• Pick a more accessible topic. Folks who opt to sit home watching television on a Wednesday night, instead of enjoying a recreational pastime like drinking, know what the Internet is. They just don't care about it like the readers of 4chan or Quarterlife's Web viewers do. Prime-time fare needn't be lowbrow, but it should be accessible.
• Make ads that entice. Quarterlife promo campaign, the 14-word version: Walking talking hugging flashes to a website really stupid quip eating more hugging grunt. It's hard to make typing at a keyboard and looking at a screen exciting, but NBC's marketing team didn't even try.
• Leave it on the Web. For the Internet, Quarterlife still counts as a hit. Even cocreator Marshall Herskovitz says, in hindsight, that he didn't think it could survive on network TV. Why didn't NBC just toss it on Hulu, where it belongs? It would have been cheaper, and possibly more profitable.

"Some interesting work is out there, for sure, like The Burg, but not a lot," he says. "And most of it is simply incompetence and ignorance masquerading as an 'Internet style.'" And so is most TV, but Marshall must mean more or he wouldn't make that point. He's discounting all of Super Deluxe, College Humor, independent shows like Clark and Michael, and the raunchy cartoon Meth Minute (published by another employer of mine).

Marshall's show? Not so good! The latest episode starts with the same type of mixed metaphors Marshall uses in Slate, such as "I don't remember being elected your babysitter." Then some theme music, crying, and an argument made of Gillmore Girls outtakes:

Even Marshall admits the promotion of the show was traditional: They were heavily promoted on MySpace, and Marshall even figured out the trick of using pretty girls in underwear for an episode's preview thumbnail, a method usually known as "incompetence and ignorance masquerading as an 'Internet style.'"

But Marshall believes Quarterlife's success came from his creative decisions: The show came out in eight-minute episodes, which he thinks is revolutionary because he never watched Clark and Michael or pretty much anything on iTunes. The site has an official fan forum where anyone snide is "carted away screaming," which Marshall again finds new because he's never visited the fansite for a TV show.

Marshall's not stupid; it took a lot of skill to market his show and convince NBC to give him full creative control. And that's great news for creators. But in doing so, he's changed the Great American Internet Dream. It was just about to evolve from "make a good web show, get famous on TV" to "make a good web show, get famous without TV." Now many indie creators will water down their work to make it palatable for NBC and other buyers. Hollywood exiles will spend their budgets not on promising fresh creators but on Quarterlife clones. Thank god Super Deluxe, College Humor and their competitors are already out there offering a better way.

That's nothing to sneeze at, but Quarterlife has been touted as the "first television-quality production for the Web," and 100,000 viewers would mean instant cancellation on broadcast TV. TV-level production values plus Internet-size audiences is a recipe for financial disaster.

But the real draw of YouTube isn't that the content is short; it's that it's easy to find and share. YouTube only implemented a 10-minute limit in an attempt to slow the flow of copyrighted content; users got around it by breaking up longer shows into 10-minute chunks. Plenty of people watch full-length shows online; indeed, that's one of the supposed draws of Hulu, NBC and News Corp.'s video joint venture.

The numbers are compelling. The number of people snagging free content off Pirate Bay has doubled to 8 million in the past year. According to SumoTorrent tracker, 50 percent of BitTorrent traffic is devoted to downloading television shows. And the audience viewing TV shows online is 25 percent more engaged with the show their couch-sitting counterparts.

The lesson: Web users can stomach full-length episodes. There's no reason to chop up narratives into bits for the sake of online attention spans. No, the real quandary is finding a big enough of an audience to support broadcast production values. Doing things the old way doesn't work: Eisner, the former Disney CEO, lost buckets of money on his "hit" Prom Queen, claiming it cost him $3,000 for every 90 seconds of footage.

NBC will put "Quarterlife" on the air starting in February or March, after its Internet run is complete, according to the Wall Street Journal. Herskovitz told the Journal the whole experience of starting a show on the Internet was "thrilling, nerve-wracking and exciting." And don't you just know what he means, fans? It's just like how you wonder if Dylan's friends will stay mad at her, or finally come to respect her for her honesty.