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REEL POP: Lessons from the 'quarterlife' bomb

UPDATED 11:31 a.m. PT Feb. 28

The ambitious experiment of transitioning Internet series "quarterlife" to TV was a failure, says the show's co-creator Marshall Herskovitz.

A day after the drama about a twentysomething blogger and her circle of friend debuted on NBC to dismal ratings, the prolific writer and producer told an audience at the Harvard Business School Wednesday that the leap to broadcast television should never have been attempted.

"It never should have been a network show. It's too specific," Herskovitz told the group at HBS' Entertainment & Media conference, adding, "It will probably end up on cable."

In a statement Thurdsay, Herskovitz clarified his position on the issue and
hinted again that "quarterlife" could shift to a cable network.

"We're deeply grateful for NBC's efforts to make quarterlife a success on network television," he said. "However, I've always had concerns about whether quarterlife was the kind of show that could pull in the big numbers necessary to succeed on a major broadcast network ... We live in a media world today where many shows are considered successful on cable networks
with audiences that are a fraction of those on the Big Four. I'm confident that quarterlife will find the right home on television as well."

On Tuesday, the NBC premiere of "quarterlife" marked the network's worst time-period performance in the 10 p.m. hour in at least 17 years, averaging a 1.3 rating/4 share among adults 18 to 49 and 3.1 million viewers overall despite a strong lead-in from "The Biggest Loser."

Still, NBC Co-Chair Ben Silverman said putting "quarterlife" on the network was "so worth the try."

"The web site traffic went up a huge amount and we continue to try new things and new models," he said. "It's very inexpensive but we hoped for higher ratings."

Although no official cancellation has been announced, sources say the series will likely be yanked from the schedule before its second episode airs Sunday night. A one-and-out network run is a rare event that most recently occurred when Fox axed "Anchorwoman" in the summer after a single episode.



The former ABC pilot "1/4 Life" was revived last summer by Herskovitz and producer partner Ed Zwick as "quarterlife," a new show shot as a traditional one-hour drama but broken up into eight-minute segments and distributed on various online platforms, including MySpace. NBC picked it up as a mid-season series in November, two weeks into the writers strike.

Herskovitz has said previously that if the show didn't find an audience on the network he would be happy to move it to one of the NBC cable nets. He said Wednesday he has yet to have a conversation with NBC about the fate of the show.

When he first launched "quarterlife," a project which also encompassed an online community, Herskovitz hoped that it could become a template for a new kind of independent production. Network-quality programs, he said, could be made less expensively for the Internet and then potentially migrate to television.

But Herskovitz said Wednesday night that the experience of watching the show on NBC, with the series' intimate storylines and tight camera angles, has convinced him otherwise.

"From the first three minutes," he said, "I knew it wasn't right."

James Hibberd reported from Los Angeles. Steven Zeitchik reported from Boston.