Every year, as the fall TV season looms, culture-watchers start pointing out trends in the new slate of network shows. A not particularly useful exercise, this usually comes across as little more than display behavior that calls attention to the commenter’s privileged early access to the shows. This year, the big trend that’s been spotted has to do with the rise of the American female and the demise of the American male: there’s a spate of new sitcoms featuring potty-mouthed, “strong” young women and limp, barely potty-trained, underemployed young men. (A Wall Street Journal piece in June cited a CBS executive’s comment that about twenty producers had pitched series sparked by Hanna Rosin’s 2010 Atlantic piece “The End of Men,” an examination of the falling fortunes of American males.) But this is more of a phenomenon—whose duration can’t be predicted—than a trend. In a couple of months, many of the shows will have been cancelled or will have evolved, at least a little (or, in rare cases, a lot, as happened with “Cougar Town,” which started off as a sitcom about a middle-aged woman on the prowl and has become a show about middle-aged friendship), or will have congealed into the kind of junk that isn’t worth taking any notice of.
What makes sniffing for trends even more problematic is the fact that networks are in the habit of sending reviewers only one episode of a new show, whether further installments are in the can or not. You can’t judge an upcoming season by its pilots, except to say, vaguely, that the season is or isn’t promising; and to judge any individual series by its pilot (I’ve said this before) is like judging a book by its flap copy. Nevertheless, by summertime the Internet is loaded with analyses of TV shows that won’t even première for a month or more. Networks may think that they’re cleverly controlling the publicity narrative—and, in the sense that they have found a way for their shows to get attention long before they see the light of day, they have—but the strategy is short-sighted. I’d also call it cynical, but in order to make that assessment I’d have to have some confidence that there’s intelligence behind it. In almost every network pilot, there is something—or many things—that can justifiably be ridiculed, partly because most shows follow the same conventions when trying to give themselves a stamp. So the tone of pre-season commenting tends to be waggish and dismissive. This is exactly what the networks deserve—it’s they who aren’t being fair to their shows, not the opinionators. And yet, year in and year out, far from being vexed by the smart-alecks who judge their offerings prematurely, the networks virtually demand not to be taken seriously.
Dramas don’t suffer at the hands of the networks in the same way that sitcoms do, and, more important, they don’t make us suffer as much. They usually emerge from one person’s imagination, take more risks, and have the power to really hook us. We say that we “love” certain sitcoms, but we become “obsessed” with dramas. Two new dramas that may—may—have potential are ABC’s “Pan Am” and NBC’s “The Playboy Club,” even though they can’t, by any stretch, be called original. Both are the direct spawn of “Mad Men”—shows set in the early sixties that aim at conveying the changes of the era which led us to where we are now. The new shows are more concerned with hitting their marks and getting the sociology right than with character, but “Pan Am” has a bit of style to it, and a note of darkness, and the formula might just work.
Pan Am is the right airline to use to convey the sweep of decades, because of what it was and because of what it, unfortunately, became. Founded in the nineteen-twenties, it grew to be not just a company with a fleet of airplanes but the very symbol of flight, of the (supposed) romance of international travel. If you flew Pan Am, you weren’t being taken somewhere—you were going places. The expansion of commercial routes also opened up a world of opportunity for intrepid women, if they were attractive and unmarried, and—if “Pan Am” has its facts right—younger than thirty-two.
The framing of the show’s first episode is more clever than its contents: it opens jauntily, in a daylit airport, with a scene in which a pilot touches his cap to salute a small boy who is looking up at him in wonder, and it concludes with one in which a stewardess turns to smile at a little girl who is looking at her through a window with the same fascination. Voilà—women’s liberation is here! But the final image really does have great charm. It’s the culmination of a sensational series of shots, set to Bobby Darin’s snazzy version of “Mack the Knife,” which, of course, could make an image of a wet sock seem dynamic: four stewardesses, in black high heels and trim-fitting uniforms, walk briskly, gracefully, through a terminal in close formation, like a team of thoroughbreds, the camera at first showing us only their locomotive parts—their hips, legs, and feet. When they turn together and head out the door to a waiting plane, we see their faces, smiling and hopeful, as if they were embarking on a great voyage of discovery. The scene may not present any kind of truth about being a stewardess in 1963, but good luck telling that to the little girl in you, who for those few seconds utterly buys this dated, Darin-stoked depiction of freedom and adventure.
