If Angela and Brian had sex . . .

Among my all-time favorite TV producers are Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. Their Bedford Falls company has generated a number of series whose characters have lived on for me long past their initial runs. There is probably no series on TV I have re-watched more than My So-Called Life, but their other prime time dramas are also faves: thirtysomething's '80s angst, Once & Again's it's-all-just-so-hard multi-generation tales, even the somewhat lackluster Relativity. We've even named our kid Leo in part through the inspiration of the Leos that have populated the Bedford Falls-averse (Michael and Hope's infant son, Relativity's leading man, the hunky younger-man doctor Karen Sammler dates).

Because of my love for all things Zwick/Herskovitzy I was so, so excited when the duo's new series, quarterlife, began its life as an internet-only series. Since then, NBC has picked up the already-produced episodes for broadcast, and I look forward to seeing them on air this February. But we've been keeping up with the online episodes, nonetheless, and I am happy to say that they've finally gotten really good, finally are beginning to live up to their producers' impressive cred.

The online eps of quarterlife range from about 7 to 14 minutes each, but these segments are clearly that--segments of hour-long TV episodes chopped up for twice-weekly internet streaming. It's a clever idea and all--finding a way to distribute a series when the nets decided not to pick it up--but it seems a bit disingenuous to call 44 minute broadcast TV episodes chopped into bits an internet series.

Just aired are the segments that make up what would be the 4th broadcast episode. Written by Devon Gummersall, also the actor who played MSCL's unrequited lover/uber-geek Brian Krakow, "Goodbyes" has all the markings of great prime time drama, and of Bedford Falls drama in particular--parallel plotlines that enrich each other in the similarities and differences of the characters' experiences, subtle dialogue that exposes character, sweet humor laced with awkwardness, Snuffy's music--just lovely and perfect.

Most perfect, however, was the story told in this episode about the growing romance between Dylan and Eric. I've liked both of these characters all along, but "Goodbyes" moved them up a notch for me into the pantheon of great Ed and Marshall couples or, better still, Ed and Marshall maybe-couples and sort-of-couples, for romance in the Bedford Falls-averse is always fraught and painful. In particular, the story of Dylan and Eric in this episode fulfills my fantasy of seeing what would happen if MSCL's Angela and Brian were to finally, actually, and really get together, a possibility only briefly hinted at in the final moments of that series. Dylan has always been an Angela-esque character and, in "Goodbyes" Eric proves himself to be the sensitive, if slightly bumbling, man that Brian always seemed he could become. Their scenes in bed make this particularly clear, but I also see it in some brief moments of this "episode":



Dylan and Eric coming inside with their bikes is sweetly reminiscent of Angela and Brian's bike straddled talks. And the moment when Dylan walks upstairs evokes for me the shot of Angela walking upstairs in the MSCL credit sequence (and taken from the pilot episode):



Too much of the early quarterlife episodes dealt with Jed and Danny's frustrated efforts to become filmmakers-- a plot way reminiscent of Michael and Elliott's story on thirtysomething, an arc I love in that show but that reads as old and boring when it features Jed and Danny. Now, however, thanks perhaps to the intervention of Brian Krakow himself, quarterlife may be becoming more My So-Called Life than thirtysomething. I always knew that Angela and Brian were destined for each other--or at least for a really awkward attempt at destiny.