Ryan j Budke

After getting sliced and diced this morning, I had the opportunity to catch up on some TV from the past few weeks. One of the shows was NBC’s quarterlife which started life as a serial on MySpace and then aired on MTV. Holy shit, avoid this trainwreck at all costs. It was supposed to be about a group of friends pretty similar to myself, in their mid-twenties, “finding themselves in a digital age” was one of NBC’s tags for it I believe. In retrospect I’m ashamed to say I was actually looking forward to this. Luckily it looks like all of America agreed, and the show is going to get yanked after a single episode, but I’m at a rare juncture of no pain, no drug haze and rage at the moment that I’m going to rant on.

First off, it was envisioned and being headed up by “the team behind thirtysomething“, let’s just pause and reflect on that for a second. Now, I’ve never watched thirtysomething, but I’ve hardly heard a bad word about it, and the reason it continues to get such praise today is because it was a very personal and poignant show written by a group who were going through the same trials and tribulations that were reflected in their stories. That was 20+ years ago, when they were actually IN their 30’s. So who the f*ck thought they’d be able to write from the perspective of their children in today’s age?

quarterlife was like someone pulled out a list of bad Web 2.0 buzzwords and were peppering and already shitty script with as many of them as they could. “Did we have her say blog in the past five minutes? No? What about video-casting?” Do the writers even know what this stuff means? I don’t know who this was marketed towards, because I don’t know anyone in my demographic who would relate to it, and my parents and grandparents both have better grasps of what the online world is like that they couldn’t be shoveled this shit.

This is all just the icing on a truly truly awful story and cast. Oh, look at our main character, she’s misunderstood and doesn’t tuck her shirt in. She’s spunky and she’ll stand up to her comic book-esque evil boss though in a moment of grandeur. No, she’s 25, if she can’t dress herself, she doesn’t need to be running a website. Grow the hell up.