Review: How in the World Did They Make "The Playboy Club" Boring?

Let's face it: on paper, a TV show set in the 1960s about the creation of the infamous Playboy Club at the dawn of the sexual revolution seems like an idea that couldn't miss.

Well, it misses. And the only interesting question is why.

The Playboy Club tells the story of a recently hired bunny Maureen (Amber Heard), her efforts to get along with the other bunnies and clients in the club (including "keyholder" Eddie Cibrian), and her Crystal Conners-like feud with the "mother" bunny (Laura Benanti).

But apparently the producers soon realized that this backstage drama had all been done many times before, so they added a murder.

Which is weird, because show starts with an actor playing Hugh Hefner narrating the words, "The world was changing ... and we were changing it." Why not dramatize that? Why squander the cool, attention-getting premise on cliché situations and stock characters (including a dictatorial "head" bunny who worries about her fading looks and, yes, a sassy black character)?

It doesn't help that a show about a subject matter that's supposed so "scandalous" ends up being surprisingly tame in actual content. Just as with Swingtown a few years back (a show about swinging in the 1970s), you have to ask: if scripted network television isn't willing to be daring, maybe it shouldn't take on these cable-friendly topics at all.

It also doesn't help that The Playboy Club's tone is off. The most interesting thing about Mad Men, which clearly helped inspire this show, is that it doesn't shy away from the rampant sexism and racism of the 1960s, even among "nice" people. It's a shocking, brilliantly subversive artistic choice: not just reminding viewers just how far society has progressed in a very short amount of time, but also emphasizing that almost everyone participated without question in the oppression of the era.

But in The Playboy Club, there is no gray area: the men are either oh-so-sensitive or over-the-top villains, and the women are all spunky and mostly liberated ... or over-the-top villains. The sensibilities are completely modern. Unlike Mad Men, they don't have the guts to show things as they really were. As a result, they don't really have anything very interesting to say about changing social mores, apart from obvious truisms like, "Racism is bad."

And I almost hate to write this, but this isn't the first time you'll read the words, "Eddie Cibrian is no Jon Hamm." He's pretty, but he just doesn't have the gravitas to carry the show's male 1960s energy.

On the plus side, The Playboy Club does include a closeted lesbian bunny who has married a gay man (Firefly's Sean Maher). Both are involved in the Mattachine Society, the country's first gay activist group, but their storyline is slight in the pilot.