Quarterlife,” the new online-only show from Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, the creators of “thirtysomething” and “My So-Called Life,” wants very badly to define the current generation of twentysomethings—or at least the white, middle-class, angsty and overeducated college grads among us. But it lost me within its first two minutes, when its protagonist looked straight into her computer and began her video blog with the following cringe-inducing monologue:
“My name is Dylan Krieger. OK, what does that say? To say something I would have to reveal something, and God forbid I do that. What is a blog? Why do we blog? We blog to exist, therefore we… are idiots. Aargh! Blog blog blog blog blog… OK, my name is Dylan Krieger, and I often cry for no reason—and then later it turns out that there was a huge reason that I was completely unaware of, and that scares the crap out of me. What IS the life of a writer, and am I living it?”
We’re supposed to relate to Dylan, the show’s anchor and tour guide, but instead I was seized with a surprisingly powerful urge to tear her laptop from her hands and bludgeon her with it. I’m the same age as these characters, and at a fairly similar point in my career and love life; like Dylan, I have a blog; like her friends Danny and Jed, I was a film student; and yet I hated almost all of these people. Partly I think that’s just an instinctive negative reaction to being pigeonholed, and the fact that “quarterlife” comes so close to the bone in those surface details makes me defensive—because the rest of the show’s characterizations tend to be, even if it’s largely unintentional, very unflattering.
Most of the main characters, struggling with post-college life, spend much of their time startled and hurt to discover they’re not instantly successful and appreciated by everyone they encounter; it doesn’t seem to have previously occurred to a single one of our protagonists that life involves a certain amount of concession or disappointment. When did the twenties, instead of the teens, become the accepted pop cultural time for these realizations? The high schoolers of “Gossip Girls” or even “Degrassi: The Next Generation” are considerably more knowing than any of the “quarterlife” crowd. In both its title and its subject matter, this show is capitalizing on the recent surge of interest in the “quarterlife crisis”; but in straining to make a broad, sweeping generational statement, the show neglects to create interesting or likeable characters. It’s pioneering a potentially groundbreaking distribution model, but all the blogging in the world can’t make “quarterlife” ’s content feel relevant to me.
The show makes much of technology’s impact on people my age, who in the interests of space I will also be referring to as “my generation,” even though after watching 11 episodes of this, the phrase now strikes me as unavoidably pretentious. The show’s first few episodes—averaging eight minutes long, posted online twice weekly—wring drama from Dylan’s incomprehensibly inconsiderate decision to secretly post video of her friends on her blog, using their real names and images, with comments like “Lisa sleeps with guys… then drinks to forget them.” But then, what did they expect?: “Things just come out of me—I’m a writer!” bleats Dylan, and, later, “I have to be honest, you know that!” (Funny, most of the writers I know lie almost incessantly.)
“Quarterlife” takes its characters’ artistic aspirations very, very seriously—a writer, an actress, two filmmakers—and its fans’, too. It’s a romantic view of creativity that’s commendable in the abstract, but doesn’t feel quite sincere; it’s too self-serious, and at the same time, too much of a calculated marketing choice. That’s because Quarterlife.com doesn’t just host the show, but is also a fledgling social networking site and multimedia platform that claims to be “for artists, thinkers, and doers,” and comes off as a prettier and more pretentious Facebook.
Herskovitz and Zwick very clearly want to attract an intelligent, arty audience, and they have the resume for it, plus a genuinely admirable desire to break of free of network television’s restrictions. And yet their characters seem too one-dimensional for that; each gets an allotment of one or two Issues, then proceeds to club the audience over the head with them.
We can tell that Dylan cares about serious issues, for example, because she’s constantly announcing it to anyone within earshot. “Glaciers are melting, polar bears are drowning, and yet they sing,” she moans to her friends during karaoke; Dylan Krieger is definitely not one of those characters you’d like to grab a beer with. She works unhappily as a glorified intern at a teen magazine, and clashes with her shallow, bitchy blond boss, Britney (of course), over Dylan’s idea for an “Alternative” section:
Dylan: We’re talking about how young people can change the world, end racism, end global warming! You can’t use that to sell stupid cosmetics and deodorants!...
Britney: I literally don’t know where you come up with these ideas.
Dylan: Must be all the hallucinogens I take.
Britney (shocked): You do not!
Dylan: No, I do not, Britney. That’s called irony.
Actually, Dylan, to be more precise, it’s called sarcasm. Has my generation learned nothing from the mistakes of Alanis Morrisette?
