Playboy Club
In early October, Playboy Club was pulled from NBC because of low ratings. For more information, please visit http://gawker.com/5846520/nbc-cancels-the-playboy-club.
September means it is time for TV’s new fall lineup of programs. One show getting a lot of attention is NBC’s new prime time series drama, Playboy Club which premieres September 19. The storyline, centered around club members and Playboy bunnies working at the legendary Playboy Club in Chicago, takes place in 1963.
It’s targeted to an audience of primarily white, straight, middle class or aspiring-to-be middle class men ages 25-60. Perhaps the older portion of the target audience will revel in a flashback to the 60s, while the younger target audience will get a glimpse into the seductive world of women and nightlife—albeit another media fantasy—decades before they were even born. The costuming, content and overall appeal of the show signals NBC’s attempt to coattail AMC’s Mad Men. If the gamble pays off and they achieve the same windfall in profits and ratings, NBC will have advertisers flocking to buy ad space for a premium price.
In this segment of the promotional trailer, we see jump cuts of club scenes that include the Playboy Bunnies and the male Club members, known as key holders; we hear music and dialogue among the characters; we see phrases of text that tell us, “It’s more than a club…It’s a lifestyle…They’re your wildest dreams…The Club makes them come true.” The lifestyle and values illustrated in this trailer are those of power, wealth, desire, and fantasy among a group of well-to-do white collar white men. This trailer is an invitation to live out the proverbial “male fantasy” in this TV program; in essence, the values that surface to the top are fantasies of male dominance, female subordination, objectification, entitlement, and exclusivity. The subtext is that you, the viewer, become a special member of The Club—the equivalent of a key holder—where your wildest dreams come true.
Peering through a frosted window, the viewer gets a glimpse into the male dominated world of sex, power, and scandal. This idea of “living the fantasy” is further exemplified with other promotional pieces NBC plans to align with this show, including a branding opportunity with Bloomingdale’s that allows viewers to meet the actors via their catalogs.
The language of persuasion is woven into the text of the video where symbols range from subtle to obvious. We see wealth and power represented inside the Club: crystal glasses, men wearing suits and tuxedos, and the allusion to exclusive membership. The Playboy bunnies represent femininity, sex, beauty, and fantasy. The instrumental music, coupled with the slow motion editing, links together the different storylines and are symbols for drama, romance, and suspense.
Corporations always look out for each other, and this case is no exception. As with many Big Media players, this program is an attempt to forge co-branding between NBC Universal and Playboy Enterprises, with Hugh Hefner remaining mostly hands-off except for a voice over in the pilot episode. In essence, here’s how it works: If the show has high ratings, NBC can increase the price for a :15 or :30 second spot, for example, because they are delivering more people to the advertiser. (More people equals more products sold, which makes advertisers happy.) All the while, Playboy Enterprises will expose its brand to more people, giving a desperately needed boost to its world-renowned name in the face of consistently declining stock value. The people behind Playboy Club, including the writers, directors, production crew members, and actors, are also empowered—when their successful work for the show is noticed by other Big Media folks, they get better paying writing, production, or acting contracts. Programming of this kind serves Big Media’s interests because it allows the TV networks to continue controlling much of the content by using an advertiser-driven formula instead of allowing for more diverse, independent voices on air.
This programming disempowers women by glamorizing a time when there were few job opportunities for women and fewer legal protections regarding equal pay and harassment. The Playboy Enterprise was built on the objectification of the female body and this trailer romanticizes this time period and commodification of women. Furthermore, we see very few people of color in the lead roles. In fact, the only person of color to have a lead role in this show is Nick, played by Eddie Cibrian, a Cuban-American actor. In a supporting role is Naturi Naughton, the only African American female on the show, who plays Bunny Brenda. Incidentally, Naughton also guest starred in one episode of season four of AMC’s Mad Men where she plays the role of Bunny Toni. Naughton chalks this up—the fact that she is the solo African American Playboy Bunny in two different programs—to coincidence. However, there are many similarities in the roles, including characters from both shows referring to her as the “chocolate Bunny.” Naughton says another overlap of the shows is that she utilized her training with Pat Lacey, an African American woman and one of the original Playboy bunnies of the 60s, to learn bunny etiquette and mannerisms for both shows.
Though some will suggest that there is room for debate as to whether or not Bunny Brenda is a positive move in the fight for accurate representation, what is not debatable is that there are only two people of color in the pilot. This tokenism and underrepresentation come at a time when NBC Universal has been criticized for not paying enough attention to diversity despite it being a condition in the NBC-Comcast merger agreement. Critics of NBC claim that their condition to improve upon the “diversity issues” has so far only been a promise with no delivery.
The untold stories in this trailer include how a number of organizations are working against NBC to get the program taken off the air. Gloria Steinem, who actually went undercover as a Playboy Bunny at the New York Playboy Club in 1963 so she could write an article about her experience, said of the series, "It normalizes a passive dominant idea of gender. So it normalizes prostitution and male dominance.” She asks that people boycott the show. Executive producers and cast from the show regard it as being about female empowerment, not exploitation, and how women best use their resources. KSL-TV, the NBC affiliate in Salt Lake City, is refusing to air the series because of its “inconsistency with the KSL-TV brand.”
At Media Literacy Project we equip young women with media tools to create positive images of themselves through programs such as Girls’ Toolbox. This past summer, the girls we worked with were specifically concerned with the impact of mainstream media on body image. We teach them how to create the media they want to see in the world, and they created video responses to stories and images like the ones Playboy Club creates. As NBC tries to woo advertising dollars by selling girls a story of womanhood that does not represent them, we offer them the skills to create their own stories -- stories where they don’t have to wear bunny ears and a tail.
Related Reading
Post new comment