Hugh Hefner

NBC president Robert Greenblatt was really committed to the new drama “The Playboy Club” just weeks ago. “What it has going for it is a recognizable brand that's automatically going to draw attention to it, good or bad," he said. "It's the right kind of thing for us to try." They tried it. Three episodes later, NBC made it the first canceled series of the season. Trains have rarely wrecked as ingloriously as this one.

By the third episode, NBC could barely muster 3 million viewers, while ABC (“Castle”) and CBS (“Hawaii Five-O”) were both over 11 million. This show had flop sweat all over it. Entertainment Weekly wrote after the cancellation announcement that “The move is no surprise and, indeed, was expected months before the show premiered.” So why on Earth did NBC work so hard to promote this show and its pornographic brand?

 

Hugh Hefner, America's most celebrated and legendary pornographer, has less and less reason to celebrate. His Playboy magazine empire is crumbling — he may even be bought out by competitors — and his prototypical leering pose with girls young enough to be his great-granddaughters is now just plain creepy. His 2009 Christmas card featured 83-year-old Hefner standing between two 20-year-old twins who are his newest live-in girlfriends. Each was wearing a pink tank top with "Hef" painted on it in white. Hefner's women are forever the plastic toys under his tree.

Into this sad picture comes documentary filmmaker Brigitte Berman with a gushy new two-hour infomercial titled "Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist and Rebel." How gushy is it? Washington Post critic Michael O'Sullivan found "the Hugh Hefner in this movie is Thomas Paine, Martin Luther King Jr., Mohandas Gandhi and William Kunstler all rolled into one."

In fact, Berman is so in love with her subject's cultural and political influence, she told one interviewer that when the news came out that Martin Luther King Jr. had cheated on his wife, Coretta, "that never affected 'I have a dream,' so I found it really curious" that Hefner couldn't be seen more as a civil rights hero and less as a seedy porn king.

How could political analysis of the 2008 election be complete without the input of the bathrobe-wearing Hugh Hefner? For those who couldn't care less what Hefner thinks about politics, a video of Playmate Kendra answering a really controversial question is presented at the bottom of this story. But first, here is the Hef answering a few questions about Sarah Palin beginning with, "As an advocate of teen abstinence, is Sarah Palin a hypocrite because of her daughter's pregnancy? Is she fit to be VP?"

I wouldn't call her a hypocrite. I think, uhh, she's not the one who got pregnant. Her daughter is her own person. I just think that, uhh, Sarah and a lot of other people misguided in terms of some very serious issues. Uhh, I don't think she is in any manner, shape, or form suited to be the vice president of the United States. And particularly not suited to be the vice president of a president who is in his 70s. And, you know, a heartbeat away from the presidency. She's clearly not qualified.