Upon seeing a headline stating that the first cancellation of a new fall TV series had occurred—just two weeks into the season—I thought it might be fun to try to deduce which network had done the deed. (Figuring out precisely which godawful new show had been axed was a more daunting task.)

I chose NBC, and that turned out to be correct. The Peacock Network has dumped The Playboy Club. NBC is the most aesthetically ambitious of the major TV networks and the least effective at reaching its goals in that regard. It regularly chooses shows that promise a deeper and more serious look at social issues and the human condition than most other nets, but it generally fails to deliver the promised depth or convey material in an entertaining way. Thus, flop after flop.

In case you haven’t heard of it, The Playboy Club was an hour-long drama, airing Monday nights, set in the mid-1960s at one of the swingin’ cool clubs named in the title, once upon a time a part of nudie magazine billionaire Hugh Hefner’s empire.

Why the show failed ought to be evident: The Playboy Club is a concept that promises scandalous fun, but that sort of thing has less than usual appeal in the current economic downturn. The show could have been either a charmingly retro pure entertainment—after the fashion of USA Network’s numerous successful series—or a serious drama exploring sexual mores, class divisions, and the like. Unfortunately for the audiences, it was neither entertaining enough nor serious enough.

Instead of either giddy glamour or realistic characters engaged in dramatic personal choices, the series’s initial episodes gave us a warmed-over contemporary film noir look, insight-free allusions to feminist politics and victimology, support for homosexuality, references to racial prejudice, an attempted rape, the gory killing of an organized crime boss, explicit sex scenes, and an apparently powerful nostalgia for 1960s fashions. None of these things, however, is given any critical analysis or nuanced understanding. Instead the show just constitutes the usual contemporary Hollywood heroes and villains story but with a Mad Men backdrop.

It’s interesting that two new series this fall were set in the swinging 1960s—the other is ABC’s Pan Am. Contrary to the popular contemporary notion of the 1960s as a contentious time of gross dissatisfaction in the United States—hippies, yippies, and protests, Black Panthers, bra burnings, etc.—the first two-thirds of the decade were actually a relatively optimistic time (even despite the assassination of President Kennedy) with an expanding economy and a sense that the nation could do big things such as land people on the moon.

And as I’ve noted before, contemporary TV series that hearken back in style to the optimistic entertainment of the mid-’60s have done very well in recent years, as they resonate with a strong strain of the American mindset. The USA Network and Fox have been especially good at conveying that same sense of optimism, adventure, and enjoyment of hard work and achievement, in shows such as Psych, Burn Notice, and The Good Guys. Perhaps NBC and ABC and the producers of The Playboy Club and Pan Am were searching for that kind of appeal in these new series.

Their choice to recreate the superficial elements of setting and time period instead of the more fundamental elements, the optimistic but realistic spirit of the time, was probably their undoing.