Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator of Quarterlife, the made-for-the-Web show that debuted on NBC on Tuesday night, had a bad feeling the minute he saw the first episode on the (relatively) big screen.

Just days before, Herskovitz was proclaiming a new direction for network television based on Quarterlife's journey from the Web to NBC. Now, after the show's debut episode managed a paltry 3.1 million viewers, the network is apparently giving up on it and shuttling it off to Bravo, its much smaller cable cousin.
 
"I was in my hotel room in New York with four other people, including two of the series' stars," says Herskovitz. As the show—originally pitched to ABC in 2004, but repurposed for the Web before being picked up by NBC last November—began, everyone seemed to be loving it. Everyone, that is, except Herskovitz, who says, "I turned to them after two minutes and said 'This will never work on television.'"

The show's ratings were particularly poor given the prime placement of Quarterlife after the popular The Biggest Loser, which gets an estimated 7.4 million viewers a week.
 
That's a disappointment for Herskovitz, one half of the Emmy-winning team behind shows like Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life, who said before the show aired that he thought Quarterlife could pioneer a new content model for the struggling network TV business. But just a few days later, he played it off like he had known better all along.
 
"What am I going to say to someone before something premieres? That I have grave doubts?" Herskovitz says now. "I've had grave doubts for months about whether we could get the audience necessary to survive on NBC, but there's no point in talking about that before the fact." Herskovitz points to the different techniques used to establish and develop TV and Web characters as one major reason the show didn't come across well on Tuesday.

The flop is also a disappointment for Ben Silverman, the recently installed co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, who had been a huge fan of Quarterlife since before he joined the network last spring and was hoping the show's Web-to-TV move could be a new model for developing new shows. Neither Silverman nor anyone else at NBC was available for comment today, but Herskovitz was blunt about the network's reaction.
 
"They were deeply upset by the numbers," he says, before adding that, "while [3.1 million viewers is] a dismal failure for NBC, it would be a huge hit on most cable networks."