AWWWWWWW YEAHHHHHH!!!!!!!! The Drudge sirens always mean BIG NEWS! We’ve got the first cancellation of the fall season, and if you took “The Playboy Club” in your TV Death Pool, collect your cash and go buy Season 1 of “Mad Men” on DVD so that you can enjoy a ’60s period show that doesn’t suck.
The move is no surprise and, indeed, was expected months before the show premiered. The industry had low expectations for the 1960s set drama, which attempted to replicate a retro Mad Men vibe but for a wide audience and on a network with plenty of content restrictions.
Playboy Club premiered to low ratings and then dropped for each of its three telecasts, with last night hitting only 3.4 million viewers and a 1.2 rating in the adult demo. Despite having relatively tame content, the show wasn’t helped by conservative group the Parents Television Council vehemently protesting the show. And sharp-eyed Playboy Club viewers got a hint last night something might have been up last night when NBC didn’t air a promo for a fourth episode. [EW]
Reruns of “Prime Suspect” will take over the Monday 10 p.m. slot for NBC until October 31st, when Brian Williams’s “Rock Center” debuts.
Not that TV execs ever learn lessons from their mistakes, but if they did the lesson here would be that if you’re going to make a show with a sexy premise, it should ACTUALLY BE SEXY. And also that you can’t expect Eddie Cibrian to act his way out of a paper bag. That guy’s awful. He shouldn’t even exist outside of still pictures.
