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TV Tonight: quarterlife Jumps Screens

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Scott Michael Foster and Kevin Christy do whatever it is those kids nowadays do with the computer machines. / NBC Photo: Elisabeth Caren

There is a generational war going on in your living room. In the one corner, your computer, that hot new property, what with its multitasking and IM abbreviations and viral videos, basks in attention and universally acclaimed hotness. And in the other corner seethes your TV, still formidable, but bitterly remembering the glory days when it was the only game in town.

Oh, that snotty little computer! Oh, its arrogance! Oh, its sense of entitlement! Doesn’t it realize the history I’ve lived through? The moon landing! The JFK assassination! By God, I changed the world! What did that little flavor of the month ever give us? Naked pictures of the girl from High School Musical? But you’d think that it was the only medium that mattered! Well, I will not be forgotten! I will not…

Tonight, into this breach strides NBC’s quarterlife, a TV show turned Internet show turned TV show about the Internet, which both embodies and attempts to transcend the divide.


There’s another generational struggle playing out in quarterlife, because it’s a show about young people written by not-so-young people, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, who gave us the masterpiece of Boomer self-analysis thirtysomething. And it’s more than that: it’s a generational statement about twentysomethings, as produced by people a good two generations older.

That’s an important distinction, and one that finally works against quarterlife. There’s nothing wrong with older people writing about younger people, any more than there is with black people writing about white characters or men writing about female protagonists. In fact, I personally think that Zwick-Herskovitz’s two best TV series were My So-Called Life and Relativity, both of which were about considerably youinger characters. But it’s one thing to write about people who happen to be younger than you. There’s a special arrogance in making broad generational declarations about a generation you have thirtysomething years on.

I wrote about these problems (and gave more of the show’s backstory) when I reviewed quarterlife as a web series last fall. Suffice it to say that, having seen the equivalent of four episodes now, the problems (and the good parts) of quarterlife are that much more pronounced. When the show tries to be a zeitgeist picture of Gen Y, it is painfully bad. On the one hand, the statements it makes about its characters’ age cohort seem to be a collection of grouchy-old-people complaints about them: they are self-absorbed (thirtysomething, pot, kettle), they have unreasonably high self-esteem, they feel entitled, they’re impatient, they want it all now, they’ve grown up in a culture of vapidity. (The lead character, Dylan [Bitsie Tulloch] works at a magazine, where her office nemesis is a ditzy backstabber named Brittany, pronounced Britney. ‘Nuff said.)

On the other hand, when its picture of Gen Y turns positive, it does so by making the characters into Junior Boomers: obsessed with the concept of “selling out” and “changing the world.” (And sure, there are twentysomethings that are like that, but by focusing on this particular group of tortured artists and activists, the show limits its characters to archetypes that are familiar to Boomers from their own twenties.) Then there are the many details that try and badly fail to be current, like having the characters blog–of course!–but agonize self-consciously about it like thirtysomething characters, or having them unironically refer to the Internet as “the ‘Net.” It’s like seeing your Grandpa get a fauxhawk.

When the show treats its characters as people and not as trend stories, though, quarterlife can be as fascinating as Zwick and Herskovitz’s earlier shows. Those shows, ironically, were at their best when they reminded us that real people don’t fit generational labels, that people are weird and idiosyncratic and contradictory and random. And there’s some of that here: Dylan’s actress roommate, for instance, seems like she fills the mandatory sexpot role until we learn that her biggest problem as an actress is that she has a hard time portraying her sexuality. And Tulloch, while she’s saddled with some horribly pretentious monologues, perfectly captures that Zwick-Herskovitz hallmark of being fascinating even when she’s unlikable. (Just as Angela Chase could break your heart and be off-puttingly cruel to her mother in the same episode.)

When quarterlife debuted online (on the ‘Net?), it got some condescending reviews that essentially praised it for looking polished and professional for a web series. (One, there were already superior online series, like The Burg; two, looking polished has little to do with telling a good, original story.) Now that the show’s on Real TV, other critics seem to be recognizing that it’s simply a fair-to-middling TV drama.

And maybe that’s the surest sign that your computer has a lot in common with your television after all: they’re both just as capable of producing disappointing entertainment. Maybe we can all get along.