NBC’s Quarterlife – a heavily-hyped serialized drama from the creators of thirtysomething and My So-Called Life – was supposed to be a bold new direction for television. The show was hyped as “the first television-quality production for the Web.”

Unfortunately, it was a pretty awful television-quality production for the Web.

In December, we told you that Quarterlife was a bomb, getting beat out on YouTube by the likes of sleeping kitties, graffiti videos and even a video of Sims in labor.

Online views for the show plummeted from its debut, going from nearly 800,000 YouTube views for the first episode to just a few thousand for recent episodes.

Now NBC is finding out the hard way that a show that tanks on the Internet probably isn’t going to work on TV either. In its network debut, Quarterlife was last in its timeslot, losing out to Jericho and an news magazine Primetime: What Would You Do Now?

What Would You Do Now? 

What we would do now is put Quarterlife out to pasture, tell NBC to stop thinking of the Web as “TV lite” and start taking a long, hard look at shows that have proven to be successful online.

Update: NewTeeVee’s Liz Gannes reports that Quarterlife creator Marshall Herskovitz has admitted that the show was a bomb.

“I watched it last night,” said Herskovitz. “When you saw it on TV it didn‚Äôt look like TV, and when you saw it on the Internet it didn‚Äôt look like the Internet.‚Äù