What’s the Deal with Quarterlife?
Like a car wreck or a thong peeking out of a waistline, I absolutely had to look when NBC’s newest show Quarterlife premiered on network television tonight. For numerous reasons. First, it’s the first ever online series to make the leap to normal TV. Granted, I’ve been in China for the last 2 years (see first 600 posts), but I had no idea there was such a thing as an online series. Second, it’s about a blogger. And by “blogger”, I don’t mean a person who “blogs”, I mean a person who satisfies every hackneyed cultural, political, visual, economic, linguistic, habilatory, and sexual stereotype for an educated 25-year-old in 2008. Which brings me to the third reason. I wanted to see how mainstream media, or in this case semi-mainstream media, portrays “bloggers.”
The two creators of the show, Marshall Herskovitz, 56, and Edward Zwick, 55, are in their third-quarter lives, though have proven, with My So-Called Life and Thirtysomething, that they are able to tap into ultra-marketable age brackets. Like eccentric artistic high schoolers in the mid-90s or a bunch of yuppies approaching middle age in the late 80s, respectively. Well, with Quarterlife, Herskovitz and Zwick play with the fascination of the 20-something in this new selfish, career-driven, youth-oriented wired world. You know these 20-somethings. Or sorry, “quarterlifers.” And if you are not familiar with them, let me describe.
They all have Macs. From what I understand, it’s impossible to blog on a PC. They all listen to obscure music, preferably music that sounds like stuff we’ve heard before, but isn’t something we’ve ever heard before. None of them listen to classic rock or alternative or rap, because it’s too proven and easy to find. They’re nowhere close to being married, even though they should be because being lonely is interesting and it gives them something to blog about. And forget about cable. Who has time to watch TV with all that blogging to do? Not only do they not have cable, but they never miss an opportunity to tell people that they don’t have cable. Glasses are all thick-rimmed, because they just are. Work always sucks, hence the blogging, and money’s always tight, despite the fact their parents have lots. They either live in New York, Los Angeles or as in Quarterlife, Chicago, where they can easily pursue something artistic and find other like-minded twentysomethings with whom they can talk about how difficult it is to be a twentysomething.
Because that’s the backwards essence of this quarterlife phenomenon. If you like being in your twenties, or if you don’t document your life on a blog, preferably a video blog, well then, you aren’t living twentysomething life to the fullest. Who the hell has a video blog anyway? Watching Quarterlife didn’t make me connect with the angst I feel being in my twenties or put me in touch with a dormant “quarterlife crisis.” It merely made me realize how much I miss Seinfeld.