Just a quick recap, so I love this TV series by Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskowitz. They originally collaborated with ABC but got dropped so the guys decided to go it alone and launch it on the internet with a 36-episode exclusive on MySpaceTV. During the writers' strike, the series got picked up by NBC. But it bombed. A host of commentators tripped over themselves to declare the Web-to-TV model
dead.
Wrong, says Jordan Levin, who once ran a network himself and who is now CEO of Web production studio Generate. "To say it proved or disproved a model, that's insanity," he said at McGraw Hill's Media Summit. What the Quarterlife experience proved, he said, is that a show about whiny 20-somethings didn't work out on NBC, whose average viewer is in their late 40s. HBO digital distribution VP Rishi Malhotra agreed. "There's a difference between a place you can launch a program and the place where it can live and succeed," he said.
And what of Quarterlife? After bombing on NBC prime time, it was moved to Bravo, which tried to kill it off by running it as a six-hour marathon on Sunday March 9, starting at 8 am. guess what, it's doing alright. According to Michael Learmonth at Silicon Valley Insider, Quarterlife averaged about 169,000 vierwers per hour during its run about 38 percent less than Bravo normally gets on a Sunday between 8 am and 2 pm.




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