I am - Hercules!!


Co-created by former model Ashton Kutcher (with "Swingtown" vet Mike Kelley), "The Beautiful Life: TBL" looks at the lives of young models and the grabby, less attractive men who want to have sex with them in New York City.

The male model from Iowa at the center of this drama finds himself slapping away the beefy mitts of a horny agent who has trouble taking "no" for an answer. I gather powerful big-city homosexuals in the fashion industry were keen to have sex with Iowa native Kutcher during his modeling days, and he felt the time was ripe to dramatize that era in his life.

Suspiciously, The CW only sent along 25 minutes of the show's pilot. I thought those 25 minutes worked better than the pilots for "Vampire Diaries" or "Melrose Place," but fell well short of any episode of "Veronica Mars," a well-written show about pretty young people the netlet felt compelled to cancel.

USA Today says:

… what's dispiriting about Beautiful Life is that it's too lazy to even work as successful eye candy. …

The Los Angeles Times says:

… not so different from, or significantly worse -- or better -- than the network's other two season premieres, "Melrose Place" and "The Vampire Diaries," which also affix stock characters, played mostly by good-looking young folk, to standard plot lines sexed up with pop songs and different flavors of visual glamour. Because they do not aim particularly high, they pretty much hit what they aim at. …

The Washington Post says:

… Although only a 25-minute sampler of this series was available for preview, it's clear that the show brings a fresh eye to one of cable TV's most hackneyed, hokey and overexposed arenas: the decreasingly fascinating world of models, fashion and all that baloney about designing divas. …

The San Francisco Chronicle says:

… awful, no matter your age or gender. … Luckily, by deadline, the CW had only sent a 25-minute presentation preview of "The Beautiful Life," the drama executive-produced by Ashton Kutcher about models in New York (a topic he knows about). If you are thinking shallow model culture is ripe for the CW, then you are too savvy to watch this show. But if you do (proving you are immune to the numerous warnings in this column about vapidity, pointless gloss and heinous writing), know that those 25 minutes felt like 105 minutes, so you should set the DVR accordingly. …

The Philadelphia Inquirer says:

… Laughable plot, wooden dialogue, cutout characters; stupid title appendage to make it more textable; usual cynical CW glorification of teen sexuality and substance abuse; mediocre acting. …

The Boston Herald says:

… It's not a great show - Raina's selfless act late in the hour doesn't ring true - but with some script styling, these models could be tarting up CW's screen for a long time to come. The catwalk has never looked so enticing.

The Boston Globe says:

… the acronym "TBL'' makes me think of two words: Troubled and terrible. In the case of "The Beautiful Life: TBL,'' I'm going to go with "troubled'' for now, and reserve the right to use "terrible'' later. … Let's see if the writers can make these sweet kids into more than cardboard cutouts. …

Variety says:

… little more than a title in search of an actual show -- less TV to talk about, per the CW's ad campaign, than TV to groan at. …

The Hollywood Reporter says:

… As an entree into a cutthroat profession, "TBL" looks good on the surface: It's fast-paced, eye-popping and seductively, shallowly interesting (words that could describe much of the CW lineup). But despite fulfilling so many expectations, "TBL" doesn't hit any high points. Posen's outfits aside, the clothes are unspectacular, and the models wearing them are just ... regular-pretty. When a fashion-show audience gasps at Raina's breakout moment, the regular-audience at home should feel those reverberations -- and they never come. For all its well-designed moves, "TBL" is made of some pretty chintzy material.

9 p.m. Wednesday. The CW.