The drama series which made headlines about its transition from internet to TV, “Quarterlife,” succeeded in being a flop in its NBC debut Tuesday night, having the worst ratings in at least 20 years, according to Nielsen Media Research.

The show designed to address audience between 18 and 49 didn’t succeed to rise to the expectations of NBC.

According to a source at NBC, the series might be canceled before the next episode.

An NBC spokeswoman said that the series will remain in the schedule and that it was moved to Sundays.

“Quarterlife” was created for the internet by producers of “My So-Called Life” and “thirtysomething,” Marshall Herskovitz and Edward Zwick. It’s been around for three months with episodes of seven to nine minutes being transmitted on its own website and My-Space TV.

The broadcast from Tuesday only draw an average of 3.1 million viewers and a rate of 1.3 among the audience from 18-49, being the lowest in NBC history since 1987 when Nielsen began measuring TV viewing by age.

To see the difference take for example the usual Tuesday 10 p.m. show “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” which led with over 12 million viewers and a 4.5 rating.  

The show is about six friends in their 20s who are struggling with their lives having at its center Dylan (Bitsie Tulloch), a character who has a video blog and messes everyone’s lives with her “need” of being honest.

Other characters are Danny (David Walton) and Jed (Scott Michael Foster) who are aspiring filmmakers and best friends. Their love interst will be Debra (Michelle Lombardo). The group is completed by Lisa (Maite Schwartz), a bartender and an insecure actress and Andy (Kevin Christy), a computer wizard.

NBC made a fuss about the show which was announced during the writers’ strike and promoted it.

NBC Entertainment co-chairman Ben Silverman said on Wednesday that the series didn’t live up to expectations, but was “so worth the try.”

He said: “The Web site traffic went up a huge amount, and we continue to try new things and new models. It’s very inexpensive but we hoped for higher ratings,” Reuters reports.

The Oscars made history Sunday night. But not the good kind.

The three-hour-plus ABC telecast averaged 32 million viewers, the smallest crowd on record—ever, per Nielsen Media Research estimates.

The show “topped” the 2003 ceremony, which, with 33 million viewers, was Oscar’s previous low.

Even worse, if possible, the show was a shadow of its 2007 self, shedding more than 8 million viewers, or one-fifth of its audience, from last year to this. Even in an age where everything is the lowest rated something ever, that’s a significant blood loss.

Oscar’s main trouble seemed to be female trouble: Based on ratings of the show’s prime-time hours, it struck out with the chicks.

Last year, with host Ellen DeGeneres at the helm, the Oscars was up across the board with women viewers.

This year, with male Jon Stewart dealing, the show looked to be down, a lot, in all the major female demographics.

The show’s disconnect with its target audience might have stemmed not so much from Stewart, who generally won good reviews, but from the top nominees, a pack of films with nary a female touch, led by Best Picture winner No Country for Old Men, that Stewart himself jokingly described as “psychopathic killer movies.”

Another ratings challenge cropped up when Hollywood’s biggest night turned into another continent’s crowning glory.

For the first time since the 1965 Oscar ceremony, all four acting awards went to residents of Europe. Perhaps not surprisingly, the ‘65 show, honoring the international likes of Zorba the Greek, suffered the ceremony’s third smallest audience share of the 1960s.

For whatever reason, this year’s Oscars repelled viewers as it went on. What began as a show that averaged 32.3 million viewers in its first half-hour, devolved into a show that averaged 25.4 million in its final half-hour of prime time.

Stewart, who previously presided over the 2006 Oscars, now goes down as the host of two of the three lowest rated Academy Awards in TV history. And in defense of Steve Martin, who hosted the 2003 misfire, that ceremony competed for attention with the start of the Iraq War. Stewart, thusly, stands alone as the lowest-rated host of relatively peaceful Oscar nights.

ABC did its best to turn its frown upside down, noting that Sunday’s telecast was far bigger than the rest of this year’s crop of low-rated award shows, including NBC’s Golden Globes debacle.

The network said the show rated highest in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, West Palm Beach, Florida, and Oscar’s hometown of Los Angeles.

Stewart’s notices were another bright spot. From Britain (the BBC called him “sparkling”) to Los Angeles (the L.A. Times found the comic “cool and loose”), and back to Missouri (”Second time’s the charm for Stewart,” headlined the Kansas City Star), Stewart won over critics.

Unlike the show.

