Press Articles

[Sascha]

CNET has an early review of the first six segments of "quarterlife", as presented last week on the CMJ Music Marathon and film festival.

it's watchable, and a whole lot better than most standard TV shows.

Another report from the premiere can be found in the New York Times:

Anyway, the “Quarterlife” preview had a remarkably favorable reception from an audience that ranged in age from people who were themselves 30-something when that earlier series came out to students that were not even born at the time.

“This was much too good for network television,” an older member of the audience remarked during the question-and-answer session with Marshall Herskovitz

[Sascha]

According to the Hollywood Reporter, NBC is interested in picking up "quarterlife" for an early 2008 airing in case the writer's strike continues into the new year.

[Greybird]

Two well-turned Los Angeles Times stories, in two days, on this latest Bedford Falls creation, both worth reading in full at the links ...

Calendar, 11 November:

Web-only series? Yep. Audience?

[...] Most of us over 25 are familiar with the work of [Marshall] Herskovitz and "quarterlife" co-writer Edward Zwick, the creative team behind "thirtysomething," the term-coiningly iconic TV series of the late 1980s, and "My So-Called Life," which, if its status as the best teenage drama ever is not universally agreed upon, then only a handful of people need their minds changed.

[Emphasis added! How could this be put more perfectly? ~ Greybird]

Having nailed the 30s in the '80s and the teens in the '90s, Herskovitz, 55, and Zwick, also 55, have left themselves with a difficult pair of decades in which to complete their epic of growing up: the 20s, and this one.

"Quarterlife" valiantly attempts to navigate a perilous strait: On one side it's a tale of young artist-types trying to get a handle on real-world living, and on the other it's an ambitious exploration of a new media genre whose waters are largely uncharted: the short-form Web drama. Which means that both its characters and its medium are experiencing rapid, whirling change on the one hand and a pervasive sense of uncertainty on the other.

[...] Though it does not have the advantages that "My So-Called Life" had (Winnie Holzman's dialogue and Claire Danes), as an hourlong TV show "quarterlife" is not bad. Shore up the blog nuisance, add a few characters who aren't white, well-to-do 25-year-olds, stick in a few symbols and ciphers for good measure, and sure, it's just about ready for prime time.

But slice that single hour into six short segments spaced out over three weeks, and it stops mattering that the show's writing, directing and acting are better than any other made-for-Web drama. Amid the endless stream of forgettable digital tidbits, you're lost without some way to keep an audience coming back. [...]

Entertainment News, 12 November:

So-called Internet show is rare for this medium

[...] The show is named for a recently defined phenomenon: the quarter-life crisis (or QLC, not to be confused with [shopping channel] QVC, which is another sort of affliction altogether), in which twentysomethings struggle with feelings of disappointment, longing, confusion, the sense that life is passing them by and that they will never get to do or have what they want, if they could only work out what that is.

[...] Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch), who wants to be a writer, is an editorial flunky at a magazine called "Women's Attitude," where her boss steals her ideas.

[...] The idea behind "My So-Called Life" was to capture the tone of a teenager's diary; "quarterlife" brings that into the 21st century by giving Dylan a blog - posted to a Website also called "quarterlife." "Why do we blog?" Dylan asks herself. "We blog to exist, therefore we - are idiots."

She speaks the truth: She puts embarrassing videos of and information about her friends and roommates online. And although I know that kids nowadays have an interesting notion of privacy, and that Dylan is probably supposed to be a bit of a loose cannon, this seems improbably improvident.

At the same time, she's the best realized of the bunch: The creators have lavished all their love on her; she is not quite Angela Chase grown up, but she has some of her intelligence and energy, and Tulloch, who plays her, seems destined to be better known. [...]

[Sascha]

A review from The Oregonian. Not so positive...

[..]
Plenty of camera-ready angst to go around, and it's all written and performed with the same rhythms we've seen a thousand times on every other love-and-life dramedy on prime-time TV.

It's not awful. Not even close, except for its generational pretension. The excruciating self-importance Dylan brings to her blog turns out to belong to the show itself.

[Sascha]

Brian Stelter from the International Herald Tribune speculates about the low viewer figures of "quarterlife" on youtube and elsewhere. The future of the show is still undecided now that production has completed.

[...]
Some episodes of "Quarterlife," a drama about a group of good-looking people in their 20s have yet to attract 100,000 video views, according to combined view counts from MySpace's video site and YouTube.
[...]

[Sascha]

NewTeeVee features an interview with Marshall Herskovitz

[...]
NewTeeVee: So what’s next? What are you going to do when the episodes run out?

Herskovitz: We will finish sometime in the middle of March. We’re going to go on NBC starting Feb. 26, and it will be six weeks in a row. We are now trying to raise the money to do more episodes.
[...]

[Jody Barsch*]

Not an article per se, but flipping channels tonight I caught the last part of Access Hollywood's spot on Quarterflife.

[Sascha]

Another very interesting article discussing the reasons for the failure of "quarterlife" in the Los Angeles Times: 'Quarterlife' gets a Web smackdown.

[..]
Herskovitz admits that he had no idea how much bashing he would encounter. "There's been an extraordinary amount of negativity surrounding the project," he told me the night after its disastrous NBC premiere. "It mostly came from the people who had a sense of proprietary claim to the Internet and resented us TV guys coming onto their turf, saying we were going to do something new on the Internet."
[..]