Could 'The Playboy Club' Find An Audience On Cable?

Sadly,The Playboy Club was the first casualty of the fall 2011 season, and as an avid television viewer, I have a feeling that this cancellation could prove to be a huge mistake.

The show never found its rhythm (or was never allowed to find it), but it was getting increasingly more interesting as each episode aired. As the storylines dove deeper and deeper into the world of the 1960s playboy culture, a number of different characters on the show were starting to resonate with viewers.

Walking around the office yesterday, the show was the main topic of water cooler conversation. Most people offering that, although they weren’t surprised that it was cancelled, that they had favorite characters and were frustrated by its abrupt demise. Surprisingly, the supporting cast of characters rather than the main characters of Bunny Maureen (out and proud Amber Heard) and Nick Dalton (Eddie Cibrian) were the main topic of conversation.

Take the head bunny, Carol-Lynne (played by Tony winner Laura Benanti). She was captivating to watch, she surfaced as the character that you loved to hate. It would have been interesting to see what exactly Carol-Lynne was capable of… in order to save her relationship with Nick and the club’s reputation.

And then there’s bunny Alice (Leah Renee Cudmore), who had to work night after night to hide the fact that she was a lesbian. Her marriage to a man was just a cover, her husband being gay himself. Her crush on Maureen was confirmed during episode two when she was playing photographer, shooting Maureen in some pretty erotic poses.

If that weren’t enough, Alice also held a place among the early founders of the Chicago chapter of the Mattachine Society – there’s some LGBT history on primetime for you—and just this week it looked as though she might get a secret love in the form of a business tycoon’s daughter, the character of Francis Dunhill (Smallville’s Cassidy Freemen). Francis began dating Nick has his acceptable girlfriend / political beard while he was running for state’s attorney, but the bombshell came at the close of the episode when she turned up at the Mattachine Society meeting and showed a distinct interest in Alice.

So, when the news of the cancellation crossed the wires, I (and many others) was left angry and dumbfounded. Did NBC pull it too soon?

I would have to say no, seeing as though 3 million is not a big number for NBC. Especially when you look at the production costs associated with such a well-produced show. But, what I can offer is the fact that NBC shouldn’t have been home to this show in the first place. Imagine if Sex in the City premiered on NBC: fail. What made that show work was the fact that they could show SEX in the city.

Which leads me to the second question, should the show have premiered on cable instead, to allow for more sexually provocative and adult themed story lines? The answer is YES! Take the show’s basic premise; it’s about a playboy club in the beginning of the sexual revolution. There’s no way to honestly portray this world unless you can show exactly what was happening in that club.

Hugh Hefner himself took to Twitter yesterday to air his disappointment about the cancellation. “The Playboy Club didn’t find its audience,” Hef said, “it should have been on cable, aimed at a more adult audience.”

Another good argument for moving Playboy over to cable is purely in the ratings. NBC sources were quoted, in multiple stories yesterday, that the show had an average viewership of “a little over 3 million people.” Although this is a small number for a primetime network drama, I should point out that this is well above the average viewership for a number of successful cable shows.

Take Showtime’s Dexter (2.2 million) and Shameless (1.5 million) or HBO’s Boardwalk Empire (2.5 million). Granted Playboy wouldn’t pull in the 5 million viewers that True Blood does, but if only half (and that’s being conservative) of Playboy’s 3 million viewers have pay cable subscriptions, it would easily produce the same numbers as Dexter, Shameless and Boardwalk.

Now, let’s look at basic cable shows like Breaking Bad (1.7 million) on AMC. I would prefer that Playboy end up on pay cable to allow for all the sex, violence and nudity it can muster (that’s just me), but even if a basic cable network were to pick up the show, it would land right in the same ballpark of viewership.

Lastly, and I hope you’re listening network execs…. whatever happened to the days when a show was given one whole season to find its legs? Why would viewers keep giving your new shows a chance when there is a high probability that the characters and the storylines that they are invested in will be dropped without any resolution or ending? You can’t keep giving us a beginning with no ending, it’s unfair and disappointing.

So let’s get this done network execs! Make whatever deal you have to so the “a little over 3 million” people who tuned in aren’t left wondering what could have been.

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