It shouldn’t come as any huge surprise, but NBC has pulled the plug on The Playboy Club, making it the first casualty of the fall television season.  What is surprising is who is taking credit for the event.

Considering the subject matter of The Playboy Club, it should come as no big surprise that my old friends the Parents Television Council (PTC) made it a target for one of their busy body campaigns of contacting the network and its advertisers about the horrors of this show and how it would destroy the youth of the United States.  So, of course they are taking credit for the cancellation no matter what the network may tell you.

Well, they must be right, I mean they tell you bluntly in their Tweet that no matter what else NBC may say it was them that brought it down.  I mean, it certainly couldn’t have anything to do with the generally lackluster reviews and the fact it was polling in pitiful ratings it was pulling in its three week run.

Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter, someone who should understand the entertainment business than most, ran down his three reasons for what happened.

1. It was bad show, period. The writing was weak, the acting spotty and the sexism too ridiculous and obvious to comment on more than once.
2. Nobody was watching it. It had no buzz tune-in numbers and sank in each successive airing, finishing with 3.4 million viewers on its third and final episode. Those are cable numbers — and not especially impressive cable numbers. The cost of filming The Playboy Club was too expensive to support that kind of tanking.
3. While the Parents Television Council may feel some vindication in NBC pulling the plug, this cancelation wasn’t about boycotts. It was about owning up to the obvious. America did not care for a Mad Men-esque retro series about a lifestyle and brand more dated than any nostalgia could prop up. One would hope that the reason viewers tuned out in droves after sampling it was because it had none of the attributes of a high-quality drama like Mad Men. NBC simply misjudged the appeal of a show like that, despite mountains of evidence from Mad Men that being brilliant doesn’t also mean dominating the Nielsens. Nobody bought into NBC’s big tent approach to nostalgia, so the Bunnies are no more.

But, nope, it was all the PTC. Not sub-par writing. Not poor ratings.  Just a bunch of people with no lives who have nothing better to do than write letters to a network and advertisers.

Oh how I’ve missed that special brand of PTC crazy.