Viewers Ignore "Melrose Place;" Ashton's "Beautiful Life" Bombs

The season so far has been a good news/bad news scenario for The CW, with one of its three new series emerging as a solid hit while the other two have bombed spectacularly.

The good news for The CW has been "The Vampire Diaries," which is predictably attracting all those blood-thirsty "Twilight" fans. And deservedly so, because it's a very good show, far more entertaining than I was expecting.

And now the bad news. After an underwhelming debut, the "Melrose Place" ratings dipped to less than 2 million viewers in its second outing. Expect these numbers to get even lower in weeks to come, as the much-hyped (but flat-out horrible) show continues to shed viewers.

And this week, Ashton Kutcher's fashion-model drama "The Beautiful Life: TBL" premiered to disastrous ratings, with less an 1.5 million tuning in. 1.5 million, in fact, is the same number of viewers who tuned into "Vampire Diaires" — in Canada! That's a huge number for Canadian television, but in the U.S., a Slanket infomercial at 2 a.m. gets more viewers than that. If The CW were an actual network, I'd guarantee both of these shows would be history by November; but since The CW literally has nothing else in the can to replace them with, I expect both shows will probably limp along until midseason, unless they figure they can get higher ratings with "Top Model" reruns.

Meanwhile, Jay Leno's primetime train wreck continues its predicted drop, shedding more than 40 per cent of his audience in his second airing. Night one was spectacular, with more than 18 million looky-loos tuning in to see what all the fuss was about. The following night, viewership had dropped down to 10 million. There was a bit of a bump on Wednesday (perhaps attributable to guest Robin Williams) up to 13 million, but Thursday's show dropped down to 8.5 million, a drop off of more than 10 million viewers from night one to night four. It does not bode well that last night's edition of Leno was lower ratings than a rerun of "The Mentalist" on CBS.

I can't wait to see how much lower this goes next week and thereafter, once CBS and ABC kick off their new seasons and Jay's competition isn't just reruns. My prediction: after a few weeks, "The Jay Leno Show" will settle in at about 3 million or so as flop-sweat panic sets in at NBC's Rockefeller Center headquarters as the brainiac executives who came up with this stupid idea try to distance themselves from this mess and attempt to shift the blame to Jay.