This is the Story of a Blog

If your attention span (or workload) can’t get you through half an hour of TV, behold the eight-minute online drama.

“Quarterlife,” produced by Edward M. Zwick ’74 and partner Marshall Herskovitz–the dynamic duo behind My So-Called Life, Blood Diamond, and Legends of the Fall—was launched in November 2007. The show focuses on the angst-ridden video-blog of the main character, played by Bitsie A. Tulloch ’03 .

But this isn’t just an emo version of Friends: the show is tied to a Web site in which users can share art, films, photography, and writing.

“I felt that there was a need that could be served that was not being served by the major social networks,” says Herskovitz of Myspace and Facebook. The aim of the project is to create a community around the issues the show has tried to address—little things like “what it means to try to be a person,” he says.

But, Herskovitz may be over-estimating his audience’s motives. “It’s a great procrastination technique,” says Millicent M. Younger ’10. Similarly, for Kimberly B. Kargman ’10, the show is just “an eight-minute diversion.”

While the Internet makes shows convenient and accessible, neither the cyber focus of “Quarterlife” nor the social networking aspect of the Web site is appealing to college viewers. Even William J. Houghteling ’09, a blogger himself, says that a blog about blogging is “an exercise in self-absorption.”

While Jason A. Bergsman, the co-president of the Harvard Business School Entertainment & Media Club, believes that the “Quarterlife” project is “certainly an ambitious and well-intentioned effort,” he admits that it is “difficult to create a social network around new content without a firmly-established, passionate fan base.”

The rest of the country seems to agree: when the show was tied into hour-long segments on NBC, the network pulled it after only one episode due to lack of interest. For the moment, Facebook, it looks like you’re safe.