RIP Playboy Club

(September 19, 2011 – October 4, 2011)

A moment of silence, please, for The Playboy Club.

It passed away in the night, while its viewers were peacefully sleeping. It was three episodes old.

It is survived by Mad Men and Pan Am.

When it first hit the scene there was hope for the show. It promised to deliver a message of female empowerment all wrapped up with a cute bunny tail. But, alas, it was not to be.

Gloria Steinem thought it was too sexist. The Parents Television Council thought it was too sexy. And the Playboy Bunnies thought it was just plain wrong.

“I didn’t like the whole show,” said Bunny Marilyn Miller. “I thought it was cheap, it was degrading, it was demoralizing… Not one Bunny I know liked the show. Everyone is hoping it gets canceled.”

Well, her wish was granted. It debuted with only five million viewers and for its final broadcast only 3.4 million tuned in. The network has decided to replace it with the news.

The show was hoping to ride the coat-tails of the incredibly popular Mad Men, but where that retro show took a right, The Playboy Club veered dangerously off course. The show was sexist, not because it was set in the 1960s, but because it was written to objectify women and propel men back into a world where their word was the only one that mattered. The real life Bunnies were working girls trying to make it in a world that only saw women as a nice piece of tail. That show would have been interesting.

Instead we have the club positioned as the saviour of a collection of vapid, witless women who haven’t enough sense to get a job or enough personality to land a man. Without the benevolent dictatorship of Hef, these girls would have been eaten alive in that big, scary world. It is as if we are expected to believe that Playboy invented feminism and that we ought to thank Hefner for granting us empowerment.

Filming of the series is continuing, it the hopes that it will sell to another network. Hugh Hefner’s twitter account apparently thinks it should be on cable and aimed at a more adult audience — so perhaps The Playboy Channel will pick it up. However, it was not the lack of skin that offended the critics. According to The New York Times, “an unwieldy and mostly humdrum combination of mob tale and backstage musical,” while the Chicago Tribune believed: “Like mean people or rainy Saturdays, the Playboy Club is, alas, a turn-off.”

But it is not good to speak ill of the dead. Rest in Peace, Playboy.

Contact the author here: mick@morningquickie.com