The Playboy Club

The Playboy Club

Annnnnd it's canceled. That sure didn't take long, but it seems that this show could not keep its ratings up for more than 3 episodes and that's why it deserved to die.

Okay, that's not entirely true. This show deserved to die for other reasons. Specifically that it was a show about a Playboy club on network television. How exactly was that suppose to work? You can't go and show what people are expecting from a show called "Playboy" on network television without the FCC getting on your ass and fining you. And you're just going to piss off the religious right/conservatives with the fact that you're glorifying the Playboy franchise.

You might as well not have bothered at all with the whole idea especially since it was only inevitable before the PTC started a campaign against it. So it was a given that Pan Am was the winner for the 60's period drama that got to survive yet another day.

Women's rights advocate Gloria Steinem wants you to boycott NBC's upcoming "Playboy Club" series because it glamorizes an inaccurate depiction of the 1960s era men's club where waitresses walked around in bunny costumes. Actually, the show should be shunned because it's an attempt by NBC to ride on the stylistic coattails of AMC's "Mad Men" and you know that a broadcast network will not be able to pull off what Matthew Weiner has done on AMC even though they've had years to figure it out. There's about a million shows that should be boycotted because of their depiction and treatment of women, most of them in the 'reality' format: "The Bachelor," "Jersey Shore," "Bad Girls Club," "Keeping Up With The Kardashians," etc. None of those shows are reality - the storylines and characters are crafted and arranged by the producers creating a product that is just as manufactured as any scripted series.

So yeah, I can't figure out why they felt there would be a huge audience for this show. It may have worked on HBO with a lot of nudity but it just goes to show you that NBC can't get a decent dramatic series going. They bombed hard last year with The Event. Now Playboy can't keep it up. Apparently even Hugh Hefner said that it should have been on cable.

Then there's Pan Am. This looks like the winner of the era replication of the 1960's Mad Men-esque shows. So yeah, I can't help but think that it's a rip off of Mad Men, but instead of making it a show set in the 60's, they set it in the eyes of the future according to someone in the 60's. Look at the sets and the awe that comes from the show.

Though I guess it not pulling its punches on the misogyny front and having barely enough dramatic writing to be passable for a decent nighttime soap opera will work in its favor. But hey, at least it can say it's not The Playboy Club. The only saving grace in all this is that I'm pretty sure they have free range to make a slew of erectile dysfunction jokes as this was the first show of the new season to get canceled for poor performance.