The Beautiful Life: TBL was a television program on the CW network that centered around the lives of young male and female models living in New York City and sharing an apartment. Gitlin says that “there is something of an over sensitivity to a given success; the pendulum seems to swing hard to replicate a winner” (257). So after seeing the successes of shows like The O.C., Gossip Girl, and 90210, the producers of The Beautiful Life probably felt fairly confident that they had a shot at making a successful program, operating under the notion that rich, over-privileged beautiful teens and young adults + big problems + [insert any setting here] + lots of drama= big hit, especially for the 18-34 age bracket, which is the CW’s target audience for most of their programming.
However, the show was cancelled after only two episodes because of low ratings, but six episodes had already been filmed. So producer Aston Kutcher decided to upload the remaining episodes to YouTube, saying that he wanted “this to be the first show ever that gets more viewers on the Web than what it got on terrestrial television” (NYT Blog). This meshes perfectly with what Sturken and Cartwright say about webcasting, that “users may upload content and images to personal websites and to centralized Web forums, and, in some cases, have their images, videos, or blogs viewed by thousands of other viewers” (234). Though the show did not garner more viewers online than on television as Kutcher had hoped, it did come somewhat close, with about 652,000 hits for the pilot episode on YouTube and 1.4 million viewers when it originally aired on television in September 2009. But this exhibits great possibilities for the future of a web series—there is an obvious audience, and with deft advertising for a web show, it would be possible for a show to be very successful on the Internet.
What is also interesting about The Beautiful Life and its transfer from television to “webvision” is how it relates to convergence. Because of convergence it has become very easy to translate media messages from one medium to another. The show, made for television, was instantly compatible to be uploaded and viewed on the Internet, and Kutcher advertised the YouTube airings on his Twitter page, hoping to get his 4 million Twitter fan followers to respond by going to YouTube and “hitting” his links. Now, taking this media transfer even further and seeing true convergence in action, The Beautiful Life uploaded to YouTube can be watched on a smart phone anywhere, anytime. The show is now transferrable to several different media forms. The entertainment industry can now borrow from the spiritual saying that “when God closes a door, he opens a window”; when network executives prematurely pull the stop on a show, the Internet creates an opportunity to put the finished work on display.
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/kutchers-beautiful-life-moves-to-youtube/
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