[Photo courtesy of Dosbit.com]
If the creators of the new NBC drama Quarterlife were aiming for a sense of the quarter-life crisis that often plagues 21 through 29 year-olds, they should have highlighted the crisis part of it, because most people don’t live till the age of 100 and the angsty characters introduced to us last night seemed more like 19 year-olds than 25 year-olds.
As someone only a little over two years younger than the presumed age of the characters and is going through her own quarter-life crisis right now, I found the execution of the idea to be appalling. It’s pretty clear that creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, who are the geniuses behind My So-Called Life, Once and Again and thirtysomething have lost or never were in touch with Generation Y. (Or Millennials, MTV generation and iGen, as it were.)
The 26 year-old protagonist Dylan, played by 27-year-old Harvard University graduate Bitsie (nee Elizabeth) Tulloch, is nothing short of gratingly aloof and self-indulgent. Which is fair – Millennials are known to be self-indulgent, and the typical blogger probably even more so. But they are also – I say this with the understanding that I am speaking of Millennials as a whole – extremely self-aware. For starters, what sort of blogger:
a) blogs thinking that no one will read/watch their material? There’s a difference between an online journal and a blog, which is a nuance I’m not sure either creator understands. Blogis gratia blogetus. Or something like that.
b) has live-in friends who don’t know about her blog or are completely unaware that they’re featured on said blog?
c) will risk their friendships and jobs to blog? Anyone under the age of 28 can understand that anything revealed online can and will be discovered by the very parties who said revelations were not meant for.
d) is naïve enough, at 26, to be that candid and unedited in front of an internet audience?
Okay, maybe I just can’t wrap my head around the complete indiscretion and self-centered obliviousness of Dylan. But other quirks of the show that are less quirky than irksome:
- Do they live in Chicago? According to the show’s official site they do. Shouldn’t they live in Los Angeles? Half or more of them are budding filmmakers and/or actors. No wonder they’re so hopelessly angsty.
- Aren’t twenty-something guys typically smoother and cynical than Jed? Even if they are sensitive and wounded?
- I don’t know any twenty-somethings who grab and hug each other every time they enter their shared living quarters. In reality, coming home would involve a lot of passive-aggressiveness and some measure of door-slamming.
- Is the ADD-styled editing of the show supposed to reflect Generation Y’s impulsiveness? It’s as if the editors were on crack. I’d probably have to be too, to scour through the rambling footage.
- Who in their right mind thought an entire social network could be created out of this show? None of the characters are sympathetic enough for me to want to watch a second episode, let alone enter their poorly represented blogosphere? “Lonelygirl15” did a better job in its pilot episodes, on all counts.
There’s probably more, but I lost interest. And my dad interrupted (perhaps I don’t have complete authority on what it is like to live with peers post-college). But if this show is meant to appear as if twenty-somethings have written, filmed, edited and broadcasted it, it fails miserably. No twenty-something would allow their peers to see them as whiny, angsty teenagers.
And if my disdain for the show is shaped at all by the two-year age difference, then I’m not sure I want to see my 25th year.
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