I don’t really think that the Linda Lovelace biopic starring Amanda Seyfriend (there are several, one has to keep track) is going to do what The Playboy Club should have and didn’t do: capture the benefits and pitfalls that the sexual revolution offered women, including the freedom to have more sex without fear of pregnancy, and the corresponding expectation that they’d be more sexually available. But I do think it sounds like it might argue the inverse of The Playboy Club‘s silly assertion that the show was going to be about women’s empowerment, and take a hard line against pornography. My guess is based mostly on the fact that the project’s cast Demi Moore to play Gloria Steinem, suggesting her 1980 Ms. Magazine piece “The Real Linda Lovelace” will be some sort of frame device for the movie.

I don’t really think that either of these perspectives really captures the tension of the period. Just because Linda Lovelace was coerced into performing in pornographic films, or because Chuck Traynor coached her on her oral sex skills doesn’t mean no woman can ever find fulfillment in the adult industry or enjoy performing oral sex. Just because the Playboy Club wasn’t a model employer doesn’t mean that no woman ever found independence by working there. There’s no question that a pornografied culture has made headway in America, but it speaks to the success of feminism that it’s made those advances by wrapping itself in the mantle of women’s liberation and independence. Neither a purely anti-porn pitch, nor a pitch that women will be most happy by making themselves sexually available and fine-tuned to men has proven entirely successful. What women wanted was more subtle and complex than any one very successful pornographic movie then, and it remains as tricky and elusive now.

A special notice! Friend of the Blog and frequent commenter Zack Stentz and his writing partner Ashley Miller have sold a TV adaptation of The Magicians to Fox. This is awesome news (plus, er, the impetus I need to read The Magician and The Magician King this weekend), so lots of high fives to Zack if you see him in comments.

-Netflix: still signing up pretty good content deals.

-Bein’ sexy: not an automatic recipe for a hit TV show.

-Erik Kain is watching and blogging The Wonder Years.

-The trailer for Young Adult is out, and it looks like Patton Oswalt might be the best thing in it:

The bridge is yours.

-How do you tell if a show is so bad it’s good?

-A basic tutorial on Lifetime movies.

-”Television is for lazy and tired people, while the active and young choose the Internet as it gives them more interactive opportunities.”

-Mindy Kaling is back and blogging. Though mostly about shopping.

-The combination of a tough action director portraying the violence of a repressive regime should be interesting. Not sure about the dialogue, though:

This was supposed to be a great fall for women on television, but several weeks in, it feels like it may be better at the cause of getting women acting jobs than at providing entertainment aimed at women viewers. With that odd disconnect in mind, my friend Lux asked me what I thought made a show woman-oriented a while back, and I was reminded of it again reading Nellie Andreeva’s meditation on The Playboy Club, Charlie’s Angels, and Prime Suspect*’s ratings troubles when she wrote:

For Playboy, there was a lack of clarity who the show is for. With a popular mens magazine in the title and the promise of scantly-clad bunnies, the series seemed to be targeting men. But it was at its core a female soap. The confusion with its mixed identity was clearly visible in the pilot, which looked like a soap, felt like a soap and behaved like one until it suddenly veered into dark territory with a murdered mafia boss’ body being dumped in the river.

As with most of these things, I think it’s easier to narrow down a definition by figuring out what’s not aimed at women. New Girl, despite its name and female protagonist, really don’t feel to me like it’s aimed at women at all. The show’s advertising focuses on how the character is perceived (thus, “adorkable”) rather than who she is. Most of the episodes I’ve seen so far are on the surface about problems Jess resolves, but are actually about the things her male roommates learn from helping her solve problems — the show is about their emotional growth more than hers. Up All Night, by contrast, could work for either gender of coastal elites, but I think is slightly more aimed at women. It’s not that Will Arnett’s stay-at-home dad Chris doesn’t have a character arc, because he clearly does. But there are also women wrestling with a whole range of career and life issues, and the core couple’s storylines are, obviously, interdependent. Raising a small human tends to do that. And I can’t quite figure out if 2 Broke Girls is supposed to be aimed at women or not: it’s got female protagonists, but it remains unclear whether they’re meant to be points of entry or objects of consumption (which may be more a problem of execution than artistic intent).

Tone isn’t really determinative, either. New Girl may be all Dirty Dancing-themed sing-a-longs and sunshine, while Prime Suspect looks gritty and muted, lots of grays and washed-out purples, plus, you know, omnipresent brutal murder. But the show is essentially a funhouse version of what it feels like to work in a bad male-dominated environment. It’s kind of a horror story with a female protagonist who gets to be a hero without having to be a virgin. And it’s not really tone that’s wrong with Playboy Club. It’s that the show puts women’s bodies on screens but no concrete ideas in their heads to relate to. Finding your dad by posing for Playboy is not an idea Viewers at Home can relate to, or analogous to any situations we are likely to face in real life.

