There are indeed a lot of good points about quarterlife: the production values, the cast. Herskovitz & Zwick let the script pander too much to stereotypes about 20-somethings, true. But individual experimentation with hedonism and perfidy as antidotes to angst is common to all civilizations in decline, and so they are not by themselves implausible enough to repel. Not right away.
I was pretty sure, in fact, that I was going to make it all the way to the last episode. I can do small doses, 3-4 mini-episodes on the web site, once every ten days or so.
Then came the Las Vegas trip. Though you don't really know where they were leaving from and thus over what period the bus-ride melodrama was spread, it didn't become unviewable until just after their arrival in the city of water-wasting consumer delusion. Even brief exposure to the desert sun can make you giddy, it seems. By the time the tribe had entered their hotel suite and parted the remote-controlled curtains over the glass wall that looked out onto the nondescript expanse of twinkling lights, they'd embraced the high-roller luxury appointments that decades of refinements to mobster taste had made a reality. (It might be well to remind ourselves here that 25 is the new 15.) Kind of makes you wonder where all that self-deprecating Weltschmerz went.
Where's Eric when we need him? He'd have reminded the gang that Vegas exists to showcase the trappings of a society that gives free reign to the very corporations that our sweet, confused, self-obsessed 20-somethings so dislike working for. Hadn't they listened to any lyrics about how showing awe only encourages them? But our quarterlifers would have laughed Eric off. Their faith in the virtue of realism (a term that now subsumes temporizing) is absolute. It is this realism that, they seem to believe, will guide them beyond the drug-induced illusions about solidarity, economic justice, activism, and the consequences of irresponsible hegemony that every Boomer ever born -- now accidental millionaires all -- so pathetically fell prey to.
As quarterlife has worn on, it has become clearer and clearer that the sequel, halflife (still lower case, but subtitled in English and dubbed in Mandarin), will show our gang grappling with the sacrifices and bitter disappointments of gaining entry to the corner offices of the thriving American subsidiaries of Shanghai-based conglomerates. From there they will be inflicting corporatism on a new and larger generation of the dispossessed. (They're the ones using public transport.)
That is, if there still *are* corporations and identifiable generations after the Implosion. The American experiment in self-determination at some point morphed into a collective desire for liberty, convenience, and the pursuit of truthiness. And the new vision hasn't been faring all that well lately.
(Q)uarterlife missed a beautiful opportunity to inspire us with a new genre. Its innovation was in offering viewers a front-row iPod seat just as the tsunami is breaking.
I was pretty sure, in fact, that I was going to make it all the way to the last episode. I can do small doses, 3-4 mini-episodes on the web site, once every ten days or so.
Then came the Las Vegas trip. Though you don't really know where they were leaving from and thus over what period the bus-ride melodrama was spread, it didn't become unviewable until just after their arrival in the city of water-wasting consumer delusion. Even brief exposure to the desert sun can make you giddy, it seems. By the time the tribe had entered their hotel suite and parted the remote-controlled curtains over the glass wall that looked out onto the nondescript expanse of twinkling lights, they'd embraced the high-roller luxury appointments that decades of refinements to mobster taste had made a reality. (It might be well to remind ourselves here that 25 is the new 15.) Kind of makes you wonder where all that self-deprecating Weltschmerz went.
Where's Eric when we need him? He'd have reminded the gang that Vegas exists to showcase the trappings of a society that gives free reign to the very corporations that our sweet, confused, self-obsessed 20-somethings so dislike working for. Hadn't they listened to any lyrics about how showing awe only encourages them? But our quarterlifers would have laughed Eric off. Their faith in the virtue of realism (a term that now subsumes temporizing) is absolute. It is this realism that, they seem to believe, will guide them beyond the drug-induced illusions about solidarity, economic justice, activism, and the consequences of irresponsible hegemony that every Boomer ever born -- now accidental millionaires all -- so pathetically fell prey to.
As quarterlife has worn on, it has become clearer and clearer that the sequel, halflife (still lower case, but subtitled in English and dubbed in Mandarin), will show our gang grappling with the sacrifices and bitter disappointments of gaining entry to the corner offices of the thriving American subsidiaries of Shanghai-based conglomerates. From there they will be inflicting corporatism on a new and larger generation of the dispossessed. (They're the ones using public transport.)
That is, if there still *are* corporations and identifiable generations after the Implosion. The American experiment in self-determination at some point morphed into a collective desire for liberty, convenience, and the pursuit of truthiness. And the new vision hasn't been faring all that well lately.
(Q)uarterlife missed a beautiful opportunity to inspire us with a new genre. Its innovation was in offering viewers a front-row iPod seat just as the tsunami is breaking.