Too Beautiful to Live: still alive and kicking

Too Beautiful to Live with Luke Burbank, a weekly evening talk show on Seattle's KIRO-FM until its cancellation last week, attracted an audience of "NPR defectors...people who were married to NPR but were stepping out on them," Burbank, former NPR reporter and co-host of the short-lived Bryant Park Project, tells the Seattle Times. As it turned out, after more than 300 broadcasts this audience was tiny: in July the show drew an average quarter hour rating of 1,400 listeners between the ages of 25 to 54, about 1.4 percent of its target demographic in the Seattle market. "Frankly, if I was managing KIRO, I'd have done the same thing," Burbank says of the decision to take TBTL off the air. In an interim arrangement expected to last at least until January, when his KIRO contract ends, Burbank is producing a regular TBTL podcast.