Beauty & The Beast

Reboots are often successful in the movie world (Star Trek, Batman etc.), but on TV, they have yet to get much traction.

The rebooted Dallas, 90210 and Hawaii Five-O trudge along with enough viewers to get renewals. But they hardly inspire much water-cooler talk the next day.

And then there's Beauty & The Beast, a reboot of an '80s pop phenomenon that seems to have succumbed to a barrage of studio "notes" before it even began. The result: four months in, this CW show (Showcase in Canada) loses almost half its viewers from its lead-in The Vampire Diaries, and two-thirds of its share of the coveted 18-49 category.

For those whose memories don't go back to President George Bush Sr., the original Beauty & The Beast was a Harlequin Romance of a series - with Linda Hamilton as a doe-eyed district attorney constantly in need of saving and Ron Perlman (under tons of makeup) as a "lion-man" named Vincent, who lived under the city and quoted poetry so purple to his l