Cancellation Corner, Vol. 1

As a kind of counterpoint to my TV pilot reviews, I've decided to tackle the other end of the TV lifespan and do quick postmortems on some of this fall's stillborn endeavors, analyzing why they failed and whether or not anyone should care. This was actually something I considered doing in the spring for The Event and, more importantly, The Chicago Code, but I never got around to it. As with my pilot reviews, I'm only interested in scripted series, so don't expect any verbage on H8R, and I'm only going to bother discussing series that I've actually watched a meaningful percentage of. Now let's pay our respects to the departed.

NBC's The Playboy Club (Born 9/19/11 - Died 10/3/11)


Episodes watched: 3 out of 3

Why didn't it catch on? With any dead on arrival TV series, it comes down to a question of whether people didn't tune in because of the show's premise or because of its poor quality, but that doesn't mean the two causes are mutually exclusive. The Playboy Club was a creatively troubled series, which I'll get more into in a second, but I don't think that's why it premiered to pathetic numbers and fell from there.

The reason The Playboy Club failed is because sex is built into the premise and very fabric of the show, and sex still makes huge swaths of America feel nervous and uncomfortable. Characters in a show can have sex and they can enjoy sex, but a broadcast network show cannot be built around sex. Premium cable series are a slightly different story – see Hung, Californication, and of course Sex and the City – but if I were an NBC (or ABC, or Fox, or CBS) executive, I would take The Playboy Club as a lesson that greenlighting a sex-centric series is just flushing money down the toilet.

Its cancellation: tragedy or blessing? Somewhere in the middle, I'd say. I'm not going to mourn the show, I doubt I'll remember its existence a few years from now, and the stench of desperation from how hard it was trying to be Mad Men was nauseating, but at the same time it wasn't as bad as some critics tried to make it out to be. It's kind of this season's Outsourced in that sense, a mediocre show that some hyperbolically described as awful.

None of the three episodes aired had particularly compelling hooks or gripping human drama, but I did like the lavish production design, the 1960s vibe, and especially the performances of Amber Heard as the newest Bunny and Laura Benanti as the senior Bunny. But I don't ever need to see Eddie Cibrian again, whose character Nick Dalton was the black hole of boringness that devoured The Playboy Club from within, and the biggest thing holding the show back creatively.

NBC's Free Agents (Born 9/14/11 - Died 10/5/11)

Episodes watched: 4 out of 4

Why didn't it catch on? At risk of giving too much credit to the American people, I'm going to say that it didn't catch on because it wasn't funny. Granted, you could point at any number of popular, terrible sitcoms that have been running for years in response, but they're all multi-cam shows. Lots of people will always tune into single camera comedies, go "Why no laugh track? Me no know when laugh! ARGH" and never tune in again, but there's often enough enthusiasm behind the legitimately funny ones – The Office, 30 Rock, and so on – to get them to second seasons and beyond. Bad multi-cams can thrive; bad single cams, with a microscopic handful of exceptions, tend to die. Trial by fire.

Its cancellation: tragedy or blessing? Free Agents disturbs me on a profound level, as it pretty much singlehandedly disproves every theory I've formulated over the last decade about what makes a good sitcom. After Arrested Development, Community, and 30 Rock, I'd determined that what it takes to make a good sitcom is to have a single camera show with a fast pace, lots of scenes, quick dialogue, a light, irreverent tone, and funny people both in front of and behind the camera.

And Free Agents did all of those things! It was quick and peppy and energetic, devoid of any laugh track shenanigans, and had Kathryn Hahn, Anthony Stewart Head, and Joe Lo Truglio in the cast and John Enbom (head writer of Party Down) and Emily Cutler (writer of Community's "Contemporary American Poultry" and "Modern Warfare," two of the best sitcom episodes of all time) on the writing staff. And it still, against all my well-formulated logic, just wasn't funny.

I could go episode by episode or scene by scene or line by line as to why not, but it really just comes down to the sad fact that the characters didn't pop, the stories were generic, and the jokes just didn't hit. It's upsetting, really: all the ingredients were right, and the dish still came out wrong. So what I'm getting at is that its cancellation is a blessing, because it frees up the many funny people involved to sink their time into something more worthwhile.

