Quarterlife, the stapled-together-for-prime-time Web-video series about twentynothing artists, flopped so hard that NBC is kicking it off the team. It sucked in a measly 3.1 million viewers during its NBC debut last night — half what programs on ABC and CBS pulled. As penance, "Quarterlife" will be riding the pine on Bravo's minor-league roster. Ben Silverman, cochairman of NBC Entertainment, described the original deal to bring Quarterlife to the airwaves as a "revolutionary step in the creation of television." In retrospect, it's easy to say he should never have bought the show, if only because watching Quarterlife makes me want to punch myself in the face. But would any other Web video have fared better. Perhaps, if NBC had followed this playbook:

The first thing I notice about Marshall Herskovitz is he's the worst writer to ever appear on Slate. The creator of "My So-Called Life," explaining how he moved from TV to the Internet and back to TV, starts the story of his show Quarterlife with a feudalism metaphor. He then switches to an even poorer sea metaphor: "If, as they say, it's a vast sea of information, the first thing to realize is that this sea is only accessible from certain harbors called browsers, like Internet Explorer or Safari." Also web sites are boats and the sea is invisible! This guy really knows his audience. What makes this so painful is that Marshall successfully left TV, started a popular web show, kept ownership, sold the show to NBC (because while the Internet is the future, TV is still where the money is), still kept creative control setting a positive network TV precedent, and thus changed the future for thousands of indie creators. But in a terrible way, because Marshall Herskovitz hates online video.

"Why do we blog? We blog to exist," Dylan Kreiger told us in episode one of Quarterlife, your favorite Web TV show from real TV show Thirtysomething creators Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zick. And now we know why Herskovitz and Zick produce: They produce to exist. On network TV.