Monday night comes the big premiere of Marshall Herskovitz’s webisode series “quarterlife,” about college grads facing the big bad real world. Pumped up? We thought so. Please keep reading anyway.
The venues for the 8-minute show are MySpace and quarterlife.com. MySpace gets dibs, in a bid to access the social network’s massive audience.
“We only care about our site,” Herskovitz said at a recent USC screening (according to the L.A. Times). “We don’t care about MySpace, because they’re not paying us. But they’re bringing us a lot of eyeballs, so it’s worth something.”
quarterlife.com calls itself “A new community for artists, thinkers, and doers.” Visitors are invited to create profiles, and then upload videos and images. But mostly it’s home to a great-looking screen on which to unspool the series. The trailer shows young people getting through life together and blogging about it. “You blog to exist,” the lady says to the audience. Yeech.
This stuff looks familiar, straight from the network template for young adult women. No doubt “quarterlife” has heart and no doubt it’s manipulative. The show might be good but don’t expect a format breakthough from these guys.
Herskovitz, you may or may not recall, created “My So-Called Life
Paying for the new twentysomething series are big league advertisers such as Toyota and Pepsi.
Herskovitz wrote an opinion piece for the Times announcing that he and Zwick were done with network television. “Networks today exert a level of creative control unprecedented in the history of the medium …,” he said. “The problem, of course, is that these executives often have little background or qualification for making creative decisions. … This season’s new shows have been a good indicator of how successful that strategy is.”
He went on about the importance of the “quarterlife” experiment:
“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.”
Of course, Herskovitz and Co. have the money and power to bolt from the nets and make a credible Internet series. Pretty much everyone else wanting to work in professional episodic video has no choice but to work for Big Media.
YouTube fun aside, the reality is almost all of the (legal) watchable stuff on the Web comes from real television. The networks repurpose their shows without additional compensation for the people who created that content. That’s what the current writers strike is all about.
One theory I’ve heard here in L.A. is that the networks are in no hurry to settle the walkout because they’re saving money they would have poured into their new crop of flop shows. Reality TV is cheap, relatively, and enough viewers will put up with it to keep the ads coming. Check out these comments about the strike savings from Peter Chernin, president of Fox parent News Corp.
The networks seem to be enjoying their speedy downhill ride. The strike’s disruptions to their primetime shows — and the defection of major talent such as Herskovitz & Zwick — are just two more bits of inspiration for viewers to conclude they have better things to do than watch network TV. Power off.
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