NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club - Preview. Above, at 3:12, Amber Heard just being Amber Heard -in a word: captivating.
After all the summer teasing & titillation this summer, "The Playboy Club" premieres on NBC-TV tonight at 10 p.m. It's time to finally let the Bunnies out to play and the mid-Sixties Chicago seediness and music performances wash over us.
Mondays at 10 o'clock just got a LOT more interesting, as the Bunnies take on "Hawaii 5-0" and, starting next Monday night, "Pan Am."
I don't know about you, but I've missed seeing Amber Heard on the tube, having watched everything she was in, even when, as often was the case, she was its saving grace.
Since she has played the girl 'beyond her years' like nobody's business, it's going to be interesting to me to see how she plays the corn-fed small-town Midwestern girl, since part of her appeal has always been that you just don't know what she's capable of.
So often, writers in projects she was in had her use her beauty as a weapon with men and women to help her get what she wants -and to advance the narrative- knowing that people, esp. men, often can't help themselves when confronted by someone whose beauty is so incandescent.
Well, it's true.
Her sort of beauty is both hypnotic and dangerous, because rather quickly, things can escalate and the next thing you know, hypothetically, you realize you are infinitely more exposed to consequences while her character has split the scene in the fast car -with the loot.
That's usually when they'd inter-cut scenes of her getting away free as a bird and the police knocking on some poor guy's door, the latest person in a long line who was disoriented because he had chosen to fly too close to the sun that is Amber Heard.
Yes, there's a lot of Mata Hari in her.
Not that you were wondering, but I think that now that she's back on TV, she's now instantly vaulted into the ten most-beautiful women on the tube, scripted drama/comedy or news, as someone out there has just unceremoniously been kicked-out without even knowing it.
One thing is for sure, though, it's NOT Robin Meade of CNN who is falling thru the trap-door, as last week, I found myself watching more CNN in the morning than I have in years, since I'm usually tuned to Dan Patrick or Glenn Beck or Diane Rehm, and our old friend Robin is as stunning and personable as ever. http://mxp.blogs.cnn.com/
NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club - Welcome to the The Playboy Club
New Playboy Club Bunny Maureen (Amber Heard), already in a tight jam after a run-in with the Chicago Mob, tells club layer Nick Dalton (Eddie Cibrian) that she's no push-over: "You just don't know what I'm capable of."
See, just like I said.
NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club - Amber Heard describes her character, Maureen, the small-town girl who has left for the allure of the big city.
So, finally, a provocative new sexually-charged drama from 20th Century Fox TV andImagine TV that will be a welcome antidote to so much of what I see on TV and turn away from -dopey reality shows featuring people I want to stay clear of, drab family comedies...
And now that my Monday night favorites on TNT, "The Closer" and "Rizzoli & Isles," are off for a few months, my Mondays are now open for bid again.
South Beach Hoosier Time Machine Flashback: In the early 1980's, Playboy magazine, in its "Girls of the Big Ten" issue, in describing the appeal of the coeds at the various schools that made up the-then pre-Penn State athletic conference, coined the phrase that quickly became a complimentary metaphor (and template) forever after amongst my IU friends and I in describing whatever social scene we found ourselves in.
They described IU's wave-upon-wave of beautiful women on the Bloomington campus as
"corn-fed Kappa cuties."
Yes, the ultimate in girl-next-door sexiness.
And that moniker became the highest-ranking we could ever bestow on anyplace we found ourselves with more than the normal share of bright and attractive women.
And yes, as always, we gave extra-credit for being from the Midwest.
And a richly deserved appellation it was, too, as the Kappa Kappa Gamma house on Third Street in Bloomington was, like the Tri-Delt house and the Chi Omega house were for me, the home to some great loyal friends of mine who were smart, funny, thoughtful and community-minded. And yes, damn attractive.
(Jane Pauley remains the best-known IU Kappa alum, and the subject of a future blog post I'll share here again some day, which includes how a photo of me, literally at her feet while she spoke, made the front page of the independent school newspaper, the ids, the following day
At a Student Alumni Council-sponsored event at the IMU, she told some great revealing stories that had us laughing and shared some unhappy and poignant childhood memories that left many girls in the over-flow crowd with tears in their eyes. Jane Pauley REALLY REALLY knows how to tell a story!)
NBC-TV video: The Playboy Club -Meet the new Bunny Mother, Carol-Lynne (Laura Benati)
Photos of the marketing posters for Season One of The Playboy Club are here:
Official show website: http://www.nbc.com/the-playboy-club/
British Pathé video: Playboy Bunny Girls and The Playboy Club (Original 1960s Footage)
