Quarter viewers

So who tuned in to NBC last night to catch the debut of quarterlife? Yeah, me either.For those who don’t know, the show may represent the beginning of a new television trend, albeit one that looks dreadfully uninteresting to this reviewer. Created by Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick, the creators of thirtysomething, My So-Called Life and Once and Again, the show saw its inception entirely online as “webisodes,” a new medium seeing slow but growing experimentation by television executives. Chronicling the lives of six twenty-something artists making their way in the modern electronic landscape, the official quarterlife website also doubles as a social network site for artists and hipsters to congregate and act pretentious with one another. NBC announced in November 2007 (12 days after the writers’ strike started, interestingly enough) that it would acquire and release all episodes of quarterlife, broadcasting them after they appeared on the internet. The first of these episodes debuted last night on NBC.

It is nothing else if not a cool idea. Other shows like Lost have experimented with delivering web and mobile phone content directly to viewers, and this is the first time I recall hearing about an online show that made the jump directly to prime-time network television—an impressive milestone, and one that may lay the groundwork for the future of entertainment development.What do you guys think? Let us know by commenting below. Is this the future of television, or just a gimmick?