Also canceled: CBS's How to Be a Gentleman. Sure glad I took the time to review that one.

Pilot Inspektor Tim: The Playboy Club

The show: The Playboy Club, Mondays on NBC

The premise in ten words or less? Chicago's Playboy Club in the 1960s, and gratuitous murder.

Any good? I've never really been part of the cult of Mad Men. I mean, I like Mad Men. I've seen all 52 episodes of Mad Men. But there are lots of other TV shows I prefer to Mad Men – past and present, network and cable, comedy and drama – and I never fail to grimace at TV critics offhandedly stating that it's the greatest show on television, if not in the history of television, as if it were an objective fact. I roared with approval at Friday Night Lights thrashing it in acting and writing at the latest Emmys.

But whatever problems I may have with Mad Men, one thing it does have is restraint, and supreme confidence in the depth of its characters being sufficient to anchor compelling drama. Granted, the last network show I saw display similar confidence was Lone Star, which Fox took into a back alley and executed after two episodes, but even so, it throws The Playboy Club into sharp and bitter contrast. The Playboy Club features its first attempted rape right around four minutes in, followed one minute later by its first spurting-blood murder and a few minutes after that by body-hiding shenanigans. That right there is not showing restraint.

I compare the shows because, however much the producers of The Playboy Club like to pretend differently, their show would not exist without Mad Men. It's trying hard to tap into the same 60s chic – smoking, drinking, retro clothes, retro cars, social regressivism and all – and the main male character, Nick Dalton, is modeled after Don Draper to a laughable, almost sad degree. One of the show's leads, Naturi Naughton, was even on Mad Men, playing a Playboy Bunny in both shows. But, in trying to do Mad Men except with murder and the mob and prettier, younger actresses, The Playboy Club shows a grave misunderstanding of what made that show tic in the first place.

And it's a shame, because, unlike the Parents Television Council (more on this in a second), I actually wanted to like this show. Mad Men ripoff or no, I was rooting for it to succeed if only for having the balls to try something off the beaten path for network TV, with nary a cop or doctor to be found.

And it does do a number of things right. A lot of money was injected into the project and they chose their director well (Alan Taylor of Rome, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones and, would you look at that, Mad Men fame) and the results are all on the screen. It looks like a million bucks; easily the most sumptuously designed, visually pleasing pilot I've seen so far this season. The cast includes Amber Heard and David Krumholtz and Firefly's Sean Maher, and some of the actors I'm less familiar with like Laura Benanti as the Bunny house mother also do good work. The characters are all pretty well-defined in the available 42-minute window and some potentially engaging interpersonal conflicts are introduced. But that murder is just such a silly and juvenile way to kick things off, and it's hard to get past that.

The other huge problem is Eddie Cibrian as the previously mentioned Nick Dalton, who is, I guess (going by the billing order), supposed to be the main character. Outside of his cringe-inducing wannabe resemblance to Don Draper, he has this agonizingly disconnected story going on about being a lawyer and trying to clean up the mob, and it's just so not what I was interested in going into the show. Shouldn't the idea be to follow the Bunnies, especially with minor movie star Amber Heard as our viewpoint into that unique sorority? I mean, who the fuck wants to follow some slicked-hair lawyer who happens to hang out at the Playboy Club a lot and sleep with one of the Bunnies? One episode in and he's already my least favorite protagonist on television. What an utterly bizarre miscalculation.

I feel I should mention that, having now actually watched the show, the Parents Television Council hysteria preceding its debut (including the show being briefly banned in Utah) is more hilarious than ever. With acknowledgement that pornography exists and women walking around in the equivalent of one-piece bathing suits being the extent of the show's "adult" material, this is basically the least racy version of a Playboy show you could possibly imagine. 2 Broke Girls is more salacious.

Will I watch again? That such an ambitious, pricey, heavily-hyped drama premiered to 5.02 million viewers all but assures The Playboy Club's fate as one of this season's first freshman casualties (I'd be surprised to see it complete its 13-episode season run, but, this being ratings-starved NBC, it's not impossible), so I'll probably keep watching out of sheer curiosity, since I'm not likely to be watching long.

Premise: B-

Execution: C+

Performances: B

Potential: C+

Overall: