Interview with quarterlife’s Marshall Herskovitz
May 24th, 2008 by Alec McNayrPosted in Business, Content, Drama, Media, Metrics, Online, Our Work, Producing, Series, Strategy, Writing |
We interviewed writer-producer Marshall Herskovitz for the May/June 2008 issue of Script Magazine a few days before his online series quarterlife debuted on NBC.
We all know what happened, but don’t write off our article just yet: quarterlife’s stumble on TV is still an important step for the emerging world of online media…
quarterlife
Creator Marshall Herskovitz illuminates his revolutionary stumble from TV to the Internet and back again.
By Robert Gustafson and Alec McNayr
The revolution was about to begin. Everything was in place. Established writer/producers backed it. Network marketing pushed it. The public relations machine was in full gear. The online community was buzzing. The Writer’s Strike was freshly over, and since so much of the debate centered on online content, the attention of the entire entertainment industry turned to NBC on February 26, 2008.
Write that down. It’s the date everything changed.
Quarterlife premiered as an hour-long television drama—the first directly derived from its online counterpart. Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick—already among the Hollywood elite for their work on television shows like 30something and My So-Called Life and movies like The Last Samurai and Blood Diamond—had created the show expressly for the Internet, but had jumped on the opportunity to move the show to television.
Their decision became the first experiment in discovering how “the future of television” would go. Could the Internet be more than just a farm league for television? Were shows actually portable across platforms? Would broad television exposure significantly expand the audience beyond the MySpace and YouTube users that had already seen the show?
Of course, we know what happened in the days following February 26, 2008. The Nielsen ratings were released, and the premiere Quarterlife episode only netted 3.86 million viewers, a 17-year low for that time slot on NBC. The remaining five hour-long episodes were moved to NBC’s sister cable network Bravo.
Regardless of these results, Quarterlife represents an important marker for an industry in transition. In a speech given at the Harvard Business School just days following the premiere, Herskovitz stated, “When you saw [Quarterlife] on TV, it didn’t look like TV, and when you saw it on the Internet it didn’t look like the Internet.”
Though television and Internet-delivered shows have great disparity between them, they are getting ever closer in both quality and style. And if Quarterlife is the first of its kind, there are great lessons to be learned by screenwriters looking to prepare for the future.
We spoke with Herskovitz himself, just days before Quarterlife’s NBC launch, and he provided thoughtful insights into the origins of the show and where the industry is headed, which, in light of the events of February 26, 2008, become all the more clear.
Piloted Beginnings
Co-creators Herskovitz and Zwick created a pilot called 1/4 Life in 2005, but insist that this iteration of the show has little to do with its predecessor. “People assume that because we did a pilot for ABC, that this is the same project, which I can understand,” said Herskovitz, “but in fact, we threw out that whole story and all the characters and literally started from scratch because we’d felt we had missed.”
They gravitated towards the trend of young people increasingly using the Internet to create and communicate. “Because it was so oriented around the Internet, it just dawned on us that this was the perfect project to make the leap online that we had been talking about.” He expands, “Ed and I had this ongoing joke that two kids out of film school were going to make a $15,000 film, post it on their Web site, make $80 million, and make the studios irrelevant. And we thought, ‘why don’t we be those two kids?’”
Producing for the Web
With no standards or models for success, the two faced many unknowns in deciding how to write and produce this “show concept” for the Web. Yet, unlike most online writer/producers, they had a wealth of experience that helped guide their decisions.
“We decided that we’d write an hour-long show and break it up into six pieces because networks demanded six acts [for commercial breaks], but even that was arbitrary,” he shared, “And even then, when we said that we were going to do eight-minute episodes, people laughed and said that no one watches more than two minutes on the Internet. But I don’t know how to do anything emotional in two minutes; it seemed silly to me. The irony, of course, is that the biggest complaint we get about the online episodes is that they’re too short.”
Herskovitz, however, quickly found that the same experiences that helped him as a television writer hindered him when it came to the Web. “My original thought was that we’d do it for $50,000, own it ourselves, and shoot it as cheaply as possible,” he concedes, “but I realized I couldn’t do what I do for that much. I had been ruined by working in television.”
