In Case You Were Planning to Watch ‘The Playboy Club’... - The Daily Beast

Nora Ephron, who wrote When Harry Met Sally, takes aim at the original Playboy prince:

I have for many years been puzzled by the persistence of Hugh Hefner. Why is he still here? Why does anyone write about him? Why does anyone quote his remarks about his own cultural relevance as if they are anything but wishful thinking?

Everything Hugh Hefner is responsible for—the magazine, the clubs, the philosophy, the T-shirts, the keys, the bumper stickers, the brand—has been deposited in the junk shop of 20th-century life, where it belonged. The stock tanked. The magazine’s circulation fell. The clubs were closed, one by one.

But Hefner himself, now 85, is a whack-a-mole, popping up from his life on the D list to give interviews about his pajamas and his little blue pills and his cadre of surgically enhanced women. Why does anyone read about him? Why do I? I can’t explain it.

Hit the link for more of the same, it’s funny stuff. There’s also the dawning realisation that, thanks to the success of Mad Men, we’re going to be deluged with TV shows set in the 1960s that copy the style but have none of the substance.

Smoking, Drinking, Writing, Womanizing, Smoking, Drinking... - Mad Men - Television - NYTimes.com

Weiner’s achievements with “Mad Men,” which is produced by Lionsgate, are plentiful, starting with the storytelling. Setting it in the early 1960s, on the cusp between the repression and conformity of the cold war and McCarthy-era 1950s and the yet-to-unfold social and cultural upheavals of the 60s, allows Weiner an arc of character growth that is staggering in its possibilities. It also gives him the opportunity to mine the Rat Pack romance of that period, when the wreaths of cigarette smoke, the fog of too many martinis — whether exhilarating or nauseating — and the silhouettes specific to bullet bras only heightened the headiness of the dream that all men might one day become James Bond or, at the very least, key holders to the local Playboy Club.