quarterlife

» see quarterlife.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

On 27 February 2008, NBC canceled a drama series one day after its premiere. The pilot had gone out the night before to 3.1 million viewers, finishing seventeenth for the evening with a 1.6 rating among adults under fifty, and that was enough to stop the whole thing. Being killed after a single broadcast puts quarterlife in a category with almost no other American network show.

The strange part is where it came from. Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick had made thirtysomething and Once and Again and produced My So-Called Life, which is as much credibility as that corner of television offers. They wrote quarterlife as a network pilot, could not sell it, and in November 2007 put it online instead. It ran as 36 segments of eight minutes each, posted on MySpace from 11 November and on quarterlife.com the day after, and it worked: better than nine million views across both in five months, the third most watched scripted series MySpace had ever carried. NBC then bought it, stitched six of the segments into an hour, and burned it off on a Tuesday.

The remaining five hours went to Bravo on 9 March 2008, all in one block, which is how a network buries something it has already decided against. The attached website, which was the actual point of the exercise, did not stop. quarterlife.com was built as a social network for people in their twenties who made things, and it kept running for another two and a half years after the show it was named for had been written off.

In 2008 I was in the exact demographic this was built for, mid twenties, a few years out of university, working. It still never came near me, because the two ways to watch were a MySpace account and an American network's Tuesday night slot. Neither was something you could get from Ankara.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the night it got its chance ~

The pitch to NBC in late 2007 was good timing and bad timing at once. The writers' strike had emptied the schedule, so a network with nothing to broadcast was buying anything finished, and a web series with nine million views looked like a found object. Herskovitz was publicly clear that the internet version was the real version and television was a secondary window, which is not the framing a network wants to hear from something it has just paid for.

What went out on 26 February was six eight-minute segments edited into an hour, so the pacing belonged to one medium and the slot belonged to another. 3.1 million is not a catastrophic number in absolute terms. It was catastrophic for NBC at 10pm, and the decision came within twenty-four hours.

~ the site that outlived the show ~

Through 2008 and most of 2009 quarterlife.com ran on its own code, a custom community with a video player attached, built on a PHP framework the page identifies in a meta tag as 3Jane, which is a name out of Neuromancer. The stylesheet behind it spells portfolio as portifolio in every path, so the people writing it were not American. The wordmark at the top of the page still had the word alpha printed beside it in December 2007, a month after launch and two months before NBC put the thing on television. Then it changed underneath. From the captures of November 2009 onward the page is unmistakably a Ning network: the signup links route through Ning's authentication path, the stylesheets carry Ning's class prefixes, and the footer invites you to create a network of your own. Somewhere in the gap between August and November 2009 the producers moved their community off their own servers onto free hosted software, and the front page grew from nine kilobytes to thirty-three.

What was on it by then was not a television property. The June 2010 front page lists members, groups, photos, videos and a forum whose live threads are Word Association, What do you think?, Homeless People, Keep Smilin', and one called Our Own Show. A few hundred people in their twenties had taken over the shell of a canceled NBC drama and were using it as a plain message board, under the tagline a site for artists, thinkers, and do-ers.

Ning announced on 15 April 2010 that free networks were over and gave owners a choice of paying or leaving. quarterlife.com answered for the last time on 1 July 2010 and was returning 404 by 16 July, six weeks before Ning's own deletion deadline, so nobody waited to be switched off. The address today sits behind a bot challenge and serves nothing. The show died in one night on a network's schedule; the community that grew in its name died on an invoice.

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