In the end, the Quarterlife team expanded the budget to $300,000—a figure higher than any other Web show, but far lower than even one episode of a television show. The challenge, then, was to create a show with high production values on a limited budget. “We found that we didn’t need a lot of things, like a costuming designer; the actors brought their own clothes.” He adds, “We confined the shoot to just a few locations with limited lighting setups. When we shot in a car, I was the one holding the camera.”
Though limited by his own budget, Herskovitz relied on the instincts he had spent his whole career honing: “It was a series of hundreds of decisions that sat between ‘what are our resources’ and ‘what do we need to make a show that we can be proud of’ and essentially trying to balance the two.”
Freeing the Script
Herskovitz and his team may have been limited by budget, but after years of writing for television, writing for his own, fully-owned Web series was a refreshing change. “Other than restricting situations, we wrote it just like we would write a movie or TV show, but I was able to shed some of the inhibitions that I had internalized while doing television for twenty years. Inevitably, when you do television, you begin to internalize those voices of doubt.”
The change allowed him to write dialog in a new way, allowing for more natural patterns, over-talking, and age-specific terminology that seemed relevant for the subject matter, but may not have been accepted on television. “There is a strange homogenization that takes place [on TV], whether you like it or not,” he said, “It’s very presentational and, over time, it demands that of you as a writer.”
The style continued through production: “Even as we started shooting, I felt this energy coming off these people—this feeling of reality—it was very exciting.”
The Old Guard Becomes New
After a disappointing one-episode run on NBC, it seemed as though the general television audience was not ready for the style of Quarterlife. But even days before its TV debut, Herskovitz questioned whether or not viewers would connect with the show’s unique voice.
“People could say ‘wow, that’s different’ and be interested in it, or they could just change the channel,” Herskovitz admitted, “but even if our show were to tank on NBC, I’ll be proud that we made the point that creative control and ownership should live with the creators.”
Herskovitz explained that the real breakthrough of Quarterlife was not simply the move from the Internet to TV, but the revolutionary change it signals in the entertainment industry. “From day one, there were two unbreakable conditions: first, we had to own it 100%, and second, we had to have complete creative control. As far as I know, that has never happened in the history of television. [Creative control] is being lost right now, because television is owned by six companies. They own these properties and now exert a level of control they never did before.”
But things are changing, thanks to the power of the Internet. “If you look at what’s happening right now, you’re seeing the dissolution of a whole set of rules for creating entertainment, and we don’t know what will take its place.”
Advice for the Future
Quarterlife itself may not have been a colossal success on NBC, but it does establish a new model for show creation. As studios and networks dump traditional pilot seasons and upfronts in favor of mining for and licensing content, Quarterlife may just be the new standard for serial entertainment.
That said, is a television writing job still the “big prize” for an aspiring writer? Herskovitz answers, “Yes, but [that aspiring writer] would be responding to how it was five and ten years ago. In television, everything you create is owned by somebody else. It is controlled aesthetically by someone else, whereas if you create on the Internet, you have the possibility of having it for yourself—of owning it yourself—and being the creative force behind it.”
Herskovitz acknowledged that creating something like Quarterlife isn’t necessarily a path available for all writers, especially those new to the business, but he affirms that writing, no matter the medium, is one of the best ways to break in.
“There are no undiscovered great writers. There is such a hunger for great writing, and there are so few good writers out there. I actually have a Darwinian view of writing.” He continues with some direct advice: “Write three scripts on spec, and if by the end of that third one, you haven’t felt that energy coming toward you—that excitement, that enthusiasm about finding a new voice—you should find something else to do, because you should feel that. The good writers do. It’s harsh, but it’s just true. You can get somebody to read your work. So, just try it. Just write and see who gets excited about it.”
We may not see another Quarterlife-like show make the jump directly to network television anytime soon, but Herskovitz and Zwick have put yet another chink in the armor of traditional media. The emerging world of online entertainment is still looking for a pathway to legitimacy and Quarterlife will certainly go down as one of many revolutionary battles fought between the ways of the old and new.
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