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.