'quarterlife': That's a wrap

After a lackluster performance in its NBC debut on Tuesday night, "quarterlife's'" impressively durable hype bubble has finally popped.   The show scored 3.1 million viewers and finished last in its time slot, marking, according to Reuters, NBC's "worst time-slot performance in at least 17 years."

And so, after weeks of trumpeting his groundbreaking sale of the show to NBC,  creator Marshall Herskovitz has changed his tune.

"It never should have been a network show. It's too specific," Herskovitz told a group   at the Harvard Business School on Wednesday. "From the first three minutes," he said of the feeling he got from seeing the show on air, "I knew it wasn't right."

Perhaps, if it wasn't right for ABC, or the Internet, or NBC, it may be right for Bravo.  NewTeeVee is reporting today that the cable network will be the show's last stop.

So yet a fourth (and hopefully final) chapter opens on this peculiar saga, which first set out to prove that failed television ideas can succeed on the Internet, and then, failing that, that failed Internet ideas can work on television.  Since that didn't work either, we're now being offered yet another hypothesis: that a show no one liked in its first three incarnations can still make a few bucks on cable.  Sounds totally possible.

(photo by Lori Shepler / LAT)