Tuesday, February 26, 2008

I have seen the future of television, and it is crap

As I start this post, I have seen a grand total of nine minutes of Quarterlife, and I've already come to the conclusion that it is the worst thing that has ever been on T.V. I want to punch all of the characters. No, really. I want to bang their heads against their thrift-shop furniture. Is that supposed to be the point of Quarterlife, or is the idea here that we're actually supposed to find these characters and their "problems" interesting? This thing is supposed to be very revolutionary, because it was originally broadcast on the internet and has now made its way to network television. It's a shame that it's so unbelievably awful.

Here are some issues with Quarterlife:

  1. Blogging about your friends' personal lives is really obnoxious. It's horrible, actually. If you can't think of anything to blog about other than that one of your friends gets drunk and sleeps around and that another is in love with his best friend's girlfriend, you really shouldn't have a blog. The protagonist's compulsion to share her friends' secrets with the world doesn't make her cool and artistic. It makes her pretty fucking appalling. And it's hard to build a T.V. show around someone who's kind of the scum of the earth.
  2. Miss Scum-of-the-Earth, the show's protagonist apparently doesn't realize that half of the city is reading her blog. In fact, she's under the mistaken impression that nobody is reading her blog. Have the old guys who made this show never heard of a site counter?
  3. The characters on Quarterlife are unbelievably self-indulgent. 99.9999% of the earth's population would be overjoyed to have the "problems" that they whine about. Miss Scum-of-the-Earth is an editorial associate at a women's magazine. She is not artistically fulfilled. She is amazed that people at her job (at a women's magazine) care that she wears sloppy clothes. She appears to be upset that women's magazines care about selling tampons and prefer content that allows them to sell advertisements. She whines about her job's "inauthenticity." What this person needs is for someone to sit her down and explain the concept of professionalism. Actually, what she needs is for someone to fire her whiny little ass, because she appears to think she's too good for a job that she is, in fact, not really good enough for. Her guy friends, who just graduated from film school, have similar artistic integrity issues about a commercial they have just been hired to make. They've been hired to make a commercial, and they are worried that they're not being true to their artistic vision. What kind of a jackass would even consider that a problem? Nobody ever explained the concept of paying your dues to these people?
  4. This show believes all the stupid stereotypes about Gen Y, and I kind of don't. I don't believe that people that age are that shallow, that entitled, or frankly that dumb. I don't even believe that the shallow, entitled or dumb ones are that shallow, entitled or dumb. I worked with a couple of people that age last year, and they were all pretty normal. They worked hard, they were not self-indulgent twits, and they had real problems.
So yeah, I will not be watching this show again, mostly because it's boring, but also because it's kind of insulting. I'm older than the generation this show is supposed to be about, but I'm still offended on their behalf.

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