A short half-life for a new series

Marshall Herskovitz's series "quarterlife" was very popular on the Web, but its move to NBC only lasted one episode. (wendy maeda/globe staff)

CAMBRIDGE - Two minutes into watching his new series, "quarterlife," debut on NBC on Tuesday, writer-director-producer Marshall Herskovitz said he knew it wouldn't succeed on network TV.

"I've been doing this for 30 years," he said yesterday at the Charles Hotel, hours before NBC confirmed that it was pulling the show after one lackluster airing, and moving it to Bravo, a cable network with the same parent company. "I was hoping that something that doesn't feel like a television show can survive on television," Herskovitz said, "but I don't think it can."

At the very least, "quarterlife" couldn't. The series, which first launched on the Internet last fall, was co-created by Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, the minds behind the cult favorites "thirtysomething" and "My So-Called Life." Eight-minute installments have drawn an average of 200,000 viewers per episode, making the show an online hit - the third-most-viewed Internet series after the far-less-polished "Prom Queen" and "Roommates." So when NBC announced in November that it had bought rights to air "quarterlife" as six hourlong episodes, some industry-watchers heralded the move as a next great step in TV-Internet convergence.

But compared to an Internet show, a broadcast TV series must draw much larger audiences to be viable. The repurposed version of "quarterlife" was largely panned by TV critics. And after only 3.1 million viewers watched Tuesday's premiere - the network's worst performance in that time slot in 17 years - NBC took the show off its schedule.

Herskovitz, who offered similar thoughts on Wednesday night at the Harvard Business School's annual Entertainment & Media Conference, blamed the poor showing on differences in audience and expectation.

"The most stinging criticism, for me, has been the notion that people would think this is a television show in disguise," he said. "That wasn't what I was doing. And really, I feel that the lack of audience on NBC is proof of that."

Though ABC did order and reject a "quarterlife" TV pilot years ago, Herskovitz said, he and Zwick reconceived and re-cast the series when they decided to produce it on their own. He saw the show as an experiment, he said, a case study of whether advertisers would flock to TV-quality fare online.

And while conceiving and writing the new series, he said, he let go of some notions he had learned from his decades in network TV. Most notably: whether his main character had to be likable.

Chief among the TV critics' complaints, indeed, has been the fact that the chief protagonist, a 20-something writer named Dylan Krieger, is self-absorbed, disloyal, and totally unsympathetic. (She's broadly parodied as such on some renegade websites.)

"Broadcast network television is a very sanitized view of humanity," Herskovitz said. He knew that Dylan's initial transgression - revealing some not-very-flattering facts about her closest friends on her video blog - would draw complaints. Some members of the "quarterlife" staff raised questions about it, too. Opinions, he said, broke down along generational lines: Those over 30 thought Dylan had done something awful. Those under 30 said they knew people who acted that way.

"Had I been worried about making a television show, I would have changed that plot," Herskovitz said. "I would have taken great pains to protect her" from the audience's wrath. But online, he said, "we're observing. We're not judging."

Of course, the TV industry has been observing and judging "quarterlife," wondering whether it could prove a model for future creative deals. Herskovitz says series owned by their creators could still make economic sense for networks, who could pay less for pilots in exchange for profit-sharing.

Indeed, it was producer-turned-NBC Entertainment co-president Ben Silverman, an early fan of the project, who approached Herskovitz with the proposal to put "quarterlife" on network TV, merging the webisodes to form a six-episode series. But Herskovitz said he's "had a sense of dread for months now that there was just too big a stretch from the Internet to NBC."

Silverman told the Hollywood Reporter yesterday that airing "quarterlife" was "so worth the try." NBC has not announced when the series will air on Bravo.

Whatever happens, Herskovitz said, the "quarterlife" story isn't over. Because he and Zwick own the rights to the show, they're free to raise money and produce new episodes on their own. They could even find a new television partner. Herskovitz is well-aware that on a niche cable channel, a series that draws three million viewers can be a legitimate hit.

"I'm in a much different frame of mind about it," Herskovitz said. "I'm not happy that it didn't do well on NBC. But I'm not devastated."

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com. For more on TV, go to www.viewerdiscretion.net.