Fans of fashion-related television and good acting alike can rejoice: The Beautiful Life: TBL is not all about troubled actress Mischa Barton. Her top model character Sonja, who has the hollow, unwieldy voice of a chainsmoker recovering from a hangover, is not the show’s focus. In fact, Barton’s appearances in the pilot are so infrequent that, despite her outlandish behavior, every time she reappears on screen comes as a surprise.

Far more interesting is the blonde and charming Sara Paxton, as recently anointed It Girl Raina. Of course, this being a CW show, Raina has her share of problems that not even being stunning gorgeous can solve. Most notably, she has a mysterious father about to be released from jail and a bossy brother who clearly lost out in the family’s looks lottery.

Most of the first episode was given over to Chris (Ben Hollingsworth), who rather improbably is on vacation with his family when he’s discovered at a fancy restaurant after giving lecherous Simon (Dusan Dukic) a stern talking to for dissing his waitress. Chris is saddled with a distant father, the kind of man who claims it will take three harvests to pay for their meal. And this salt-of-the-earth man is less than thrilled that his square-jawed, corn fed boy is ditching his family to pursue a modeling career. Of course, given that only the horny Simon sees potential in him, one can hardly blame his father.

But this innocent newcomer intrigues Raina when she meets him in the hallway of her agency, run by Claudia Foster (Elle Macpherson). So she takes him under her wing, instructing him during a test photo shoot to pretend he’s in the shower, with the warm water drizzling down his body. If Chris had only bothered watching those Top Model marathons with his younger sister, such ridiculous directions would have been unnecessary, but one imagines he was too busy working the combine to bother with learning how to smile with his eyes and give broken doll.

As silly as the show is, with the good looks in direct proportion to the talent (save Paxton), there’s a certain masochistic scratch itched in wallowing in all of these impossibly good looking people being paid to impersonate impossibly good looking people. Sure, they have problems too, but most of them come from being impossibly good looking. A former child model must whore himself out for work; an arrogant male model gets busted for selling cocaine; the girls exchange tight-lipped, passive-aggressive compliments as they battle it out for campaigns. As long as Barton’s secret love child is kept on the back burner and Paxton moved front and center, there’s no reason why The Beautiful Life: TBL (despite its absurd title) can’t become the latest guilty pleasure on a network that specializes in them. Besides, think of the crossover appeal between TBL, Gossip Girl, and America's Next Top Model. As Tyra might say, “That is so fierce!”

Photo by Takashi Seida /The CW.