CW's The Beautiful Life TBL, its glossy new drama starring Mischa Barton, was scheduled to present its third episode tonight, but don't look for it. Two strikes -- two telecasts -- and it's already out.
Its replacement, for tonight at 9 ET, is a rerun of Melrose Place. That quick-kill fate may seem like a curse, but The Beautiful Life is not the latest victim of The Kickoff Curse. The series that's cursed this season, if the Kickoff Curse is going to come true again, is none other than... Melrose Place itself...
What is the Kickoff Curse, who invented it, and how reliable is it? Good questions all. Here are the answers.
The Kickoff Curse says, simply, that the new TV series to beat the others to the starting gate in a given season -- in other words, the show that takes a calculated head start by premiering earliest among all new freshman series -- will fail to survive to see a second season.
Who invented it? I did, decades ago. I had more spare time back then.
How reliable is it as an indicator of first-year failure? Over one 12-year stretch, it claimed a dozen victims in a row. And in the 34 years since a network intentionally jumped the gun in hopes of giving a new series some early attention, only six series lived to fight another day. Or, at least, another year.
Last year, for example, NBC's America's Toughest Jobs was first to arrive. It's gone, and isn't coming back. The year before that, it was Fox's Nashville, which went Nowheresville. And the year before that, in 2006, it was Fox's Vanished, which... vanished. So the past three years, the Kickoff Curse is 3 for 3.
This season, CW's Melrose Place, premiering September 8, inherits the Kickoff Curse. With Heather Locklear coming aboard soon, maybe this series can survive the curse, but not many have. Most prominent among the survivors are the CBS sitcom Alice in the 70s, ABC's newsmagazine Primetime Live in the 80s, Fox's sitcom Roc in the 90s, and the Fox drama Prison Break in the current decade.
And except for a pair of fairly recent sitcoms from the now-defunct UPN network, Girlfriends and One on One from 2000-01, those are the only survivors of a curse that began way back in 1975, during the Gerald Ford administration.
The most famous victims of the Kickoff Curse include ABC's fabulous 1994 teen drama My So-Called Life, starring Claire Danes; 1984's Call to Glory, an ABC drama starring Craig T. Nelson that explored the Kennedy-era 1960s the way Mad Men is doing now; and 1990's Hull High, the NBC series that was the last show to attempt a weekly high-school musical series until the current Glee.
For the record, and for your amusement, here's the complete list of shows that faced the Kickoff Curse, along with their respective fates. Only shows which are underlined survived the curse.
Remember any of these? If most of the names don't ring a bell... well, that's the point.
YEAR.....NET.....SERIES
2009......CW.....Melrose Place (fate unknown)
2008.....NBC.....America's Toughest Jobs
2007.....Fox.....Nashville
2006.....Fox.....Vanished
2005.....Fox.....Prison Break
2004.....Fox.....North Shore
2003.....NBC.....Whoopi
2002......WB.....Family Affair
2001.....UPN.....One on One
2000.....UPN.....Girlfriends
1999.....UPN.....Grown Ups
1998.....Fox.....Holding the Baby
1997.....UPN.....Good News
1996.....Fox.....L.A. Firefighters
1995.....Fox.....The Crew
1994.....ABC.....My So-Called Life
1993.....Fox.....Front Page
1992.....ABC.....Covington Cross
1991.....Fox.....Roc
1990.....NBC.....Hull High
1989.....ABC.....Primetime Live
1988.....NBC.....Baby Boom
1987.....NBC.....Private Eye
1986.....CBS.....The Wizard
1985.....CBS.....Hometown
1984.....ABC.....Call to Glory
1983.....NBC.....We Got It Made
1982.....NBC.....The Powers of Matthew Star
1981.....ABC.....Best of the West
1980.....CBS.....Ladies' Man
1979.....ABC.....240-Robert
1978.....NBC.....Dick Clark's Live Wednesday
1977.....CBS.....The Betty White Show
1976.....CBS.....Alice
1975.....CBS.....Big Eddie