Playboy Clubbed

NBC, having spent seven seasons at the bottom of the broadcast television food chain, has tried to shake things up with a controversial show that, true to form, has generated more controversy for NBC than ratings.  "The Playboy Club," a "Mad Men"-style ripoff set in the original Playboy men's club that opened in Chicago in the early sixties, has drawn fire from an unlikely (until you consider their arguments) alliance of feminists and cultural conservatives for its exploitation of women.  The show's cast members have defended it for celebrating those females who worked as "Playboy bunny" waitresses in these clubs as self-empowering pre-feminist types who found a way to command respect in a male-dominated society.

Good grief, even the Tea Party offers up more believable Orwellianisms than that. 

Anyway, Gloria Steinem, who once worked undercover as a Playboy bunny in the New York club, presented a much more persuasive argument against it than the anyone involved with the series have to able to produce in its favor. The series, Steinem says, "normalizes a passive dominant idea of gender. So it normalizes prostitution and male dominance."

Meanwhile, the politically arch-conservative Parents Television Council - no supporter of feminist theory - has panned "The Playboy Club," joining Steinem in advocating a boycott and calling  it "a blatant attempt to obliterate any remaining standards of broadcast decency." Meanwhile, KSL-TV, NBC's affiliate in Salt Lake City, has refused to air the series.  KSL-TV pretty much serves the entire state of Utah, whose largely Mormon population frowns on anything sexually explicit. 

Calls for a boycott may have helped the show's detractors before it was even aired.  A mere five million viewers tuned into watch "The Playboy Club" when it debuted on September 19, and more than 20 percent of that audience didn't bother to see it again the following week.  Astonishingly, NBC is keeping it on for now, thinking it just needs time to find an audience.

Dude, this isn't exactly "Hill Street Blues." 

It's fine by me if "The Playboy Club" stays on for awhile, because that will make sure that Gloria Steinem and Brent Bozell, normally ideological opponents, work side by side.  And that, in and of itself, is more entertaining.

Meanwhile, ABC has tried to capture the formula of "Mad Men" and put it in its own bottle, and the Disney network's effort seems to have paid off.  "Pan Am," a series about stewardesses for the now-defunct airline of that name and starring Christina Ricci, has gotten much better reviews and much better ratings in depicting women in the early 1960s in the way "The Playboy Club" insists it does -  it depicts them as finding empowerment in the limited career opportunities offered them.  But then wearing a WAC-style uniform and serving drinks to male customers on a plane is always classier than wearing a bunny uniform and serving drinks to male customers in a club - or TV show - that never gets off the ground.