Originally making its debut on MySpace and quarterlife.com back in 2007 as an experiment, the quarterlife webisodes will soon be getting air-time on NBC as a full series beginning on February 26. With quarterlife about to network its way into the households of America, The Deadbolt recently joined a conference call with co-creator/producer Marshall Herkovitz and cast member Bitsie Tulloch to hear what all of the quarterlife blogging is about.

Marshall Herskovitz on the origins of quarterlife:

"This began its life as a television pilot for ABC, and we did a pilot for ABC called quarterlife three years ago. But we were not happy with how it turned out and we felt that the problems with it were quite inherent and structural and conceptual. The only thing to do was to start from scratch, which I did. I threw out the whole story, all of the characters, and started from scratch. All that I kept was the name. It was in the midst of re-conceiving it that it started to be more of a story about the Internet, and Ed [Zwick] and I decided that we shouldn’t even try to do it as a television show, we should do it as an Internet show. We walked away from ABC at that time and started to do this on our own, so that’s kind of how this began. This came out of our wish - honestly, we found ourselves surrounded by a lot of twenty-five-year-olds in our lives. I have kids in their twenties and all of the people in the office are in their twenties. We found ourselves everyday fascinated by the problems, issues, and concerns of people [of] that age. And because we’ve done this so many times before, it naturally occurred to us that that might be a series."

Herskovitz on creating the social network aspect of the show:

"One of the reasons we created a social network is because I don’t know how to navigate my way around Facebook and MySpace. They don’t really fit what I’m looking for as an artist and a writer. I felt it would be interesting to try and create a community that was more focused on artistic people who really wanted to accomplish things in their lives and get somewhere. So the idea of creating a community that cuts deeper, that tries to deal with the authentic emotional experience of one’s life and the authentic artistic experience of trying to be better, is something that I felt was missing out there and that’s what we’ve tried to do."

Bitsie Tulloch on the look of quarterlife:

"I don’t know if there’s a show out there that can easily be compared to quarterlife. Yes, it is also about people struggling through relationships and everything, but it’s really not a glossy show per-se in the way it’s written, shot, acted or directed. There’s a lot of dirty shots as opposed to clean shots and the camera is rarely on sticks. The way it’s shot really adds to the voyeuristic quality and the whole realism that Marshall or Neal or Ed are known for."

Tulloch on her character Dylan being labeled a gossip hound:

"I don’t know. I guess you could say gossip hound, but I wouldn’t really characterize Dylan as being gossipy. She kind of compulsively has to tell the truth. I don’t know if that’s the same as gossiping in the sense that the end result is different. Dylan is incredibly observant and she tends to sort of hang out in the background watching people. She’s fascinated by human behavior and one thing that just kills her is when people are dishonest about their true feelings. So what ends up happening is she - unbeknown to them, at least in the pilot episode - goes online and starts saying one of the characters is in love with his best friend’s girlfriend, and someone sleeps around too much and drinks too much. Then there’s the other one who’s attached to her parents and [can't] grow up and let go. Dylan starts blogging about this sort of naively thinking that they won’t find out, and of course they all do. And, as you can imagine, chaos ensues."

Herskovitz on the way to turn a profit on a show like quarterlife:

"It’s a really interesting question and nobody knows the answer yet. I’ll tell you we had an operant theory that may yet come true, but the theory was that there was a self-fulfilling prophecy about monetizing content on the internet. Because content on the internet was not very ambitious, was short - basically candy in some form - it wasn’t creating the kind of fan base or emotional relationships that would lead to advertisers being real interested in it. So therefore advertisers didn’t pay that much for that. Our theory was if we did a series on the internet that had the same level of quality as a series on television, and the same kind of fan base, then maybe advertisers would be interested in paying more for that and help finance our production costs. In fact, that’s worked out pretty well and we got two sponsors, Pepsi and Toyota, to commit major dollars in advance before we went on the air. And if you know how the things work on the Internet, then you know that’s almost unprecedented. I don’t know of any other case where advertisers pledged money in advance like that. Everything is based on a CPM, where based on how much traffic you have, that’s what they pay you. In this case, they really liked the experiment and they came onboard, and the thing is: we still have to deliver. We’re still in the early stages and I think we are delivering, and I think we’ll be able to get other advertisers at that rate, but we’ll see."

Marshall Herskovitz and Bitsie Tulloch on how technology has changed the world for lonely, artsy type kids:

Herskovitz: That’s an interesting question and I’m not sure I can do it justice. I think we’re watching something happen in the culture right now and we don’t even know where it’s going to lead. As you know, quarterlife is not just a show, it’s also a social network and we already have a very sizable community on this social network of people who are artistic and creative. I’m astonished at what I see on the forums on the web site and the number of people who feel isolated in their lives, who’ve taken to this form of communication and are opening themselves up in ways they never did before. They’re talking about things they’ve never talked about with anybody. There was a thread about someone saying they had Generalized Anxiety Disorder and they never talked about it with anyone and does anyone else have it, and other people were chiming in. So I think, yes, in some ways the Internet has allowed people who feel alienated or isolated to reveal themselves in ways they couldn’t before, and in other ways I’m sure the Internet allows people to remain isolated. [laughs]

Tulloch: It’s funny, because the cast as a whole, we’re all pretty much in our mid-twenties, which is nice. I definitely think that a few things with this generation in particular - first of all, we seem to really define ourselves by our creativity in a way that other generations didn’t, not because they couldn’t, but because they didn’t have access to this incredible, far reaching platform. The show is really about the Internet and quarterlife.com is a huge part of it, and it’s the first generation that grew up on the internet. I was a freshman in high school when I had my first e-mail account - granted people are using it now when they’re six-years-old - but we were really the first generation to grow up with it as such a huge integral part of our lives. And my character is a blogger, which I think is a fascinating form of self expression, particularly in that you can control how you're perceived by people. You can choose how to portray yourself, whether or not it’s reality, and there’s this strange sort of ambiguous thing that goes on a lot with the blog, particularly with my character. She’s inviting people in and simultaneously keeping them at a distance, because at the end of the day, she’s still talking to a computer screen, she’s not talking to a living, breathing human being."