Have you ever seen those memes that say something along the lines of, “Everyone I know is either getting married, getting pregnant, or getting engaged, and I am just over here like ‘I love pizza’”? Yeah, that’s me. It is this precise emotion that had me hooked on Quarter Life within minutes of stumbling across the pilot episode.
Quarter Life is a web series that was written, produced, directed, and stars WFU alum Celia Quillian (’14) and her friend Shelli Delgado. It follows the girls on their journey from co-workers to best friends and shows them navigating the pitfalls of being a post-grad millennial. It’s a little bit Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt meets Golden Girls. These young women have a compelling onscreen dynamic that is every bit sugar and spice and everything nice. They don’t pander to their audience, and often you feel left wanting more at the end of each episode. The result is strong vignettes using fantastical camerawork and editing to give you a snap shot of the lives of Celia and Shelli.
Shelli Delgado (Left) and Celia Quillian (Right), the co-creators of Quarter Life in a still from the series.
I recently had a chance to speak to the creators of the web series about their process and about how Quarter Life went from an idea to a six episode series on YouTube. In recent years, we have seen a decline of television cable subscriptions and a constant uptick in digital content entertainment platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video. When I asked Celia and Shelli about their decision to go the web series route they acknowledged that they wanted to stay in control of this project. They told me: “If we had just written a script and pitched it to studios, we wouldn’t have been the ones casting the show, choosing locations, directing it, and editing it. Perhaps we wouldn’t have ended up acting in it. The Web Series platform allowed us to make our artistic endeavor truly our own,"
For Shelli and Celia, the stakes were high and they were determined not to disappoint those who had backed them. They crowd funded over $10,000 in just 40 days to get their idea off of the ground and start filming the series. In less than a month since its YouTube drop, Quarter Life has won an award for Best Web/New Media from the Women's Only Entertainment Film Festival and it continues to garner praise from its viewership.
In a patriarchal industry, where the majority of writers, producers, and directors are men, Celia and Shelli have received some reactions that were less than supportive. Celia described to me one of the more patronizing examples. She said: “We had a lot of people that were crazy surprised that the series was a) good, b) funny, or c) “funny for men too!” I mean, we’ll take the compliments, but….you know. It’s kind of a let down to have people be shocked that something that two funny women wrote could ACTUALLY be funny.” But Quarter Life is more than just a funny show about two women and the hijinks that they find themselves in, it is carefully constructed by millennial’s and for millennial’s. They take on concepts such as dating, fitness and diets, work, and making friends with a witty and empowering undertone for all quarter-lifers.
Click Here to check out Quarter Life on YouTube. You can watch all of season one and you can also watch behind the scenes footage on how the series was created. Also, Click Here to like the Quarter Life Facebook page to stay up to date on what Shelli and Celia are up to now!
