NBC's 'Quarterlife' Is Bound for Bravo
Former MySpace series earned poor ratings
By Marisa Guthrie -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/3/2008
The next stop for itinerant Web-to-TV series Quarterlife looks to be Bravo.
Sources at NBC—which picked up the Web series about a twenty-something blogger and her friends during the Writers Guild of America strike and debuted last week—said the rejiggered drama will run on its NBC Universal-owned cable sibling.
The show first surfaced in November 2007 on MySpace after being developed and passed over by ABC. Its NBC premiere Feb. 26 at 10 p.m. pulled in a dismal 3.1 million viewers, losing 5 million viewers from its The Biggest Loser lead-in and earning the dubious distinction of becoming the worst performer in the time period in almost 20 years.
NBC has yet to formally announce the program's fate.
Speaking Feb. 27 at an Entertainment and Media conference at Harvard Business School, Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator of the show with Ed Zwick, said Quarterlife was out of its element on broadcast TV.
"It never should have been a network show," he added. "It will probably end up on cable."
In an usual programming move, Quarterlife also aired the same night on MTV.
Last week, Herskovitz was compelled to clarify his remarks, issuing a statement that said in part, "Reports of Quarterlife's demise are exaggerated."
"We're deeply grateful for NBC's efforts to make Quarterlife a success on network television," Herskovitz added. "However, I've always had concerns about whether Quarterlife was the kind of show that could pull in the big numbers necessary to succeed on a major broadcast network. We live in a media world today where many shows are considered successful on cable networks with audiences that are a fraction of those on the Big Four. I'm confident that Quarterlife will find the right home on television as well."