However, to the surprise of no one who has watched television before, Britney steals Dylan’s self-righteous idea, eventually leading Dylan to interrupt a full staff meeting to set the record straight, telling all of her coworkers: “I will probably get fired for saying this… I really just wanted people to know that at least I was smart.” No, you idiot, you will get fired for video blogging on a public site about how much you hate your employer and boss.
Is this really a popular view of my generation? What the hell did we do to deserve this?
No generation, an ill-defined mass of millions, can be easily defined, but this one has proven especially tricky to categorize. The popular images of the Baby Boomers or Gen X are grossly oversimplified at best, but my generation doesn’t even have a gross oversimplification to call its own. Two of the most common handles describe us only in relation to those better-known groups—Echo Boomers or Generation Y, which, thank Christ, never really caught on. In researching this story (read: skimming the GenY Wikipedia entry), I found out we’re also called the Millennials, which makes us sound like a mediocre ’90s alt-rock band. I would never, ever try to name this generation myself, certainly not without massive quantities of protective irony… which probably says something in and of itself, but never mind.
Marketers hate a void, hence the invention of the “quarterlife crisis,” a phrase popularized by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001 book of the same name about “The Unique Challenges Of Life In Your Twenties,” which spawned a new self-help niche. The issues the book and its imitators raise are real enough—dealing with newly unstructured post-college life, struggling to build a career—but the entire concept is still a fairly naked sales ploy. Presumably it’s only a matter of time before new books emerge to help you deal with the unique challenges of your thirties, to tide you over til your previously scheduled mid-life crisis.
What exactly is the magical age where everything is fine? Starting around middle school, aren’t most people’s lives basically one long crisis with occasional stretches of calm, and not the other way around? A certain amount of turbulence seems to be the normal human state, but I suppose calling it a “crisis” gives those feelings some kind of dignity or reassuring official validation. Not to mention a hook for a book or TV show targeted at young adults.
The Quarterlife.com social networking site claims to be “devoted to facilitating that same coming of age as the series. Along with community building, it provides resources in all the areas of life that affect those in their twenties—careers, love, health, finances, education, activism.” Because certainly no one in their thirties or forties ever worries about those things. (Also, do 25-year-olds really need their “coming of age” to be facilitated, let alone by a promotional website?)
On her blog, “Quarterlife Crisis” co-author Abby Wilner writes, “it is my belief that this and future generations of twentysomethings may not experience midlife crises because we’re doing so much exploration now as young adults—moving around between jobs, relationships and living situations. Hopefully, once we figure it all out and settle down we’ll feel so relieved that we won’t want the sportscar or a new spouse.” Right.
Still, pop culture seems fixated on twentysomethings, probably for the very simple reasons that 1) they tend to be attractive and can have sex on TV without sparking too many complaints from conservatives; and 2) they’re an extremely desirable demographic for advertisers, who seem confident that if we’re ever able to afford a car, we’ll be influenced by the five million Nissan ads they forced down our throat during “Grey’s Anatomy.” (God bless TiVo, the greatest invention of the last decade.)
Quarterlife” is all the more disappointing because it comes from the minds behind “My So-Called Life,” one of those shows that was watched by almost every single twentysomething I know, and yet managed to get cancelled within a year due to terrible ratings. In fact, with few exceptions, all the shows about my own age group that I’ve loved over the years have been strangled in their crib or struggled for renewal every year, which leads me to believe that I’m just not that in tune with the majority of my fellow Millennials — or possibly there is no well-defined group for me to feel a part of in the first place.
I think the last show that everyone in my age group watched was “Saved by the Bell.” It wasn’t a thoughtful show, or well-written. Or well-acted. Yet it had some sort of mysterious universal appeal, maybe because it painted a picture of a safe, logical, good-natured world, and we were all still young enough to accept it without skepticism; had I gone to Bayside High, I certainly wouldn’t have been friends with any of the “SBTB” gang, but I didn’t know that yet. I can’t even recall people talking about the show much while it was on, and yet it burrowed into all of our skulls – I give you the otherwise inexplicable continuing career of Mario Lopez – and I have vastly clearer memories of Zach Morris than I do of any one of my fifth-grade teachers.
Freshman year of college, I bought some caffeine pills, and literally every single person who saw me with them, or heard me mention them, students from every corner of the country, all of them brought up the episode where Jessie gets hooked on caffeine pills (or as the “SBTB” kids called them with a straight face, “drugs”) and has a complete meltdown. If you’re in your twenties, you not only know exactly what I’m talking about, you probably just started humming “I’m So Excited.”
In the years since, though, everything fragmented. I suppose you could make an argument for “Beverly Hills 90210,” but that doesn’t strike me as having had the same age-specific impact. I loved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but it never was able to fully overcome its ridiculous name.
