TV is the New Reading

‘quarterlife’ is hip, edgy

Clearly hoping to recapture the magic of “Friends,” NBC launched six brand new Bright Young Things into the cultural consciousness with “quarterlife.”

You can tell it’s hip and edgy from its very title, as if to say “We’re way too hip and edgy to capitalize the ‘q’ in our title! Just try and make us!”

It continues with handheld camerawork, narrated by Dylan, an impossibly beautiful waiflet who’s struggling to find her own voice in the big evil corporate magazine she’s working at.

She finds that voice partly in a blog – essentially an online video journal – titled “quarterlife,” where she talks about her friends and their secrets and their indiscretions and in the debut episode this week managed to start a couple of fights.

Before I go any further, I wanted to credit Minot playwright Kÿmn Quill and Nicole Kvigne for introducing me to the concept of quarterlife a year or so ago in a collection of original monologues they presented in the Black Box theater at Minot State University.

The idea derives from the concept of midlife, as in a midlife crisis. Quarterlife crises are different but just as real, and largely stem from having way more creativity than opportunity and passion than common sense and all the joys of getting out and starting life on one’s own, generally with more drive and energy than money and stability.

As milestones go, it tends to be a great time to stop and take stock. Physiologically, the decision-making areas of the brain are completing their development and those grand idealistic adventures of youth that never quite seem to gel get set aside in favor of more practical paths.

Funny, clever

Meanwhile, everyone is terrifically funny and clever and beautiful and bounteously creative and tortured and complicated and significant. At least, everyone in this show is. Of course, if memory serves, everyone I knew in my 20s – including myself – was just as hip and arch and edgy as any of the people on the show. Heck, most of us were even just as cute.

So it definitely has a ring of authenticity. Throw in the pursuits of the 20somethings in question – music, acting, writing, directing, filming and editing – and it’s just the perfect set of friends to center the story around. Better, even. They don’t need to paint their apartment purple to be hip and cool, because they just are hip and cool, even in their crappy apartments.

And, naturally, conflicts arise from the blog. Dylan’s roommate Lisa gets upset when Dylan calls her an alcoholic who sleeps around in an empty attempt to make connections. Jed – who Dylan herself is crushing on desperately – gets upset when Dylan tells the world that he’s in love with his best friend Danny’s girlfriend, Debra – until it turns out Debra might feel the same way about him.

But then Danny gets all romantic and Debra doesn’t leave him, breaking Jed’s heart even worse. And all the while, Dylan can’t bring herself to tell Jed she’s in love with him.

Not to worry. Surely with all the creativity bouncing off the walls with these people it’s only a matter of time before one of them returns the favor, starts a blog and spills all of Dylan’s secrets as well.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

Back Back to Shows Back to Main Page Next