Mischa Barton's return to TV -- the CW Network's "The Beautiful Life: TBL" -- looks like the first fatality of the fall TV season. The trade newspaper Variety reports that the show has been pulled from the schedule after the first two episodes yielded little more than yawns.
Nielsen numbers show a little more than a million people tuned in for "TBL." That ain't enough -- even on the CW, which targets its shows at younger female viewers.
The show was loosely based on Ashton's modeling days, and was delayed a bit by Mischa's personal problems.
It looks like reruns of the "Melrose Place" remake will replace it in the 8 p.m. Wednesday time slot on Channel 18 in Milwaukee.
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
