FOR THOSE of us who checked out the online series "quarterlife" when it first premiered in November, it's deja vu tonight on NBC, as the show makes its way from the Web to actual TV sets.

In a letter to their "esteemed media friends," of which I apparently still am one, even though I pretty much panned "quarterlife" the first time out, creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick hail its latest incarnation as a historic first: "a show wrought for the Internet and then delivered to a television network as a completed entity, without the network even seeing the scripts beforehand."

Their letter mentions that "quarterlife" is getting a one-night-only premiere right after "The Biggest Loser" - a show that tells you just about everything you need to know about the current state of affairs at NBC - but doesn't actually touch on the writers strike that left NBC so strapped for scripted content that it was willing for once to make a deal with writers it couldn't control.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

Still, this makes for a pretty story - sensitive writers on one side, insensitive network suits on the other, with the writers emerging triumphant, taking their work to the people, and letting them decide whether or not the characters and stories are worth sticking with.

Except that Zwick and Herskovitz don't need to be controlled. They control themselves.

Their past TV collaborations, from "thirtysomething" to "Once and Again," may have shown them to have a finger on the pulse of the baby-boom generation, but they know better than to offer up "fiftysomething" for the new millennium.

Madison Avenue doesn't pay to attract the 49-plus viewer. It wants tweens and teens and twentysomethings who may not yet have decided for sure what brand of stuff they'll be buying the rest of their lives, and "quarterlife," with its attractive, angst-ridden millennials, its aspiring filmmakers and actors and activists and Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch), the video blogger who helps us spy on all of them, seems no less cynically aimed at that audience than the CW's "Gossip Girl."

Not that there's anything wrong with making shows about people in their 20s. People do it all the time, and some of them - CBS' "How I Met Your Mother," ABC's "Ugly Betty" - are pretty good.

And some of them - yes, I'm talking about you, "October Road" - aren't.

But there's no shortage of shows about people finding their way in those tricky post-college years, or of stories about guys who are in love with their best friend's girl, or of girls with the hots for a guy who's hot for someone else.

Even if there were, I'm not sure that Zwick and Herskovitz, whose work has often felt more biographical than anthropological, would be the ones to fill the gap.

Viewers who managed to make it through the first several episodes of "quarterlife" last fall will find them mashed together, slightly chaotically, in tonight's premiere.

A future episode with material I hadn't seen seemed a bit more TV-like, whatever that means in the age of YouTube.

Having grown up watching TheirTube, I still prefer my TV to look like TV, even when I'm watching on my laptop, which could be why I liked that later episode more.

But though the abbreviated installments of the online "quarterlife" had annoyed me with their very brevity, at an hour, NBC's "quarterlife" seems to drag on forever. *

Send e-mail to graye@phillynews.com.