Articles have reported that quarterlife, the online episodic that NBC licensed for television broadcast, was deemed unsuccessful when it attracted something like three million viewers on Tuesday night. In terms of broadcast television economics, that’s considered a failure, but there are a number of factors here, not the least is that it was set it up for failure from the start. But failure in broadcast does not mean the show itself is a failure, which by internet standards is quite successful in terms of the vibrancy of its online community which is evolving nicely.
NBC did not put their usual marketing campaign behind it, and without this, it’s hard to build a large audience, viewers are starved for attention, there’s little reason to watch yet another show unless the network promotes the hell out of it. In addition, they probably over-estimated potential audience for the broadcast. You don’t need fancy focus groups and analysis to see what is going on, you just have to look at the world around you. Sean Fitzroy, who teaches twentysomething students at the New England Institute of Art, was telling me on Wednesday that only 50% of his students own televisions, and this is the quarterlife demographic. And last but not least, quarterlife is not a broadcast show to begin with. Putting quarterlife on television is akin to entering a cat in a dog show. Very different species. Quarterlife co-creator Marshall Herskovitz put it best on a panel at the 2008 Media & Entertainment Conference at the Harvard Business School on Wednesday (and I quote):
When we started out to do [quarterlife], and people heard it was going to go to NBC, we were sort of damned if we did and damned if we didn’t, because a lot of people said “oh, it’s just a television show in disguise, and these are old television guys, and they are just doing television,” in fact, the difference for me was I went back to my early days, I just recently looked at the pilot of thirtysomething, and I was not so brainwashed in those days in the world of television, and the pilot of thirtysomething is so raw, and so real, it doesn’t look anything like a television show, it’s not lit like a television show, they don’t sound like a television show, and that’s what I went back to, in other words, I didn’t say, “what is the internet, I have to do an internet thing,” I said, “let me let go of the shit that I’ve been doing that I’ve taken on over the years without knowing it,” these voices in my head saying, “oh, will they like this character, you know, will people understand when you say this, will they stick around,” all these kind of things that network executives are scared of I just said, “forget it, I’m just going to do my thing for this, that”s how I did it differently, and low and behold you know what? It ain’t a television show, and it was proven last night it was not a television show (laughter in the room), it’s too specific for a big network, and that’s fine, cause we’re going to find a home for it, that will work for what we do. But that’s the difference, is I went back to my own voice.
It’s ridiculous to call quarterlife a failure, it’s simply a proof point that crossover is not always a good idea, that the audience for broadcast television and internet episodics is different, and twenty-somethings are growing up in a vastly different media world. They are not going to watch broadcast television the way my generation did. And why are we even talking about online shows making the jump to television? As if this was somehow the holy grail? Why look at new media through the lens of old media? As Herskovitz said, quarterlife is not television, it’s something different. It does not belong on prime time, which is about mass audience and lowest common denominator, it belongs on a niche cable station if on broadcast at all. Why do so many broadcast industry people talk about the internet as a new breeding ground for television shows? They sure would like to outsource creative development. But the internet is not a new old thing, it’s a new new thing, and internet entertainment properties should be judged on their own terms as their own thing. The new media revolution will not be broadcast, nor will it be rebroadcast. It will be streamed, downloaded, and shared as part of a community experience as you see happening right now on the quarterlife site. When quarterlife first launched I did an interview with Marshall Herskovitz that you might find interesting.
Personally, I find quarterlife to be one of the more interesting pieces of entertainment to come out in 2007, and part of what I like about it is its rawness, the feeling that it’s a work in progress, something evolving, and that there’s a community around it. It’s in a very different “voice” as Herskovitz said. And that’s part of the appeal for me, and probably not right for mass audience appeal. But in the world of long tail media distribution, it’s about finding a niche, not the mass audience. What is being done with quarterlife may not translate to the model for the future of television, but it’s sure working by many metrics of success. Without spending time watching all of the episodes and spending time observing and/or participating in the community, you can’t really grok what quarterlife is. Innovators in entertainment have created some flops that have made cinema/television/new media history, but at the same time where would we be without the innovative projects that showed us that there are other forms that entertainment can take, and new ways of interacting with an audience? It’s too soon to call for a verdict on the quarterlife experiment and premature to make claims of it’s demise.
Thoughtful, insightful analysis. Clearly makes the distinction between old media and new media.
George
Hi David, I’m currently blogless, (admittedly trapped in MoveableTextPressWordType analysis paralysis) so I thought I’d post my comments to yours.
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