*You should watch Prime Suspect. Maria Bello is very good, and the show deserves to survive.

I’m somewhat anxious about the turn that Raising Hope has taken this season into incredibly broad humor, but this article and watching Deadwood made me think about how much I like Garret Dillahunt. He’s a wide-ranging actor, but he’s also very good at doing something pretty difficult: making sympathetic characters who aren’t very smart.

Maureen, the Bunny who is supposed to be our entre into The Playboy Club in the show of the same name, is hard to sympathize with not because she’s bought into a false idea of liberation (though, the whole my-long-lost-dad-will-see-me-on-the-cover-of-Playboy-and-get-in-touch thing is pretty false), but because she’s really, really dumb. She leaves her blood-stained Bunny uniform poorly concealed under her bed in a Playboy-owned dorm. She keeps the key to the club owned by the man she killed in self-defense. She doesn’t seem to understand that hanging out in her underwear with a man one of her coworkers is dating might not be interpreted as a good-faith attempt not to flirt with the dude. All of her problems are self-created. And the plot doesn’t exist and move forward without Maureen making transparently dreadful decisions. That’s a recipe for disaster and perpetual infuriation.

But Dillahunt is kind of a genius at portraying characters who are, well, not that, but who don’t seem repellently stupid. Jack McCall is an obnoxious, thin-skinned sot, but in Deadwood, you can sort of see why Wild Bill Hickock needles him so much. Hickock has everything, but he’s not happy about it, and he’s not blowing it gleefully: he’s bitter, and obnoxious. McCall has nothing but the power to mess with Hickock, not even the power to resist doing it.
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So, it looks like in their ongoing quest to shut down The Playboy Club, the Parents Television Council may have overstated the number of advertisers who are pulling out of NBC’s period drama. Kraft and P.F. Chang’s confirmed to AdWeek that they haven’t dropped their advertising contracts with the show — instead, they just had episodic ad buys. I still think the chances of the show vanishing from airwaves soon are relatively high — the already low ratings dropped by a million for the second episode. But I don’t really think it’ll be over morality concerns. The show isn’t actually sexy enough to ruffle feathers.

The Parents Television Council has to be one of the smartest outfits in Washington. They’re incredibly good at identifying winning controversies, even if they’re not necessarily right on the merits. And it looks like their latest scalp might end up being NBC’s The Playboy Club. PTC’s been targeting the show for months, and now they’ve announced that seven advertisers have pulled out of The Playboy Club, theoretically in response to PTC’s call for a boycott. There’s no question that such a move would make sense given the show’s dismal ratings. And while PTC is right that the show has, in the words of PTC’s president, Tim Winter, been “a commercial disaster,” I think he’s wrong to call the show a “degrading and sexualizing program.”

I don’t think that being a Playboy Bunny was inherently liberating, and I think it was a mistake for the network and the show’s creators to sell it that way over the summer. It was a ridiculous claim, and easy for the show’s opponents to debunk. But showing women being super-empowered all of the time isn’t the only way to make a feminist show. And while The Playboy Club has some contradictory elements and mixed messages, I think that on balance, the show does more to display the evils of sexism than it does to promote them.

There’s no question that, at least in the pilot, The Playboy Club was still trying to sell the idea that being a Playboy Bunny was, well, the Hef’s pajamas—glamorous and liberating all at once. Voiceovers from Hugh Hefner in that episode insisted that the Bunnies were super-liberated, even as the actual events of the show insisted, they were still quite vulnerable. In the world of the show, whatever the Bunnies might have believed about their jobs, they were still vulnerable to clients who assumed they were prostitutes, powerful figures who sexually harassed or assaulted them on the job, men who didn’t want to promote them, and rigid standards for their self-presentation enforced by other women. And outside the club, the characters have boyfriends who want them to quit, abusive ex-husbands they’re in hiding from, or sham marriages to help them hide their sexual orientation. The Bunnies may get excited about the chance to be on the cover of Playboy, but the $2,000 that comes with the career opportunity is also a big deal. They may live in a swanky dorm, but they’re still grown women who can’t afford or aren’t allowed to have their own apartments.

