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On the first night of November, a group of about 15 professors, graduate students and film school alumni half-filled USC's tiny Ron Howard Theater. They came for a sneak preview of the much-anticipated Web series "quarterlife," an event hosted by the show's co-writer and director, Marshall Herskovitz.
"Quarterlife" is about kids a few years out of college trying to find their way in the real world. It hopes to speak to college kids, in their own language and in a medium they can relate to. The problem was it was hard to say if anyone who'd showed up for the screening actually was a college kid (USC has 16,500 of them; its film school alone has 730) -- except 19-year-old Cynthia Horiguchi, the Daily Trojan's television reviewer. But I'd invited her myself.
"I hadn't heard of it," said Horiguchi, a sophomore, in a phone call afterward. "I don't think there's much of a buzz around it."
That's not strictly true -- it's just not the show's audience that's buzzing about it. Most of us over 25 are familiar with the work of Herskovitz and "quarterlife" co-writer Edward Zwick, the creative team behind "thirtysomething," the term-coiningly iconic TV series of the late 1980s, and "My So-Called Life," which, if its status as the best teenage drama ever is not universally agreed upon, then only a handful of people need their minds changed.
Having nailed the 30s in the '80s and the teens in the '90s, Herskovitz, 55, and Zwick, also 55, have left themselves with a difficult pair of decades in which to complete their epic of growing up: the 20s, and this one.
"Quarterlife" valiantly attempts to navigate a perilous strait: On one side it's a tale of young artist-types trying to get a handle on real-world living, and on the other it's an ambitious exploration of a new media genre whose waters are largely uncharted: the short-form Web drama. Which means that both its characters and its medium are experiencing rapid, whirling change on the one hand and a pervasive sense of uncertainty on the other.
For his part, Herskovitz said he had become "radicalized" by what he saw as a consolidation of media power that had homogenized broadcasters' offerings and which, as he wrote in a recent Times Op-Ed, was "literally poisoning the TV business," having laid the groundwork for the writers strike.
