Okay, who had “The Playboy Club” as the first cancelled network show of the season? I sure did…

Wow… the show lasted a blistering three weeks.

I’m talking about “The Playboy Club,” a television drama that purported to use the backdrop of Hugh Hefner’s successful gentleman’s clubs as a jumping-off point for period drama.  The show was designed to titillate – showing Playboy bunnies and talking about the cocktail-and-martini 1960’s, with cameo narration – at least in the first episode – from Hef himself.

What did we get instead?  A melange of hackneyed, over-used plotlines that went absolutely nowhere.  The first episode started with a murder mystery – one of the Playboy Bunnies, in self-defense, killed the head of an organized crime family.  Even with three weeks of broadcasts, the plotline played out slower than frozen molasses.  Several of the other Bunny backstories were augmented with “I don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ve got this secret…” – Bunny Jamie was a criminal, Bunny Brenda is saving every penny for her own plot of real estate, Bunny Alice is in a lavender marriage with a gay man, the club owner Billy Rosen is in gambling debt up to his eyeballs, Bunny Mother Carol-Lynne is involved with the bar’s legal counsel, who is aspiring to become Illinois’ new State’s Attorney – correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that job currently held by – or will be in about 40 years be held by – Peter Florrick?  Har.

I blogged about this show and its retro TV brother “Pan Am” a few weeks ago, and although “The Playboy Club has a decent “retro” feel to it, and there are several noticeable brand names that are visible throughout the show – a bartender is moving boxes of Schlitz Beer; one of the Bunnies uses Aqua Net for her hair – the show itself tried to merge all these different iconic images without staying on one specific timeline.

And then they made the cardinal sin – a television sin as far as I’m concerned.  They tried bringing in pop stars to perform on the Playboy Club stage, pretending to be pop singers from the 1960’s.  I hated when they did that kind of “spot the star” junk on “American Dreams” ten years ago, and it doesn’t change for me today.  Last night’s episode, for example, featured pop singer Colbie Calliat pretending to be Lesley Gore.  That’s right… 26-year-old Colbie Calliat singing 17-year-old Lesley Gore’s “It’s My Party.”  Which was recorded in 1963.  Except that earlier in the episode, the show made plenty of references to its current timeline as 1961.  And for that matter, what’s a 17-year-old – or, if she’s in 1961, 15-year-old – doing performing in a nightclub that serves alcohol?  Wow, the things you can get away with in Chicago…

For that matter, is the show about the Bunnies and the lifestyle, or is it a variety show in which today’s artists pretend to be someone from the past?  So confused…

See, it’s stuff like that that makes viewers snap out of the “suspension of disbelief” that they’re watching real-life images, now suddenly they’re watching a bunch of actors playing roles in a scripted drama.

Let’s face it.  Was this show really anything more than an attempt by NBC to create a one-hour Playboy infomercial, using the Playboy Club as a network-sanitized version of “Mad Men”?  And despite all that, it didn’t work.

Honestly, this show is toast.  I don’t see any viewer campaigns starting up for this show, any write-in “save the Playboy Club” movements.

You want to know what they SHOULD have done with this program?

Don’t put a show like this on NBC.  Don’t put it on network broadcast television.  Find a pay channel like Cinemax or Showtime or even the Playboy Channel itself, and air the program – and add in footage and scenes of what people HOPE they see in a Playboy Club – and let it go from there.

That, or bring back the one Playboy-based TV show that was actually halfway decent – “Playboy After Dark.”

Because really, trying to watch a sanitized version of what life was like at a Playboy Club in the 1960’s is like trying to watch the PG-edited version of “Saturday Night Fever.”