The Playboy Club

At the start of Amber Heard week I mentioned her starring role in the short-lived TV series The Playboy Club. It was the publicity surrounding the show that had me thinking about her in the first place, though I hadn't seen any episodes. Well, thanks to Comcast On Demand, I watched all three of the aired episodes today.

The show is not the worst thing I've ever seen, but its cancellation is not undeserved. It doesn't seem to have a real purpose--perhaps it's a copycat of Mad Men, in that it's a show set in the early '60s, full of vintage clothing, cars, and music. But unlike that much superior show, The Playboy Club doesn't really make any points. Mad Men uses the past as a mirror to the present. The Playboy Club, at least in the third episode, makes no stronger case that the bunnies at the clubs are decent, hard working women.

I've been reading Playboy for almost forty years, since I snuck peaks of my dad's issues, but I certainly get why some people object. Over its existence, Hugh Hefner has represented many things, a lot of them good--such as civil liberties and sexual freedom. But he has also maintained a curious view of feminism. Dressing women up as animals to serve men in clubs is not exactly a modern view of female empowerment. Hefner, who narrates the pilot episode, has never been able to reconcile the objectification of women and feminism, and this show has the same problem.

All this would be meaningless if the show had an interesting story or dialogue; it does not. Heard stars as a new bunny at the Chicago club. She, along with the other girls, lives at the Playboy Mansion (another curiously patriarchal habit--they aren't trusted to live on their own?) She's groped by a mobster and while fending him off kicks him in the throat with her three-inch heel, puncturing his jugular.

Luckily for her, a suave lawyer (Eddie Cibrian) comes to her aid and helps her dispose of the body. Cibrian, who even sounds like Jon Hamm's Mad Men character, seems to me be the Playboy ideal male, the guy who used to be pictured in ads titled "What Kind of Man Reads Playboy?" He's handsome, smart, successful, and dating the "bunny mother" (Laura Benanti). One wonders how he has so much time to be both successful and hang around the Playboy Club every night.

The mobster story dominates the first three episodes. We even get an appearance by Mayor Richard Daley, who is revealed to be dirty (shocking!). None of this was terribly compelling. Despite Benanti's excellent performance (and perfect look--she does look as if she came right out of a 1961 issue), her jealousy of Heard isn't very interesting.

A different approach might have made a more interesting show. A subplot involving an early gay rights organization was promising, and maybe, given time, more interesting historical things like that would have been incorporated in the storyline. But the show was neither fish nor fowl; Playboy suggests nudity, but of course on NBC there would be none. It would have worked better on a cable network that would have allowed full artistic freedom.