Must Have Been Really Bad!
“0.2. That was the grade-point average of Kent Dorfman in Animal House.
“It’s also the overnight rating among boys ages 12-17 for Monday’s episode of The Playboy Club, and the surest confirmation that this NBC drama, canceled today, was an ill-fated venture,” Jon Weisman writes for Variety.
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“The Playboy Club was debuted to TV critics at the last TCA’s, where the cast had an almost defensive attitude towards the dated material that seemed to want to capture a glamorous take on time in American history that was full of overt sexism and racism,” April MacIntyre writes for Monsters & Critics.
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“[O]ne of the most LGBT-inclusive series on network television,” the Advocate reports, “The series takes place in early 1960s Chicago and stars actress Amber Heard as a Playboy bunny, and out actor Sean Maher as a closeted gay men married to a closeted lesbian and involved in the pioneering gay rights organization, the Mattachine Society.”
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“Set in 1961 at the eponymous Chicago nightclub, the series had been filming entirely in Chicago since mid-August, primarily from the new Cinespace soundstage complex on the Southwest Side, where producers built an elaborate set re-creating the club’s interior,” the Tribune reports.
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“‘I’m highly disappointed,’ said Local 476’s Mark Hogan, whose members numbered from 125 to 200 working on the show, which employed another 50 from other unions,” Ruth Ratny reports for Reel Chicago. “Through episode four, 70 local actors had been hired for the AFTRA series.
“The local AFTRA office estimates the number of actors should be close 100 by the time it receives the figures for all six episodes.
“‘Fox Television spent millions of dollars on the sets,’ says Hogan, ‘which was a beautiful showcase for our talented workers and it was mindboggling what they turned out.'”
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The trailer:
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Comments welcome.
Posted on October 5, 2011