A good-looking, shabby-chic cluster of twentysomethings is downing Coronas in a haphazardly furnished apartment. Suddenly an angry young woman bursts in the door. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the intruder shouts. “You put my face all over the freakin’ Net!” Welcome to Quarterlife, the new drama from thirtysomething creators and filmmakers Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz. Like their forebears on thirtysomething, the hot-button show of the late ’80s, the protagonists of Quarterlife make out, freak out, and shut each other out, not infrequently in bed. But this time, instead of talking to shrinks, they blab to strangers, shamelessly posting their confessions as videoblogs—like Harriet the Spy with a MacBook.

“We blog to exist,” says cute protagonist Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch). “Therefore we ... we are idiots.”

If you like such smartly written generational angst, you’ll probably like Quarterlife. Yet the most interesting thing about the show may not be its content, but its business model: Quarterlife premieres on MySpace this November in 36 eight-to-10-minute “Webisodes,” featuring all the production values of a network drama. The only difference? There’s no network. The first big-budget show made for the Internet, Quarterlife expects to spend up to $500,000 for each hour produced, or about ten times the budgets of most Web shows. Zwick and Herskovitz aim to turn a profit through product placements and ads targeted at hipster viewers.

“What’s potentially radical about this is the creation of a self-sustaining model that exists without the participation of the Leviathan,” i.e., the networks, Zwick explains. “That would be revolutionary. Should it happen, you’d hear howls inside those [network] towers.”

Zwick, 55, never planned to be a television rebel. Back in college, he was one of those English-lit kids who directed theater productions and hung out at the Harvard Square Theater watching Kurosawa films. Upon graduation in 1974, he headed to Europe to study experimental theater. After introducing himself to Woody Allen on a Left Bank street, he wound up working for the director as an assistant on 1975’s Love and Death.

Zwick traveled next to the American Film Institute, where he met Herskovitz. In 1983, the two friends made Special Bulletin, a TV movie that won four Emmys, which led to a deal to develop a prime-time series. The resulting show, thirtysomething, gave voice to the frustrations of American yuppies. Zwick and Herskovitz would keep their hands in film, helping to create Shakespeare in Love, Traffic, Glory, and Blood Diamond, among others. But the two remained intrigued by the creative possibilities of TV. “Television has been the most fertile personal exploration of things that are intimate and layered,” Zwick says. “That’s important to me—to talk about smaller complexities.”

They did not, however, love the business end of television; Zwick and Herskovitz have been railing against the network model ever since thirtysomething, for which they took standard writers’ fees but got nothing on the back end when the show became a hit. In later years, they found themselves struggling to save shows such as My So-Called Life and Once and Again, cult faves that never found a mass audience. So when ABC rejected 1/4life, as it was then known, for its fall 2005 season, they started shopping for a new roost.

The idea for tying in social-networking came up during a meeting with Apple, Zwick says, but the show ultimately ended up at Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace. Quarterlife will anchor a growing stable of high-profile offerings on the site, including Prom Queen, a series of 90-second video shorts produced by former Disney CEO Michael Eisner.

The Web’s communal spirit pervades Quarterlife. One day after each episode appears on MySpace, it will be posted on Quarterlife.com, a social-networking site where participants can share portfolios of their work. Some of the show’s writers are, in Zwick’s words, “unknown”; its music will come from unsigned bands; and fans might land roles on the show or sell scripts that they’ve posted on the site. “We’re making it a wiki,” Zwick explains. Whatever happens, “we want to be transparent.” Herskovitz will actually blog about the show’s bottom line—“if we don’t make it financially, or if we do.”

In the end, Quarterlife must win not in a Nielsen ratings war, but in the harsh meritocracy of the Internet, where it competes with LonelyGirl15, YouTube footage of Britney Spears’ latest meltdown, and random stuff like “cats riding bicycles,” according to Josh Bernoff, an interactive marketing analyst for Forrester Research. “On the Internet, the good stuff floats to the top, but ‘good’ is defined as things people want to watch, not by production values.”

For Zwick, just taking a chance on Quarterlife is its own reward. “Each of us fears a certain rigidity in our lives and fears old-fartism,” said Zwick. “So the idea of shaking it up and doing something that hasn’t been done before—it keeps your edge.”