Quarterlife is the new Web drama about twenty somethings,
created by Ed Zwick and
Marshall Herskovitz.
There were rumours even before the U.S. writers strike
started
that it might lead to one of the networks picking up Quarterlife,
which has been written and produced by the team behind Thirtysomething
and My So-Called Life, and now it appears that
those rumours
have come true.
The series has been getting mostly positive reviews after its première last week, a fact which has obviously helped it move from the web to mainstream TV.
On NBC From January
NBC, which like other networks is looking down the barrel of
an empty
TV season, said that it has picked up the show and will run it starting
in January.
The show becomes the first to move wholesale from Web to TV,
but I predict (as others have) that if the strike continues, Quarterlife
will not be the last to make that jump.
The major networks have a
voracious need for content, and when the chips are down they really
couldn’t care less where that content comes from, so long as
it fills
the airwaves.
During the last strike it was reality TV shows like Cops
and America’s Most Wanted that filled
the void for the networks — this time around it’s
the Web.
Can You See The Irony?
As I noted in
this post
about the writers’ strike, it’s more than a little
ironic that while
the Web is the hot-button issue in the strike, it’s
also the place that
writers are going to get their message out.
While writers are after revenue for online content,
it has also now become
the source of content that is replacing their traditional TV
work. As my friend Tony Hung notes, these are interesting
times.
Written by Mathew Ingram, a technology journalist. Catch his views on the intersection between media and the web at MathewIngram.com. This post is licensed under the Creative Commons.