The telecast, both a celebration of the ceremony’s 80th anniversary and, as the Hollywood Reporter pointed out, a reminder that Stewart’s writing staff was only recently back from the picket lines, was dinged for being clip-heavy.

“This wasn’t an Oscars,” wrote Deadline Hollywood’s Nikki Finke. “This was a slightly longer version of the Golden Globes announcement.”

The Washington Post’s Tom Shales said the show went “clip-clip-clipping along.” “This is not a good thing,” he decided.

Shales chided the telecast for waiting to get to the acting categories, and for waiting to present presenter Miley Cyrus until the unfriendly kid hour of nearly 10 p.m. ET.

Riffing on Oscar’s birthday, Time’s Richard Corliss said the ceremony “had the tone and pace suitable to an octogenarian’s temper.”

Celebrity bounty hunter Duane “Dog” Chapman is set to return to television after his reality TV show was pulled from the air three months ago in a controversy over his use of a racial slur, cable channel A&E said on Tuesday.

A&E took the popular show, “Dog the Bounty Hunter,” off its schedule last November after a private phone call in which Chapman, an ex-con, used an offensive term to describe his son Tucker’s black girlfriend hit the Internet.

It transpired that Tucker sold the tape of the conversation to The National Enquirer, for a reported $15,000.

A teary Chapman apologized repeatedly on television and to the African American community after the tape was made public and promised to make amends.

He acknowledged using the epithet “nigger” on a heated call with his son but admitting he was probably interfering in his son’s life and he still loved his son.

An A&E spokesman said the network had decided to start production again of “Dog The Bounty Hunter” but no airdate has yet been scheduled.

“Over the last few months, Duane “Dog” Chapman has taken and continues to take the appropriate steps in reaching out to several African American organizations in an effort to make amends for his private comments to his son which were released publicly,” said a statement from the network.

“Since the premise of “Dog The Bounty Hunter” is about second chances - we have decided to give him one.”

Honolulu-based Chapman, 55, who has 12 children and has been married five times, rose to fame after his 2003 tracking and capture of Max Factor heir and serial rapist Andrew Luster in Mexico.

For all of you KITT fans out there, the car is back in business, but for all the David Haselhoff fans, he isn’t. Not entirely.

The new TV movie “Knight Rider” premieres on February 17, at 9 p.m., on NBC starring “All my Children” Justin Bruening, as Mike Tracer, the estranged son of Michael Knight, and the new KITT 3000, a Ford Mustang Shelby GT500KR.

We all know the things old Trans Am KITT could do back in the 1980s, like almost everything, but what about KITT 3000?

One of the executive producers, David Bartis promises us that the new KITT has many surprises in store for us.

Bartis says: “I think everybody knows already that the car has the ability to morph. It can shape shift a little bit in ways that enhances its handling and its abilities on the road. It also has some sort of weapon defense systems that are based on nanotechnology that I think are going to be pretty amazing when people see the way we’ve built the effects there. It’s got a pretty deep arsenal of abilities and tricks there,” mercurynews.com reports.

The movie suffered a last minute change. As Variety announced that the new voice of KITT will be that of Will Arnett, who does the commercials for GMC Trucks, the General Motors had a change of hearts and said it didn’t want Arnett for the Ford Mustang’s voice in the new movie. So Val Kilmer came in to fill the role.

You have to know that the new “Knight Rider” is not a remake of the original 1982-86 series, which had Glen A. Larson as its original creator, but a sort of pilot for a possible series producers hope for if the movie has enough viewers.

Besides Bruening in the role of Mike, we get to see Deanna Russo as ex-girlfriend Sarah Graiman and Sydney Tamiia Poitier as FBI agent Carrie Rivai.

In an interview Bartis said that Larson, who has the movie rights, has been working for a big-screen launch since 2002.

In the new movie, Mike Trance is the estranged son of Michael Knight, whose existence Knight was not aware of. Mike grew up with his mom, Jennifer Knight (Mary Kate McGeehan), who, if fans remember, appeared only once in the old series as the daughter of Wilton Knight, the founder of the Knight Industries. Jennifer took over the foundation in the fourth season opener.

A new character makes his way in the new movie, which connects it to the original series. That is Charles Graiman (Bruce Davison), Sarah’s dad, who is the original creator of KITT, since from the original series we don’t know anything about who built the car ad the technology.

Will just have to see and wait if the new “Knight Rider” can lift up to the expectations of a series which made history back in the 80s and a star out of Haselhoff.