Judd Apatow’s 1999 masterpiece “Freaks and Geeks” is probably the best show about high school ever made—even though it was set in the ’80s, it felt completely relevant, because high school never really changes—so naturally NBC jerked it all over the schedule, aired it out of order, and killed it with just 18 episodes shot and fewer aired. But from a business standpoint, you can hardly blame the network, because “Freaks and Geeks” was far too realistic, and therefore often excruciatingly painful, awkward, and embarrassing, to appeal to a wider audience. Told from the point of view of the titular outcasts and losers—not the funny, lovable, two-dimensional outcasts and losers often used as comic relief on TV shows, but fully realized people with familiar and raw emotions—it was presumably not the ideal platform for selling cosmetics, car insurance, or office supplies. And while its portraits of individual types were dead on, it never presumed to speak for everyone who was in high school in the ’80s; its broader points were all drawn from extremely specific characters, and it had nothing to say about the “average” teen.
(Speaking of NBC, the network recently acquired the rights to “quarterlife” and plans to air it in 2008; it won’t be affected by the writer’s strike due to quirks of its ownership structure. There’s no justice in this world.)
I disliked “quarterlife” so much that it actually made me question whether My So-Called Life was really as good as I remembered, or if I was just less discerning at the time because I was 13, and therefore an idiot. But the show still holds up; strangely enough, Herskovitz and Zwick’s teen show was considerably more complex, and less condescending, than their take on young adults. In fact, “quarterlife”’s Dylan is a bit like who Angela Chase might have become, if she’d lost her sense of humor and learned absolutely nothing about life in the ten years since her sophomore year. Qualities that are perfectly understandable in a 15-year-old—self-absorption, whininess, a near-hysterical overreaction to any slight—are considerably less charming in a 25-year-old, who is, despite what you may have been led to believe, an adult.
Maybe popular culture is just too fragmented these days for any one show to strike a deep chord with a wide enough audience to keep it on the air. In which case it makes sense for quirky entertainment to find a home on the Internet, where it can be produced less expensively and find its audience without worrying about network ratings.
Hopefully the online shows that follow “quarterlife” will be less obsessed with trying to define the “Internet Generation,” and less of full of generalizations about People In Their Twenties. Because even I have no idea how to characterize us, and it seems both arrogant and pointless to try. If “quarterlife” is to be believed, we mostly sit around in front of computers and whine, which…well, OK. They may have a point there.
“My name is Dylan Krieger. OK, what does that say? To say something I would have to reveal something, and God forbid I do that. What is a blog? Why do we blog? We blog to exist, therefore we… are idiots. Aargh! Blog blog blog blog blog… OK, my name is Dylan Krieger, and I often cry for no reason—and then later it turns out that there was a huge reason that I was completely unaware of, and that scares the crap out of me. What IS the life of a writer, and am I living it?”
We’re supposed to relate to Dylan, the show’s anchor and tour guide, but instead I was seized with a surprisingly powerful urge to tear her laptop from her hands and bludgeon her with it. I’m the same age as these characters, and at a fairly similar point in my career and love life; like Dylan, I have a blog; like her friends Danny and Jed, I was a film student; and yet I hated almost all of these people. Partly I think that’s just an instinctive negative reaction to being pigeonholed, and the fact that “quarterlife” comes so close to the bone in those surface details makes me defensive—because the rest of the show’s characterizations tend to be, even if it’s largely unintentional, very unflattering.
Most of the main characters, struggling with post-college life, spend much of their time startled and hurt to discover they’re not instantly successful and appreciated by everyone they encounter; it doesn’t seem to have previously occurred to a single one of our protagonists that life involves a certain amount of concession or disappointment. When did the twenties, instead of the teens, become the accepted pop cultural time for these realizations? The high schoolers of “Gossip Girls” or even “Degrassi: The Next Generation” are considerably more knowing than any of the “quarterlife” crowd. In both its title and its subject matter, this show is capitalizing on the recent surge of interest in the “quarterlife crisis”; but in straining to make a broad, sweeping generational statement, the show neglects to create interesting or likeable characters. It’s pioneering a potentially groundbreaking distribution model, but all the blogging in the world can’t make “quarterlife” ’s content feel relevant to me.
The show makes much of technology’s impact on people my age, who in the interests of space I will also be referring to as “my generation,” even though after watching 11 episodes of this, the phrase now strikes me as unavoidably pretentious. The show’s first few episodes—averaging eight minutes long, posted online twice weekly—wring drama from Dylan’s incomprehensibly inconsiderate decision to secretly post video of her friends on her blog, using their real names and images, with comments like “Lisa sleeps with guys… then drinks to forget them.” But then, what did they expect?: “Things just come out of me—I’m a writer!” bleats Dylan, and, later, “I have to be honest, you know that!” (Funny, most of the writers I know lie almost incessantly.)
