'Quarterlife' is alive and well

IT was a surreal moment when I learned of the "demise" of my online series "quarterlife" on the front page of Tuesday's L.A. Times. Mark Twain notwithstanding, reports of said demise are not only premature but laughable. To be fair, the paper printed a correction the next day, but the error didn't happen by accident. The headline referred to the Big Picture column by Patrick Goldstein in that day's Calendar section, and while Patrick didn't write that headline or the one on latimes.com [" 'Quarterlife' Gets a Web Smackdown"], both reflect the sentiments in Patrick's piece.

Goldstein -- whom I like, by the way, and think is a very smart writer -- put forth the thesis that "quarterlife" represents a "culture clash" between old and new media, wherein two old media types -- Ed Zwick and myself -- had "arrogantly" blundered into the new media world with the message that we could do it better, and as a result had received an astonishingly negative response online. He described charts Podcasting News published about our performance on YouTube as looking "like a graph of Ron Paul's delegate count" and quoted PN's claim that we were getting fewer views than "sleeping kitties, graffiti videos or even a clip of Sims in labor." With no other performance figures cited in the article, one was left to assume that "quarterlife" had in fact tanked on the Internet.

Uh, not exactly.

"Quarterlife" has actually been a hit on the Internet, the third most successful scripted show ever (after "Roommates" and "Prom Queen"). We've racked up almost 7 million views in less than four months, with higher per-episode averages than either "Roommates" or "Prom Queen." The Podcasting quote refers to YouTube, which is not our distribution platform. That's like going to San Francisco, looking for copies of the Los Angeles Times, and when not finding any declaring the Times a failure.