Since YouTube became an overnight success by dishing out 15 seconds of fame to pets, teenage girls, and the occasionally funny SNL clip, one of the industry’s big questions, repeated last week by NBC Universal president Jeff Zucker, has been “How can web video move beyond cats on skateboards?” Incidentally, I’m sure NBC wasn’t blind to the favorable economics of switching the entire prime-time lineup to cat videos during the strike.

As expected, the conference brought together a polite cacophony of voices attempting to answer, or at least clarify, that question. Quarterlife is one attempt to answer it in practice. I’m about two-thirds of the way though my complimentary DVD and these are my thoughts so far.

I agree with David and others that Quarterlife definitely doesn’t feel like broadcast television, and I agree that transplanting it shouldn’t be the goal of the producers (especially if the target demo is likely to lack a TV, as is the case with many of my students). There are raw moments in Quarterlife that feel voyeuristic and authentic – moments that would (and probably did) get lost in the primetime assault of 30 second TV ads on NBC. However, I can’t believe these bits fare any better against the hyper-competitive lean-forward attention orgy of the web. The first time I tried to watch Quarterlife on MySpace, I found myself multislacking in another window before the heroine, Dylan, blogged her first piece of meta-angst.

Quarterlife’s loose dialog and residentially-challenged characters remind me a little of the kids in Mumblecore movies. The execution, however, hints that, for better or worse, you’re watching a story written, acted, and shot by professionals. I found Quarterlife’s aesthetic closest to the mocku-drama-mentary style of Soderberg’s groundbreaking K-Street or Unscripted. In fact, the acting class threads in Quarterlife and Unscripted are similar enough to make me wonder if there are only so many “young creatives struggling to make it in LA” stories to go around. Sadly, though we’ve seen all of these characters before, and not in a finally-a-series-that-tells-it-like-it-is way. Even Dylan is a stereotypical chick-lit heroine who is underemployed in traditional publishing. Her arc of the series could easily be called The Devil Wears Threadless or Bridget Jones’s Podcast.

Additionally, Quarterlife counters any conern of being too subtle by pushing the plots fully into melodrama. Six webisodes in, we have writer-writing-too-much conflict, too commercial/not-commercial-enough filmmaker conflict, too sexy (but only without trying) actress conflict, too commitment-phobic cheating boyfriend conflict, and n-dimensional love polygon conflict. At some point you wonder why, for all the media communication these characters indulge in, can’t they just sit down and talk about stuff?

The resulting experience is an amalgamation of different, sometimes contradictory, elements that have worked on TV or the web in one form or another. The formula? One part naturalistic intimacy, two-parts Scion anti-commercial-within-a-commercial, graft both onto melodrama and bodies strait out of Laguna Beach, cut into 8 minute slices, then sandwich back together into hour long Frankensodes that may or may not work better than the medium for which the series may or may not have been originally created (depending on whether you believe Quarterlife was really meant to be an over-budgeted web series, as opposed to an under-budgeted TV pilot). I found the show works better on DVD, as an uninterrupted long-form experience, but even K-Street and Unscripted lasted only one season each on HBO, so going commercial-free may not be a panacea.

To be fair, I decided to check out some of the other made-for-web offerings. Kate Modern’s “Touch the Toyota” episode was a disappointment while the episode of Roommates that I caught was nothing more than an awkwardly-executed 5 minute Ford Focus commercial. In the meantime, the abc.com original “Squeegees” debuted to a collective yawn and subsequent onMouseOut event. Another online tale, apparently told by and for idiots, full of canned sound and After Effects fury, signifying nothing has really improved in the last few months.

After checking out the competition, it’s obvious how Quarterlife, as amorphous as it might be, at least benefits from Herskovitz’s dramatic experience. It’s easily a notch above the other made-for-web offerings. Even so, I feel compelled to answer the original question with another question: “Can web video move beyond verité-style life-after-college cliches and thinly veiled compact car ads?” Quarterlife is a step up, but for now my money is staying on the cats.

-Sean

George