“Quarterlife” takes its characters’ artistic aspirations very, very seriously—a writer, an actress, two filmmakers—and its fans’, too. It’s a romantic view of creativity that’s commendable in the abstract, but doesn’t feel quite sincere; it’s too self-serious, and at the same time, too much of a calculated marketing choice. That’s because Quarterlife.com doesn’t just host the show, but is also a fledgling social networking site and multimedia platform that claims to be “for artists, thinkers, and doers,” and comes off as a prettier and more pretentious Facebook.
Herskovitz and Zwick very clearly want to attract an intelligent, arty audience, and they have the resume for it, plus a genuinely admirable desire to break of free of network television’s restrictions. And yet their characters seem too one-dimensional for that; each gets an allotment of one or two Issues, then proceeds to club the audience over the head with them.
We can tell that Dylan cares about serious issues, for example, because she’s constantly announcing it to anyone within earshot. “Glaciers are melting, polar bears are drowning, and yet they sing,” she moans to her friends during karaoke; Dylan Krieger is definitely not one of those characters you’d like to grab a beer with. She works unhappily as a glorified intern at a teen magazine, and clashes with her shallow, bitchy blond boss, Britney (of course), over Dylan’s idea for an “Alternative” section:
Dylan: We’re talking about how young people can change the world, end racism, end global warming! You can’t use that to sell stupid cosmetics and deodorants!...
Britney: I literally don’t know where you come up with these ideas.
Dylan: Must be all the hallucinogens I take.
Britney (shocked): You do not!
Dylan: No, I do not, Britney. That’s called irony.
Actually, Dylan, to be more precise, it’s called sarcasm. Has my generation learned nothing from the mistakes of Alanis Morrisette?
However, to the surprise of no one who has watched television before, Britney steals Dylan’s self-righteous idea, eventually leading Dylan to interrupt a full staff meeting to set the record straight, telling all of her coworkers: “I will probably get fired for saying this… I really just wanted people to know that at least I was smart.” No, you idiot, you will get fired for video blogging on a public site about how much you hate your employer and boss.
Is this really a popular view of my generation? What the hell did we do to deserve this?
No generation, an ill-defined mass of millions, can be easily defined, but this one has proven especially tricky to categorize. The popular images of the Baby Boomers or Gen X are grossly oversimplified at best, but my generation doesn’t even have a gross oversimplification to call its own. Two of the most common handles describe us only in relation to those better-known groups—Echo Boomers or Generation Y, which, thank Christ, never really caught on. In researching this story (read: skimming the GenY Wikipedia entry), I found out we’re also called the Millennials, which makes us sound like a mediocre ’90s alt-rock band. I would never, ever try to name this generation myself, certainly not without massive quantities of protective irony… which probably says something in and of itself, but never mind.
Marketers hate a void, hence the invention of the “quarterlife crisis,” a phrase popularized by Alexandra Robbins and Abby Wilner’s 2001 book of the same name about “The Unique Challenges Of Life In Your Twenties,” which spawned a new self-help niche. The issues the book and its imitators raise are real enough—dealing with newly unstructured post-college life, struggling to build a career—but the entire concept is still a fairly naked sales ploy. Presumably it’s only a matter of time before new books emerge to help you deal with the unique challenges of your thirties, to tide you over til your previously scheduled mid-life crisis.
What exactly is the magical age where everything is fine? Starting around middle school, aren’t most people’s lives basically one long crisis with occasional stretches of calm, and not the other way around? A certain amount of turbulence seems to be the normal human state, but I suppose calling it a “crisis” gives those feelings some kind of dignity or reassuring official validation. Not to mention a hook for a book or TV show targeted at young adults.
The Quarterlife.com social networking site claims to be “devoted to facilitating that same coming of age as the series. Along with community building, it provides resources in all the areas of life that affect those in their twenties—careers, love, health, finances, education, activism.” Because certainly no one in their thirties or forties ever worries about those things. (Also, do 25-year-olds really need their “coming of age” to be facilitated, let alone by a promotional website?)
On her blog, “Quarterlife Crisis” co-author Abby Wilner writes, “it is my belief that this and future generations of twentysomethings may not experience midlife crises because we’re doing so much exploration now as young adults—moving around between jobs, relationships and living situations. Hopefully, once we figure it all out and settle down we’ll feel so relieved that we won’t want the sportscar or a new spouse.” Right.
