Quarterlife, the first Web-based drama to air on network television, has been canceled by NBC after a dismally rated first episode but will move to sister cable channel Bravo, people close to the show said on Thursday. The highly touted online series about a group of young artists bombed in its NBC debut on Tuesday night, drawing the network's lowest ratings and smallest audience for that time slot in at least 20 years, according to Nielsen Media Research. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal.) The show ranked a distant third place for the 10 p.m. hour, averaging just 3.1 million viewers and a meager 1.3 rating among advertisers' favorite demographic, adults aged 18 to 49, the precise audience for whom the series was designed.

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Quarterlife originally was created for the social-networking site MySpace.com by Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, Emmy-winning producers of "thirtysomething" and My So-Called Life. Consisting of 36 eight-minute webisodes, the series began running on MySpaceTV.com and quarterlife.com in November, with two new segments appearing online each week.

NBC made headlines when it announced in the midst of the Hollywood writers strike it was picking up the series as a mid-season replacement show, and heavily promoted the drama in the run-up to its prime-time launch.

At the time, quarterlife was touted as a new model for the development of video entertainment, marking the first program to originate independently online before moving to a major broadcast outlet.