Reports of the demise of Taradise were slightly exaggerated. The E! Entertainment Television travelogue/partymentary, with tottering Tara Reid as the occasionally too exuberant host, performed adequately for the network in the ratings, hovering around E!’s summer prime time average of about 400,000 viewers.
But the show will indeed not be back for a second season. E! Networks President Ted Harbert tells B&C that Taradise, a marginally less lascivious and more intensely host-centric version of the network’s long-running beach’n’bikini-fest Wild On, proved to be a more complicated project than its previous incarnations.
“The show was incredibly difficult to produce with someone well-known,” Harbert says. “Tara was involved in every minute, and it was an exhausting production.”
E! will run 12 of 13 planned episodes of the show that tracked Reid’s funfunfun visits to Monte Carlo, Spain, Athens and Cyprus, Greece, and other places where bartenders are known to work.
The online folks at Gawker Media were especially attentive to the series: The Defamer Web site’s recent report that Taradise “is no more” was nearly accurate (they said two episodes would remain unshot), and Gridskipper tirelessly chronicled “the ultimate in do-nothing television.”
We’ll miss those pitiless, hilarious summaries almost as much as—O.K., a whole lot more than—the show itself.