Still, pop culture seems fixated on twentysomethings, probably for the very simple reasons that 1) they tend to be attractive and can have sex on TV without sparking too many complaints from conservatives; and 2) they’re an extremely desirable demographic for advertisers, who seem confident that if we’re ever able to afford a car, we’ll be influenced by the five million Nissan ads they forced down our throat during “Grey’s Anatomy.” (God bless TiVo, the greatest invention of the last decade.)
Quarterlife” is all the more disappointing because it comes from the minds behind “My So-Called Life,” one of those shows that was watched by almost every single twentysomething I know, and yet managed to get cancelled within a year due to terrible ratings. In fact, with few exceptions, all the shows about my own age group that I’ve loved over the years have been strangled in their crib or struggled for renewal every year, which leads me to believe that I’m just not that in tune with the majority of my fellow Millennials — or possibly there is no well-defined group for me to feel a part of in the first place.
I think the last show that everyone in my age group watched was “Saved by the Bell.” It wasn’t a thoughtful show, or well-written. Or well-acted. Yet it had some sort of mysterious universal appeal, maybe because it painted a picture of a safe, logical, good-natured world, and we were all still young enough to accept it without skepticism; had I gone to Bayside High, I certainly wouldn’t have been friends with any of the “SBTB” gang, but I didn’t know that yet. I can’t even recall people talking about the show much while it was on, and yet it burrowed into all of our skulls – I give you the otherwise inexplicable continuing career of Mario Lopez – and I have vastly clearer memories of Zach Morris than I do of any one of my fifth-grade teachers.
Freshman year of college, I bought some caffeine pills, and literally every single person who saw me with them, or heard me mention them, students from every corner of the country, all of them brought up the episode where Jessie gets hooked on caffeine pills (or as the “SBTB” kids called them with a straight face, “drugs”) and has a complete meltdown. If you’re in your twenties, you not only know exactly what I’m talking about, you probably just started humming “I’m So Excited.”
In the years since, though, everything fragmented. I suppose you could make an argument for “Beverly Hills 90210,” but that doesn’t strike me as having had the same age-specific impact. I loved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” but it never was able to fully overcome its ridiculous name.
Judd Apatow’s 1999 masterpiece “Freaks and Geeks” is probably the best show about high school ever made—even though it was set in the ’80s, it felt completely relevant, because high school never really changes—so naturally NBC jerked it all over the schedule, aired it out of order, and killed it with just 18 episodes shot and fewer aired. But from a business standpoint, you can hardly blame the network, because “Freaks and Geeks” was far too realistic, and therefore often excruciatingly painful, awkward, and embarrassing, to appeal to a wider audience. Told from the point of view of the titular outcasts and losers—not the funny, lovable, two-dimensional outcasts and losers often used as comic relief on TV shows, but fully realized people with familiar and raw emotions—it was presumably not the ideal platform for selling cosmetics, car insurance, or office supplies. And while its portraits of individual types were dead on, it never presumed to speak for everyone who was in high school in the ’80s; its broader points were all drawn from extremely specific characters, and it had nothing to say about the “average” teen.
(Speaking of NBC, the network recently acquired the rights to “quarterlife” and plans to air it in 2008; it won’t be affected by the writer’s strike due to quirks of its ownership structure. There’s no justice in this world.)
I disliked “quarterlife” so much that it actually made me question whether My So-Called Life was really as good as I remembered, or if I was just less discerning at the time because I was 13, and therefore an idiot. But the show still holds up; strangely enough, Herskovitz and Zwick’s teen show was considerably more complex, and less condescending, than their take on young adults. In fact, “quarterlife”’s Dylan is a bit like who Angela Chase might have become, if she’d lost her sense of humor and learned absolutely nothing about life in the ten years since her sophomore year. Qualities that are perfectly understandable in a 15-year-old—self-absorption, whininess, a near-hysterical overreaction to any slight—are considerably less charming in a 25-year-old, who is, despite what you may have been led to believe, an adult.
Maybe popular culture is just too fragmented these days for any one show to strike a deep chord with a wide enough audience to keep it on the air. In which case it makes sense for quirky entertainment to find a home on the Internet, where it can be produced less expensively and find its audience without worrying about network ratings.
Hopefully the online shows that follow “quarterlife” will be less obsessed with trying to define the “Internet Generation,” and less of full of generalizations about People In Their Twenties. Because even I have no idea how to characterize us, and it seems both arrogant and pointless to try. If “quarterlife” is to be believed, we mostly sit around in front of computers and whine, which…well, OK. They may have a point there.
