Again. I realized that they were well-made shows, and therefore kind of appreciated them on some level, but I never got too attached.

Quarterlife mines some of the same ground as those other series, using lead character Dylan's (Bitsie Tulloch) video blog as the entry point into a group of striving postcollegians who all have creative-type (or at least creative-adjacent) jobs but haven't really gotten anywhere yet. Interpersonal conflicts and self-centered behavior abound, but the relationships are only sketchily filled in over the first couple of episodes. You don't get much sense of shared history between the characters.

Visually, the show shouldn't have any problem in its transfer to the somewhat bigger screen; it's professionally shot and edited, and Herskovitz does manage to slip in some reasonably sharp observations about joining the ranks of grownups ("We were all geniuses in elementary school," Dylan observes at one point, "but apparently the people who deal with us never got our transcripts").

Taken in the small doses in which it's served online, Quarterlife isn't bad. A little self-absorbed and precious maybe, but not bad. But I can't see myself watching four or five installments back-to-back, which is what we'll be asked to do, in effect, when the show hits NBC.

Have you watched Quarterlife yet? Is this the future of programming, or just a show about a whiny blogger and her friends? Or maybe both?

E-mail

• Digg
• Facebook
• Fark
• Yahoo Buzz
• Stumbleupon