What would Garfield be like if that fat orange cat were expunged from the record?

It’d go something like this:

Who would have guessed that when you remove Garfield from the Garfield comic strips, the result is an even better comic about schizophrenia, bipolor disorder, and the empty desperation of modern life? Friends, meet Jon Arbuckle. Let’s laugh and learn with him on a journey deep into the tortured mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness and methamphetamine addiction in a quiet American suburb.

If anything, this highlights the out-of-context dark comedy that the set-up guy lives in. Without the conventional punchlines, you’re just a guy without a cat.

It seems like only yesterday that “Quarterlife” was going to be the long-awaited breakout Web television hit. It had MySpace behind it, with a healthy chunk of its millions of users as a built-in audience.

Flash forward: On the strength of its online performance, “Q-life” gets picked up by NBC, making an improbable comeback to the broadcast medium that originally rejected it.

And then, it tanks hard with only 3.1 million viewers, the worst network debut in 20 years, earning it cancellation and a demotion to Bravo.

What does this portend for the Web-development model for future mass-market media vehicles? The lack of even one solid success in this Web-TV crossover indicates that what works online is simply not transferable to the boob tube, despite content being content. It could be that movers and shakers on both sides are beating a dead horse in trying to find synergy this way.