Roush on Quarterlife
Question: I must've been one of the only ones who watched
Quarterlife and enjoyed it. I can't believe NBC didn't give it more of a chance. I heard it was yanking the series after only one episode. What did you think of it, and don't you think the network pulled the trigger just a tad too soon?
— David
Matt Roush: I guess you missed
my review, in which I suggest the biggest mistake was moving it from the Internet to network TV in the first place. As a media CEO told
Television Week earlier this week, "NBC has proven that content that no one watched online can also be watched by no one on TV." An exaggeration, but not by much. The numbers were so pitiful for
Quarterlife's Tuesday tryout, even in the target demo, that NBC had no choice but to yank it before it moved to Sundays. I hated the fact that I hated this show (and I didn't like it much when I sampled it online either, but at least there it felt appropriate), because I admire the show's creators (Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick) so much. Back in the day, I was always irked whenever critics blasted their earlier shows like
thirtysomething and
Once and Again for being whiny, because I felt so passionately about the emotional truths those shows conveyed. I didn't feel the same was true with the callow, self-absorbed and self-impressed characters in Q
uarterlife, but then, I'm an outsider when it comes to the Facebook/MySpace generation, so maybe I just don't speak their language. Even so, there was universality to the earlier Herskovitz-Zwick shows that I felt was lacking here. Plus, I pretty much hated all of the characters, especially Blog Girl.
