With tonight’s premiere on NBC of Quarterlife, a show about the personal life of a twentysomething blogger, a new model for developing TV shows may have finally arrived. The show, first pitched for television, found life on the Web before finally being picked up by NBC in November. Under new co-chairman Ben Silverman, who took over in May, the network is hoping it can dramatically reduce the costs of developing new shows by buying properties that already have a following on the Web.

And the show it’s betting on is no phenomenon, either. Quarterlife boasts a strong pedigree with co-creators and executive producers Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, the Emmy-winning team behind such acclaimed shows as Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Once and Again. The two have also collaborated as producers and directors on movies like Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, and Traffic. But when they pitched it to ABC in 2004, they were turned down. So they took it to MySpace, where it’s gotten decent but not spectacular traffic. On NBC, it is set to run as six one-hour episodes, with the fate of future episodes to be determined by ratings.

In an interview, Herskovitz talked about why this new model of developing network content might not be so good for writers and producers, why network TV will never command the huge audiences it once did, and who won the writer’s strike.

Quarterlife didn’t do particularly well on the Web, with some episodes receiving less than 100,000 views. So why do you and NBC think it will succeed on network television?

Actually, I think it has done very well on the Web. If you compare it to other online scripted series, it’s probably the third most successful one ever. I think that it just proves to be very difficult to promulgate scripted content on the internet. That’s the reality we’re all facing.

So how will it do on NBC?

I’ve been in this business too long to ever prognosticate. I think that television is now a very fragmented medium. There are series that are considered successful, and depending on where they “live,” they can have from 2 million to 20 million viewers. It’s an open question whether a show like Quarterlife will attract enough viewers to remain on a major network like NBC. If it doesn’t, I would happily take this show to a cable network. Maybe that’s the niche it’s supposed to be in. We don’t live or die by the numbers on NBC. That’s never been true for me before.
 
You’ve been very vocal about saying that the networks are forcing creative people to profit less while being less creative. So why sell the show to NBC?

Remember, I have nothing against television. I wrote television for years. To quote Saturday Night Live, television has been “bery, bery good to me.” The problem is, in the last five to ten years, networks have started exerting way more creative control over the product. That’s my objection. In this case, Ben Silverman has allowed us to retain complete creative control. They don’t even know what the stories are until they get them. I have nothing but gratitude to Ben for being willing to understand how important that was to us.

You created and executive produced Thirtysomething in the late '80s, a show that really had lots of people talking about every show. Do you think network television can still create shows that reach and affect so many people?

Yes, I do. I think it’s harder. The average audience of any given show on network television has gone way down over the years. Television is now a very fragmented landscape. Nevertheless, shows have effects on the culture. Look at American Idol. Television shows can still become cultural touchstones. It’s something we all have to reckon with. We see it in our political system as well. There’s no longer one America; there are many Americas.

Do you think NBC, or any of the other networks, will ever reach the status of being must-see TV again?

The numbers for certain specials, like the Super Bowl, were astonishing. Shows like American Idol, and one or two others, do major numbers. When we were doing Thirtysomething, we were actually not a big hit. We were a middle level hit, with 21, 22, 23 million viewers. That was okay, not great, in 1987. But if you have 23 million viewers today you’re like a god. The world has changed. We’re probably never going to go back to the consolidation of the audience you had when 75 million people were watching the The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday night.

How do you think series like Quarterlife will factor into the future of network TV? Do you see this as a harbinger of a new way of doing business?

I hope so. But I also think there’s a danger in networks using the internet as a farm team for new talent and new television shows. It’s fundamentally exploitive, getting people to work for less money on the internet, test what they’re doing in a cheap way, and bring the good stuff to TV. If I were doing Quarterlife for hire, and someone said, "We’re going to pay you a quarter of what we used to pay for a pilot and then we’ll pay you more if it goes to TV," I’d be pretty pissed off about that.

Networks have to encourage artists and filmmakers to be more entrepreneurial. I think there are a lot of actors, writers, and directors who would be wiling to bet on themselves. Networks could go to [them] and say, “We’d like to pay you half your normal episodic fee to make this pilot. If we order a series, we’ll give you a bonus that’s double your episodic fee. And if the series is successful, you’ll get X percent of gross revenues.” A lot of people would take that deal. And the networks would be able to make a pilot for $1 million, instead of $5 million, and could afford to try a lot of different things.

It would incentivize everyone. But it’s not in the nature of how these corporations think. They’re in the business of ownership.

Do you think the writers strike has encouraged more creative people to go straight to the Web?

It’s hard to know. There are certain realities about the Web, mostly having to do with the fact that there’s no money in it. The only way to produce content on the Web now is to have major investment money behind you, or to do it for nothing. I just don’t think the economic model is there yet for a lot of substantial stuff to be done on the net. I’m hoping if we succeed, we can help create that model.

What would you say to people who said you benefited from the writers’ strike because that’s when NBC picked up the show?

Well, that’s just a factual mistake. Our deal with NBC was finalized two months before the strike began. Most people believed that if there was going to be a strike, it wouldn’t happen until July. Ben Silverman saw the pilot of Quarterlife last March, almost a year ago, when NBC wasn’t even on the horizon for him. He wanted to be in business with us then. When he went to NBC, he called us in his first week. This was not about the strike. I think people assumed it was about the strike because of the timing, but in fact all this was in place before.

Who did win in the writers strike?

It didn’t affect us because we were finished with our scripts. I don’t know if we’re ever going to know what this particular strike means. I tried not to take sides. I’m a loyal member of the Writers Guild, but I’m also a member of the Producers Guild. I don’t think anybody won. This is just an interim agreement that will be revised several times. I think there were a lot of losers, and that’s all the innocent people who make their living from the film and television industry. This wasn’t their battle.

Has NBC committed to another order of episodes after the original six-week run? If not, what do you think it would take for them to do so?

No, not yet. I’m hoping they will do so. They’re going to look at the numbers and see how they feel about them. This show cost less than half of what a normal scripted drama cost, so I don’t think the numbers will have to be as big. They would love nothing more than to pick up the show, but they have to wait and see one to two airings.

Had I done [Quarterlife] for television, I would have shot it the same way. What’s different is, I realized working on this project that I’d developed a “governor” voice inside myself that questions the things I did on television; I had internalized the network voice. “Are you sure people will like this character? Are you sure people will understand this?” The minute I said “Internet,” I was able to let go of all of that.

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