This, as with The House Bunny, a charming Anna Faris vehicle about a former Playboy Bunny from 2008, doesn’t really do much to make the case that it was awesome to be one of Hef’s girls, now or then. Maybe being harassed was worth it if the money let you hide from a husband you couldn’t divorce. Maybe selling your sex appeal was worth the chance to become the first person in your family to own property in a gentrified Chicago neighborhood. In its clumsy way, The Playboy Club has made these dilemmas clear. The show isn’t good. With the ratings it’s getting it’s probably going to be cancelled. And the PTC will be able to claim a huge scalp out of it. But when The Playboy Club dies it’ll be because it’s a not very well-written, and often badly-acted television show, not because it glamorizes Bunnydom, or because it’s sexist.

I’ll admit I started watching The Playboy Club with a certain measure of ill grace and anti-Eddie Cibrian bias, and even after watching it, I think my skepticism is correct. There are a lot of intriguing elements in this show — a former mob lawyer who’s now representing black Chicagoans in housing discrimination cases; an aging Bunny trying to move into the ranks of management; a black Bunny who sees the Club as a refuge from the outside world’s discrimination; the problematic but interesting notion that being a Bunny was a way to reinvent yourself, even if it was a highly controlled and limited one — that are essentially swamped under some deeply clunky writing and overacting by the leads. But the first episode did have one surprise so gratifying and so potentially important that I’ll be back for another round of the show, even if it’s a storyline that’s only five minutes a week.

A lot of the Playboy Club’s problems, I think, stem from a lack of self-awareness, of the pilot’s unwillingness to explore the uncomfortable assumptions behind the things the characters are saying to each other that should be the essence of a show like this that’s all about a moment when one set of behaviors became not okay and another set of behaviors and identities fought ferociously for their right to exist. When some young Club patrons learn, to their surprise, that they can’t sleep with one of the Bunnies for the grand total of $1.50, the Bunny in question explains to them, “And I’m not a waitress, either. I’m Bunny Janie.” The interesting bit here is that self-delusion, the idea that she’s achieved some separate category, and what it takes to convince herself of that. When Hugh Hefner says in the voiceover that opens the show, “it was a place where anything could happen to anybody. Or any Bunny,” that’s true, only if bad things can happen as well as good things.

The other challenge the show faces, and I’m curious to see how Pan Am will handle this, is how to create an atmosphere of pervasive sexism and racism without making the characters who say sexist and racist things seem totally revolting to an audience who will refuse to identify with them in ways that will allow the show to actually explore issues. When one Bunny jauntily declares that if she overeats at the Mansion’s breakfast buffet, “I just stick my finger down my throat and throw ‘em up. It’s this new diet I heard about,” it’s alienating rather than creating affinity between an audience who knows the cost of bulimia and a character who’s embracing it as a trend.
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As usual, the bridge is yours.

-Have we really not figured out how to keep stages from collapsing?

-I will only watch The Playboy Club if there’s a Rahm Emanuel analogue among the show’s politicians.

-I’m not shocked that a barbarian movie doesn’t have strong female characters.

-It would be nice to see the Falcon in Captain America 2.

-I’m reading Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken right now: this is a cool interview with her.

I haven’t actually seen The Playboy Club (though I’ve got a request in to NBC for screeners), but it strikes me that Gloria Steinem’s call for a boycott of the show on the grounds that it romanticizes a place she found to be sexist and unglamorous is overblown. The network’s decision to sell the show as a parable of women’s empowerment also seems to be overstating the case — in part because I don’t think it’s necessary.

The very thing that’s interesting about the sexual revolution is that it’s contradictory, right? Getting to a place where your sexuality isn’t your father’s to withhold or give away, and where the way you dress and present yourself is governed by your preferences rather than by norms of what’s appropriate is an important first step. But it doesn’t mean you can’t be sexually harassed, or misinterpreted, or end up in a liberation movement where you’re told that your role is to provide sexual comfort for the men leading it. What’s interesting about the ’60s is the process people went through over and over again, whether they thought they’d escaped sexism, or racism, or homophobia, only to find that they hadn’t, and that they had to try in new and different ways to build a more perfect world.

It’s entirely possible both that the women of The Playboy Club thought that setting themselves up as sexual icons, and that they could be harassed and humiliated on the job. In fact, the first big plot arc of the show, in which Amber Heard accidentally kills a customer who tries to sexually assault her, looks like it’s pretty squarely situated in just that dilemma (even if the death itself is of the One Tree Hill Dog Ate My Heart Transplant variety):

And perhaps more to the point, I don’t think Steinem has to worry. This is a show that posits Eddie Cibrian as a poor man’s Jon Hamm. I’m not particularly worried that it’s going to garner a lot of viewers and critical acclaim and stick around for a long time.