My So-Called quarterlife or Something

“Why do we blog?” asks Dylan, the lead character in the new NBC series, quarterlife, already a series of web episodes and a social networking Web site. “We blog to...”

She pauses.

“Exist.”

And there you have it: this, if all of our capital-G Generation is as NBC and Myspace would have you believe, is the crux of our era. Never mind that it’s entirely unclear who else is involved in the first-person plural Dylan employs—is this the royal “we?” No, that’s unimportant. What matters is that this dialogue represents—or at least really, really believes it represents—the way we speak. These characters’ problems reflect our own: one of them has issues with her mother! Another went to film school but is selling out to make a commercial for a car dealership! The painfully earnest series, at least, is convinced of its own verity. And if the 50,000 weekly visitors to quarterlife.com—along with the 100 new users the site gains per day—are any indication, our capital-G Generation might just agree.

Quarterlife follows Dylan, an aspiring writer working a clearly Devil Wears Prada-inspired job at a soul-sucking women’s magazine called Attitude, along with her roommates Lisa and Debra, the former of whom is an actress/bartender and the latter of whom is depressive. Dylan, Jed, and Andy, all of whom aspire to careers in film, and Eric, an activist/bum, round out the cast. All the interpersonal drama and romantic entanglements that are bound to happen when you get seven attractive people together, of course, ensue—and while none of it is terribly original, it’s strangely gripping by virtue of its own self-conscious “edginess.”

“You know damn well what I’m talking about,” Lisa exclaims to Dylan in an early episode after the others have discovered Dylan’s blogorrhea habit. “You put my face all over the frickin’ Net!” It’s a cringeworthy line, but in the context of the Web site it’s just self-referential enough to work. (When the viewer sees this line delivered, of course, her face is all over the frickin’ Net.) Whether it will hold up, along with the series itself, on less-permissive network TV remains to be seen.

The show is the brainchild of Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the reigning kings of TV angst who are also responsible for My So-Called Life and thirtysomething. Go ahead and call the new series My So-Called Quarterlife or Something—you wouldn’t be the first. Herskovitz, for his part, is aware that, at this point, he might be pigeonholing himself.

“I can’t reinvent myself entirely, nor would I try,” Herskovitz said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t presume to say this show should be all that different from My So-Called Life.”

While the series’s content and tone might be familiar at this point, quarterlife can at least boast an entirely new kind of presentation. When it premieres on NBC tonight, the show will carry the singular distinction of being the only web-based series to make the leap to prime time. Since there’s no precedent, it’s unclear how well the show will translate from laptop to living room screens—online, for example, the show has been presented in essentially standalone eight-minute chunks, and a two-hour premiere consisting of these segments knit together might prove disjointed. Besides the difference in length, the material will remain mostly unchanged, with the exception of a few dubbed words the Internet can get away with but NBC can’t.

“We’re supposed to cover everything,” Herskovitz said, “So that if somebody says ‘shit,’ they also say ‘crap’ in another take. When you allow characters to use profanity, it changes the way they speak and makes it more natural.” Herskovitz is a producer obsessed by naturalism, hence the constant, short, establishing shots of quarterlife’s six main characters bumming around their apartments, or the decision to include a scene in which Dylan stutters while video blogging.

The social-networking facet of the show, as well, is unique. The Web site is something of a Facebook/Myspace hybrid, with a video-blog platform built in as well. It’s designed to appeal most to the early-twenties set, but feels strangely artificial—like an elaborate advertisement for the show—when you encounter the religiously-updated profiles that have been created for each character. Asked whether this blurring of the line between the reality of the show and the reality of its viewers bordered on manipulative, Herskovitz drew a parallel to another kind of low-art denizen.

“When Shakespeare wrote his plays,” Herskovitz said, “some of the stuff was for the groundlings and some of the stuff was for the sophisticated, educated audience. Some of our viewers can’t distinguish between the show and reality ... but we are not trying to pull one over on anyone and say that Dylan is a real person. There’s a desire to learn more about the characters, see more of their inner lives. It’s a manipulation if you choose it, but I’m not forcing it on anybody.”