Are you one of those online junkies who loves to watch people bare their lives on blogs or on social networks like MySpace or Facebook? If so, you might dig the online elements and concept behind Quarterlife. In the opening scene of this bizarre hybrid of a show, our lead female says, "Why do we blog? We blog to exist." And she's serious. The blogger generation will certainly know what she means.

Using a combination of webcams, handicam, and more traditional filmmaking, Quarterlife wants to be "My So-Called Blog" but feels a bit too much like a more contemporary generation awkwardly trying to tell the stories of another. Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz have written some of the best TV of the last three decades with Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, and Once and Again and all three shows displayed an impressive ability to turn young lives into relatable drama. Can they strike gold again with Quarterlife?

Despite better-than-average dialogue and an interesting ensemble, Quarterlife never clicks the way it should. Maybe it's because there are so many real people out there right now bearing their souls on social networks and sharing their throughts on webcams that a few fictional characters have a much higher bar to jump over to make them as interesting as today's online characters.

Quarterlife bills itself as the first network-quality TV series that was produced for the internet. After all, the show was originally launched on MyspaceTV.com and on quarterlife.com in November of last year, consisting of 36 eight-minute episodes and spread itself to YouTube, Facebook, and Imeem, along with NBC.com. Despite the move to TV, Quaterlife certainly had much more of an impact in that medium. But the strike forced NBC to move it to the big leagues where the tone of TV is vastly different than the online world. On the internet, the dramatic chords of everyday life are very real. On TV, drama is fictionalized and it's a tough sell if there's not a seamless transition. In the end, that's just the new reality of life on the internet and how it's changing the way we view shows on mainstream TV.

Quarterlife tells the story of six twenty-something friends and the blogger in their midst. The narrative is driven by Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch), a gorgeous young woman who lays the lives of her friends at the feet of the blogosphere on quarterlife.com. In the pilot, her friends find the site and realize that their lives and secrets are out there - "Dylan is blogging about us." The "us" includes filmmakers Danny and Jed, actress-bartender Lisa, geek Andy, and dependent Debra.

And that would have been an interesting story. But a show spawned from the new age when nothing is private and designed around the blogosphere and Facebook doesn't make the transition to television smoothly. The premiere of Quarterlife is interesting in fits and starts - kind of like a show that would have worked for eight minutes at a time - but never develops a dramatic rhythm. It's hard to believe anyone (especially the older non-bloggers) will care long enough to come back after a commercial break. They'll be too busy finding something similar online.

Part of the problem with Quarterlife is that it doesn't maintain its concept. If the show had been about the website and what the world learned from it, that would be one thing, but it's constantly spinning off into subplots and scenes that take place completely outside the world of quarterlife.com. It's as if we get to read a blog and then act like peeping toms on the lives that it's written about as they do other things. The blog is one thing but the characters/people have to be real and engaging for the scenes away from the webcam to be effective. Unfortunately, they're just not on Quarterlife.

It's easy to use mixed media to create a compelling concept for a webisode or a site, but character still rules the day on TV. At the end of the show, the biggest problem with Quarterlife is one that Zwick and Herskovitz couldn't possibly have fixed. We watch video podcasts and we read people's cyber-diaries on MySpace because the drama is real, not because it feels real. It comes down to one important question that was inevitable if not handled in the right way - Why spend time with the awkward characters of Quarterlife when there are so many more interesting ones just a click away?