Ax quickly falls on ‘Quarterlife’

ZAP2IT.COM

NBC has pulled the plug on its Internet-to-TV experiment “Quarterlife” — a decision that apparently won’t bother its creator too much.

After a premiere that pulled in historically low ratings on Tuesday, the series from “My So-Called Life” creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick has been pulled from the 9 p.m. Sunday time slot where it was scheduled to air for the next several weeks. “Deal or No Deal” and a “Law & Order” rerun will fill the hour for the next two weeks.

“Quarterlife” drew a CW-esque 3.1 million viewers in its debut at 10 p.m. Tuesday — the worst in-season performance in the 10 p.m. hour by an NBC show in at least 17 years. The show, which has been airing in eight-minute chunks online since November, also got pummeled in the adults 18-49 demographic, where it managed only a 1.3 rating.

This despite a fair amount of hype about the show, which was scrutinized for its online to on-air transition and because it was produced by Herskovitz and Zwick, who reworked a pilot that ABC rejected a few seasons back into the Web series.

Herskovitz was, not surprisingly, optimistic about the show’s prospects before the premiere. “What we’re doing — which started out to be an Internet-only show and now has this television component — is part of some, I think, hybrid process that will continue for the next few years,” he told reporters earlier this month.