One of the show’s executive producers, Nancy Hult Ganis, was a Pan Am flight attendant for seven years, beginning in 1969, so I’m guessing that the series will have some broad-stroke accuracy, though the first episode, despite a plot line that introduces a believable note of Cold War dread and paranoia into the show, has worrisome melodramatic tendencies and a network-TV obviousness. Because I don’t like judging pilots, I shouldn’t even mention the conversation between one of the stewardesses (Christina Ricci) and a proto-slacker who’s crashing at her apartment in New York. Banging away at a typewriter, he ignores the ringing phone next to him, in the age-old tradition of geniuses at work. Just as Ricci is about to answer it, he stops her with the question “Does the Marxist dialectic account for a dual thesis?” “That’s Hegel, not Marx,” she says impatiently. He reminds her to take her “silly blue hat” with her to the airport. “Look, I get to see the world, Sam. When was the last time you left the Village?” Mr. Intellectual retorts, “I don’t need to see the world to change it.” “Well, I do,” she virtually harrumphs. The show makes me think of the difference between Truman Capote’s novella “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the movie version: “Pan Am” feels like a watchable version of something whose core has been removed.
I said that “The Playboy Club” might be promising. Guess what? I lied. But I am not the right audience for the show, since I have always found the Playboy ethos, and its creator, laughable and insipid—the opposite of sexy. Hugh Hefner tweets frequently, never failing to let his fans know that, say, he’ll be “playing backgammon by the pool Sunday afternoon surrounded by two dozen bikini-clad beauties,” or that “Anna has chosen a sexy school girl costume for Halloween.” Strangely, for someone who considers himself a world changer—“Playboy inspired the Sexual Revolution that set us free sexually, legally & morally”; “I knew by promoting the sexual revolution I would be changing society as a whole—for the better, I thought”—Hefner seems to express himself almost exclusively in clichés, and, despite his I-don’t-need-no-rocking-chair vitality, he comes across as dull and complacent, marbled with the fat of amour propre.
He doesn’t appear in “The Playboy Club,” but he does a voice-over at the beginning and at the end of the pilot. “I built a place in the toddlin’ town where everything was perfect. . . . Yes, it was a place where anything could happen to anybody. Or any Bunny.” That’s essentially just witless ad copy, hinging on a lame pun, but what Hefner says at the end is delusional, or, if you prefer, stupid: “The world was changing, and we were the ones changing it, one Bunny at a time.” Playboy Bunnies changed the world? The show wants things both ways: to glamorize the Playboy “life style” from a male point of view and also to try to persuade us that, although Bunnydom had its hardships and rigors—no gum chewing, constant smiling—wearing an uncomfortable skimpy uniform and putting a poufy fake tail on your butt meant you held the keys to the universe. “Nobody ever knew their last names,” Hefner says about the Bunnies, but they “were some of the only women in the world who could be anyone they wanted to be.” Or anything he wanted them to be.
The show plays like an old-fashioned backstage musical: we see the camaraderie and the competition among the women, the old saw of an older woman feeling threatened by a younger one, and the kinds of bits that are thrown in to show, in cheeky shorthand, how times are changing. A Bunny and her boyfriend are having sex in a bathroom in the club, and he says, in the middle of it, “Baby, will you marry me?” Appalled, she says, “What? No!” And the world shifts on its axis, right there and then. One of the Bunnies accidentally kills a man with her stiletto heel, which completely messes things up, because he’s a Mob boss. There’s one unexpected wrinkle in the pilot—one of the Bunnies, it turns out, is gay, and is using her nightly tips to help support a local chapter of the Mattachine Society. “The Playboy Club,” in its bid to be taken seriously, also calls attention to Hefner’s self-proclaimed progressiveness about race a little too often. Hefner’s philosophy, in fact, is a narrow one, his idea of sexual freedom unimaginative and regressive. He’s a man who “loves” girls but appears not to notice the existence of women. A look into Hefner’s world is like watching a grown man playing with Barbie dolls—it’s a spectacle that can really be appreciated only by other grown men who like to play with Barbie dolls. ♦