Posted on 10/07/2011 4:24:43 AM PDT by Kaslin
NBC President Robert Greenblatt was really committed to the new drama "The Playboy Club" just weeks ago. "What it has going for it is a recognizable brand that's automatically going to draw attention to it, good or bad," he said. "It's the right kind of thing for us to try." They tried it. Three episodes later, NBC made it the first canceled series of the season. Trains have rarely wrecked as ingloriously as this one.
By the third episode, NBC could barely muster 3 million viewers, while ABC ("Castle") and CBS ("Hawaii Five-O") were both over 11 million. This show had flop sweat all over it. Entertainment Weekly wrote after the cancellation announcement that "The move is no surprise and, indeed, was expected months before the show premiered." So why on Earth did NBC work so hard to promote this show and its pornographic brand?
They weren't the only promoters. The Playboy porn empire aggressively swung for the fences, pushing the NBC show everywhere, including the cover of its October issue. For which they charged just 60 cents at the porn stand. (NBC was promoted right above "The Gentleman's Guide to Having an Affair.")
Playboy chieftain Hugh Hefner tweeted his spin: "I'm sorry NBC's 'The Playboy Club' didn't find its audience. It should have been on cable, aimed at a more adult audience." That's a weird analysis, since putting it on cable would have made the comparisons to AMC's sixties drama "Mad Men" even more intense. It's also disingenuous. NBC most deliberately wanted to bring all the shock and awe to higher-profile broadcast TV. On cable, it wouldn't have lasted two hours.
TV critics were pretty brutal with NBC. Previewing the season debut, Time's James Poniewozik presciently wrote, "I suspect that using the actual Playboy brand is the original sin of a show based in a theoretically strong premise, from which by definition it can't recover."
Poniewozik found Hefner's cameo on the show's first episode especially vomit inducing. He shared his personal notes about his reaction. Hefner's voice-over cooed: "It was the early '60s, and the bunnies were some of the only women in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be." Poniewozik reacted "Barf". Then Hefner said, "So come on in. You can be anyone you want to be. But like it says on the door, if you don't swing -- don't ring." Poniewozik's note to himself: "Barf, Barf, Barf."
For his part, Hefner immediately went back to work promoting his massive ego (and his accompanying 4,000-plus scrapbooks celebrating himself) around Hollywood. "There is renewed studio interest in a major motion picture on my life and the start of the Sexual Revolution," he tweeted.
"Playboy Club" anything-goes defenders insisted the show wasn't really that explicit or offensive. But NBC made actors sign a nudity clause before filming. "Nudity as defined above and/or simulated sex acts may be required in connection with player's services in the pilot and/or series," according to Variety. Sexual "liberation" was clearly on the agenda.
One of the final scenes of the first episode featured two married characters - in a "lavender marriage," hiding each other's homosexuality. They were running a meeting of the Chicago chapter of the radical-left Mattachine Society, an early gay rights group. The male actor in that pairing, Sean Maher, came out of the closet in the real world at the same time.
Amber Heard, the female lead in "The Playboy Club," was also openly gay, and as the show collapsed, she was starring in the New York fashion magazine Vs. in racy black-and-white photos that promised "some edgy girl-on-girl action with a sado-masochistic theme." Who knows what would have been cooked up for NBC in the months to come?
Before the third and final episode, cast member David Krumholtz lashed out on Twitter at the Parents Television Council, the leading opponent of the show, for threatening his paycheck. He attacked the PTC on Twitter for "randomly" choosing the Playboy show, and then claimed Playboy is less offensive than the Mormons and Catholics, who have "a long history of degrading women."
When someone asked how Catholics degrade women, he snapped back "My bad. I should have said little children instead of women." (He later apologized.)
The show's cancellation is a victory for foes of pornified TV shows. But the push-the-envelope instincts of network executives like Greenblatt do not inspire much comfort. For those in love with trying the edgy shows all over prime time, there's always a new low around the corner. There's no telling what will be the right kind of thing for them to try next.
Pretty funny seeing dreck from the dreckmasters at NBC and Playboy flop like this.
(Although I never did actually “see” any of it.)
They should have pushed the writers to write something that wasn't crap. Lame attempt to cash in on "Mad Men".
So they make a Playboy show and the main characters are gay?
I assume they bought the porn magazine for the articles.
I understand why the media has a direct interest in promoting hedonism - but while this doddering, creepy pervert represents the truth of hedonism, he is an absolutely terrible advertisement for it. I don't get it.
Amber Heard is gay? Hmm.
Got to vote not guilty on that one . . .
The only network tv I watch is on Sunday. Sunday between 1pm and 11pm. I skip all commercials. And I only watch match ups that interest me like NE vs NY.
The rest if network is gay friendly lesbian oriented shilling for leftist political orgs.
Even the NFL is turning really queer so I’m almost done with them to.
And I hate IPhone auto correct too!
I didn’t know anything about the show and I pay no attention to network tv (haven’t seen any series show in several years), but it is most entertaining to read about this collapse. Serves the scumbags right.
btw, how did the morons ever think that getting a “Playboy Club” show entwined in a gay rights agenda with gay/lesbian actors in lead roles could possibly catch on with the needed demographics?? Gays aren’t going to care about this show, and healthy hetero males are not going to be interested in this approach...... a very big LOL.
The same attempt to "bring back the old days" with this so-called Wall Street protest will also fall flat on its face.
It's almost humorous to see these excercises in futile theater
she actually said she was bisexual, if I remember correctly.
I’m still shocked they picked up “Whitney”, the pilot was of a lower quality than my local community theater. A bunch of unknown stand up circuit comedians with their feet stuck in cement, making parody of parody jokes about relationships while wildly flailing their arms about is not a television sitcom.
Playboy clubs, like all strip clubs, were never anything but havens for pathetic losers whose idea of hot sex was looking at a woman. Or being seen with one. I can’t imagine why anybody thought a TV show based on that premise would prosper.
How can an industry that survives on public consumption so consistently and grossly misread the consuming public? The only thing I can think of is that this video vomit is developed in a vacuum and promotes some ideal enshrined in the narrow corridors of Hollywood but nowhere else.
Hawaii Five-o reruns are beating them? Wow, It must be a real stinker.
I thought the playboy club went the way of “highballs”. Or was this a sort of “Mad Men” type of thing?
I just read the article. I feel like I have just awakened in a parallel universe that makes me want to vomit. I am dumbstruck that such people, as well as plots, get any notice of our society and that the activity can be viewed as anything but repugnant.
I just read the article. I feel like I have just awakened in a parallel universe that makes me want to vomit. I am dumbstruck that such people, as well as plots, get any notice of our society and that the activity can be viewed as anything but repugnant.
Getting rid of TV over a decade ago has given me an apparently unique perspective. Our culture has significantly coursened.
If you are going to do a sexually themed show it is never gonna work on broadcast TV with it’s standards and restrictions. It needs to be on pay cable where people who would be offended have the option not to subscribe.
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