quaterblah

With many of my favorite TV shows still in a coma from the blow to the head that was the writers strike, I was really looking forward to the new NBC show Quarterlife. It's been awhile since I was able to devote myself to a new show. I thought the trailers looked promising. The premise of the show is simple, a 25 year old girl keeps a video-blog type thing, blogging about her friends and her personal life. However, I quickly learned how un-interesting this could be. The main character, Dylan, is an insecure young woman who is obsessed with voyeurism and in her self-absorbed little life, she observes, and passes judgement on her friends. She also "suffers from tortured artist syndrome" (geeksugar.com).

Her character is incredibly annoying. She is under the impression that just because she is a writer (she is an editorial associate at a magazine) she has to make this known to everyone, because clearly she is better than they are. Also, she feels that because she is a writer, she must write what comes to her. At this point, that includes being very critical of her friends/roommates. According to geeksugar, she suffers from "the illness in which one is convinced other people are not worthwhile unless they're artists." (geeksugar.com).

So okay, she blogs. What bothered me the most was, she says some very revealing things about her friends. They of course find out and are very angry. Firstly, if you want to stay out of trouble, don't use your friends names. Use fake names! That way nobody really knows who you are talking about. Also, why a video blog? You are plastering people's personal lives onto the web. There's something really creepy about that.

For example, she said her roommate Lisa is an alcoholic. Lisa is angry of course because her entire acting class was on the blog. So after a little spat, Dylan apologizes and then they are BFF's again.

I'm sorry, what?

I have a feeling the entire series is going to go on like this. Dylan says something she shouldn't. Friend gets mad. Friend and Dylan reconcile. All is sunny again.

All in all, this was a pretty terrible pilot. This show has a lot of potential and TV cred however. Its producers are none other than the team from My So-Called Life. It is also dripping with Apple geekery! (Basically every character has a Mac, there's even a gratuitous Final Cut Pro shot )

I really hope that this show gets better from here on out. I am reminded of other bad pilots of some of my other beloved shows. The Buffy pilot is vomit inducing for example, and after that (and the first season subsequently, but I'm not going to get into that cheese-fest now) the show was amazing. So let's pray that Quarterlife figures out who and what it wants to be and therefore becomes something better than its current state. I feel that if it doesn't improve, it will go the way of the cancelled monster.


Update: 2/29/08

Apparently NBC canned Quarterlife. According to thefutoncritic.com;

"After posting a 17-year low in the 10:00/9:00c hour for the network, it's one and out for NBC's online-turned-broadcast drama Quarterlife.

After the premiere, the series was to move to Sunday nights at 9 pm, however, seeing as how bad the premiere was, this is no longer the case. Supposedly the remaining episodes will move to Bravo.

According to buzzsugar.com;

"We'll never know whether the premiere got such poor ratings was because the show, from My So-Called Life creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, had already aired on multiple online platforms and MTV, had a boatload of obnoxious and false-sounding technology references, just plain wasn't that compelling, or some combination of the above."

Buzzsugar also writes that a later episode of Quarterlife was much better than the premiere, however may not have been good enough to keep people watching. It is a shame that the show had such a short life. I feel that it could have been so much better.