Can the Internet carry a blockbuster drama? Not yet, judging from the mixed, unexciting reception to the Internet’s most expensive serial drama, Quarterlife.
Launched in November 2007 with a budget only slightly less expensive than a network television show, Quarterlife is the audacious experiment of Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, creators of the boomer tv touchstone thirtysomething. Funded heavily—in part by product placement from Toyota and others—the show is streamed at quarterlife.com, on youtube, and on MySpace. As a kind of sequel to thirtysomething, the program focuses on a new generation of upwardly mobile twentysomethings who are trying to find their way after college. The star, Bitsie Tulloch, is a frustrated tyro journalist and blogger, who scandalizes her circle with video blogs about her friends: the beautiful neurotic, the cocky stud, the quiet nerd. The show debuted to a relative media frenzy for online programming, and thanks to visible placement on Youtube, it attracted more than 700,000 viewers to its eight-minute premiere.
"There aren't any hits on the web now, so we didn't really look at other programming as examples," Zwick said at the time. "It’s not like there are any successful formulas that exist right now. Who knows what size of audience we'll get? Who knows what you’ll have to do to keep this show running."
The Internet has spawned thousands of viral hits (Miss South Carolina, "The Evolution of Dance") it has really only launched a few serial hits (LonelyGirl15)—and even those have failed to enjoy either the longevity or mass appeal enjoyed by even semi-successful, third-tier cable television programming. Quite often, these shows have enjoyed brief moments in the sun, but little long-term success, financial or otherwise. The few shows that have succeeded over a long period of time tend to be run on miniscule budgets (Chad Vader) and it’s unclear which of those are profitable.
For Herskovitz and Zwick, the risks of the Internet were matched by the potential reward. "The hope is that maybe we can keep this thing sustainable without the massive audience numbers it would have taken us to keep [our cancelled show] Once and Again on the air," said Zwick. "There's much less freedom on network television than there ever was, so we like the idea that there's something in the democratization of the net, that would allow truly independent work. But we don’t know what’s going to happen."
As it turned out, audiences practically abandoned Quarterlife after its high-profile premiere. Recent episodes (the series has posted twenty seven episodes, as of mid-February) have rated less than one hundred thousand views on Youtube and MySpace (Quarterlife.com stats are unavailable). Since those numbers couldn't possibly support a drama with such a high budget, the show would be a commercial failure—if it weren’t for the fact that Quarterlife will soon get a second life on television.
Thanks largely to the writer's strike that has crippled American television, Quarterlife will premiere on February 26 as a mid-season replacement on that very old-fashioned network NBC. Ironically, this old-fashioned broadcast might save its online future. So far, the most successful programming online are some of the same shows that are popular on TV: conventional shows like Battlestar Gallactica, Lost, and The Office, which have innovatively packaged their programming online. Perhaps Quarterlife’s network broadcast will send viewers online for more. Best of all, if fans love the premiere on TV, they’ll get to sneak-preview the next twenty installments online.