NBC Banks quarterlife for Later Use

While we were taking some time off to recoup our brains and spirits after last week’s conference, quarterlife creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick confirmed rumors they’d sold a second run of their web show (currently running on quarterlife.com and MySpace) to NBC. Amidst concern it won’t have any new content due to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, the network has banked the rights to air quarterlife on U.S. television and internationally online and on DVD.

Rafat Ali at paidContent has an excellent roundup of the takeaways from various stories on the news.

So now we have an example to parrot of an Internet show moving to TV — except not really, because the show’s writers’ TV backgrounds was what made the show noteworthy — and besides, they only took it online after failing to get it on TV originally. So. In my experience watching quarterlife, our reviewer Karina Longworth’s assessment rings true:

quarterlife mostly uses videoblogging as a catalyst for violating the old show-don’t-tell rule through constant, literal narration… Ironically, with every narrative event mediated through Dylan’s diary, quarterlife often prevents the viewer from having that experience of interpreting what the characters are thinking by looking at an actor’s face.