AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Old Media upstart ‘Quarterlife’ gets a Web smackdown - The Los Angeles Times

There was a time, not so long ago, when it felt like everyone was rooting for Marshall Herskovitz to succeed. He and longtime producing partner Ed Zwick were among the fair-haired boys of Hollywood, having produced such classy hit films as “Traffic,” as well as such critically beloved TV dramas as “thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life.”

But that was then. Ever since Herskovitz made a big splash by co-creating “Quarterlife,” a Web drama that launched on MySpace last fall, he’s found himself in the bewilderingly unfamiliar role of an Old Media interloper, ripe to be taken down a notch. Podcasting News, for example, gleefully pronounced the Web series a bomb in December, running a chart of each episode’s views on YouTube that looked like a graph of Ron Paul’s delegate count, noting that the show was getting fewer Web views than “sleeping kitties, graffiti videos or even a clip of Sims in labor.”

That was nothing compared to what happened last week when “Quarterlife” premiered on NBC. The show was an outright bomb, with the Hollywood Reporter saying that it had earned the worst 10 p.m. time period ratings for the network in 17 years. NBC pulled the show immediately, announcing that it would finish its run on Bravo. For the most part, print critics hammered the show, dismissing its characters as annoyingly self-absorbed. Entertainment Weekly’s Pop Watch blogger Annie Barrett was equally unimpressed. “Dylan [the lead character] would be blown off the face of the planet if she existed in real life,” Barrett wrote. “Nothing about her ‘blog’ was realistic, particularly the notion that anyone would want to watch it.”

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