America needs a girdle.
Maybe that’s the message of the flood of retro-programs that treat the Kennedy era with reverence.
Think pointy bras, skinny ties and vintage cars, add a Sinatra soundtrack, and you’re halfway to a prime-time television series, give or take a subplot.
The TV networks hope that the invocation of the past through fashion and music is this season’s ticket to success. Clearly, there’s something about the ’60s that registers with a new generation and provides nostalgia for older audiences. Don Draper’s gray flannel suit may have launched the trend, and the secretaries sipping highballs at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce certainly did their part for foundation garments.
But this season, television will plunge even further into iconic 1960s fashions and mores to reveal America’s supposedly sexy recent past.
Stewardesses in pillbox hats and hose. “Angels” kickboxing in heels. Playboy bunnies in corsets and tails.
During the difficult present, television can help America stay focused on the past. At least we know how the Space Age turned out.
The ’60s were a turbulent, dark era of crisis. Or the 1960s were a romantic, liberated time of optimism. It’s complicated.
Due on broadcast TV in coming weeks:
NBC’s “The Playboy Club” is a nostalgic drama about Hugh Hefner’s bunny club in Chicago, being spun by the producers as “empowering” to women. There’s a thread of a murder mystery interwoven with the hot jazz and cool martinis. Cocktail waitresses in a soft-porn strip club, or upwardly mobile young women free to make money in well- monitored clubs? It may be less clear than you think.
ABC’s “Pan Am” is an equally glorifying ode to the women who were stewardesses before the modern rebranding of the job as “flight attendants.” These are cover girls, often fluent in several Romance languages, one of whom may be recruited by the CIA for spy work in the series opener. They fly on glorious, well-appointed jets with impeccable individualized service. The idea of air travel was new and exciting; nobody had ever heard of a hijacking or a dozing air traffic controller. Girdles were required.
And “Charlie’s Angels,” a reboot of the 1970s show, is a superficial, glossy fantasy about beautiful young single women, living the high life and blasting the bad guys while reporting to the unseen Charlie. Remember, the late Aaron Spelling considered his original “Charlie’s Angels” a boldly feminist statement.
What makes the networks believe the time is right to revisit the Sputnik era?
It’s not all “Mad Men” envy on the part of networks eager to cash in on that show’s ratings. (AMC’s “Mad Men” returns for a fifth season in March.) Apparently, comfort and nostalgia linger in revisiting the Jack-and-Jackie days.
“The ’60s are so multipurpose,” said historian and professor Patty Limerick, “so full of contradictions and complexities.” Even the term “The ’60s” is “an excellent expansive umbrella,” she said, covering the lingering conventions of the 1950s, like bouffant hairdos, as well as the breakdown of cultural norms in the psychedelic Haight-Ashbury era.
Limerick suspects Americans have evolved to more sophisticated ways of thinking about the issues of the ’60s that sharply divided the nation at the time.
“We were more confident in categorizing good and bad then. It wouldn’t surprise me if it turns out everything shifts around, and we have to say there’s more complexity” in evaluating a concept like Playmates, for instance.
To a history professor, the ’60s are “not easy to romanticize. It was a very tense period with grim struggles” between generations.
But to network executives, the ’60s are all about romanticizing.
The more crass business reason for pitching a ’60s show is the demographic spread it invites. Older viewers want to see the familiar look for nostalgia’s sake; younger viewers think the slicked-back hair and skinny ties are cool. In the competitive world of prime-time TV, telegraphing a mood quickly is crucial, and the 1960s provide an inviting hook across demographic groups.
The producers of these series hope that, after enough seasons of “CSI” and women in police gear or forensic white lab coats, the audience is ready for eye candy. The women of “The Good Wife” dress well, but the babes of “Charlie’s Angels” are not attired for court.
Maybe the bunnies will hit a sweet spot midway between “Xena: Warrior Princess” and Snooki.
The deeper reasons today’s audiences embrace the mind- set of a half-century ago may have to do with America’s self- image. These shows reflect the beginnings of modern upper- middle-class values and the appeal to snobbery. The branding of Pan Am then was as deliberate as the launch of any luxury line today.
The affluent pilots and glamorous stewardesses in ABC’s “Pan Am” are symbols of American mastery of new technology and progress.
And the networks have learned that audiences don’t mind product placement so much when the brands displayed have a vintage cachet, reminders of a cool past. (“Mad Men” featured vintage ads for Dove, Breyers, Hellmann’s, Klondike and Vaseline — living brands that lend a sheen of authenticity to the show.) Some speculate the vintage Pan Am travel bag will be this season’s hottest accessory.
The most controversial of the fall series is “The Playboy Club,” which has been called ” ‘Mad Men’ with boobs.” The pilot has been derided from left and right: The Parents Television Council says it promotes pornography; feminists say it objectifies women.
Controversy suits NBC’s PR plan. Focus less on the controversy than on the “fun soap opera” angle, proposed NBC chief Robert Greenblatt.
Greenblatt promises that “a lot of research has been done into the lives and experiences of real bunnies. And the show is based on some of those stories from a book called ‘The Bunny Years,’ by Kathryn Leigh Scott.” He also listed famous former bunnies, including Barbara Walters, Lauren Hutton, Deborah Harry, Susan Sullivan, Sherilyn Fenn, U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood “and Dr. Polly Matzinger, a world-renowned immunologist.”
“It’s empowering because these girls are smart, they’re going to school, they’re buying homes, buying, you know, property,” said actress Naturi Naughton, who plays one of the bunnies.
Actress Amber Heard, another bunny on NBC, said the costume is constraining, but “you put on the suit, and you’re instantly transported back to this time, the cigar-smoke filled rooms and the music and the glitter and the songs and the heels and the fishnets and the whole nine yards.”
The most outspoken former bunny of them all had something to say about reliving the period through the small screen.
Gloria Steinem, who famously worked as a bunny/undercover magazine writer, spoke to critics here on behalf of a biographical film HBO is doing on her life and career. Asked about the influx of pre-feminist TV shows, Steinem suggested, “The men who run networks and who write shows have sort of a nostalgia for that time and what men and women were like and how things were.
“The question is, what is the attitude of the film or series?” Steinem said. “Is it aggrandizing the past in a nostalgic way, or is it really showing the problems of the past in order to show that we have come forward and continue to come forward?
“I somehow think the Playboy shows are maybe not doing that.”
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
