SCENE: The original Playboy Club, on Walton near Michigan Avenue, circa 1961, painstakingly resurrected at the sprawling Cinespace soundstage in Douglas Park 50 years later.
This sybarite?s delight, with its cottontailed waitresses and simmering sexuality, is the setting for ?The Playboy Club,? which had its premiere Monday night on WMAQ. It is a place where, in a different era, you would have found the philandering husband of ?The Good Wife,? seen Sundays on WBBM. It probably would not be a hangout for Tom Kane, the Chicago mayor with the degenerative brain disorder in the coming Starz series ?Boss.?
Neither Mike nor Molly, the rotund, blue-collar title characters of last year?s breakout ABC comedy, would fit in, even if the actress playing Molly, Melissa McCarthy, were toting the Emmy Award she picked up last Sunday. Nor would the hardscrabble Gallagher family of ?Shameless,? a British import transferred to the Lawndale neighborhood by Showtime. They probably couldn?t even scrape up tip money for the bunny delivering their cocktails.
In the world of prime-time television, Chicago is home to rough-and-tumble politics, street-smart cops and robbers, and the sexiest nightclub of its time, as well as to plenty of down-to-earth folks who make you wonder how that nightclub arose in their midst.
That may not be the way Chicagoans see themselves, but it describes the city?s image as viewed through the lens of modern-day television. Most Americans get their idea of the nation?s cities from what they see on TV. The robust crop of series currently set here fits neatly into prevailing opinions of who we are, at least in the minds of television executives in Los Angeles and New York.
Walter J. Podrazik, co-author of 10 books, including ?Watching TV: Six Decades of American Television,? said that Chicago often stands in for ?flyover country,? using the slightly pejorative term for everything between the East and West Coasts.
?By setting a show in Chicago, they?re acknowledging that something exists in the middle,? he said. ?Chicago is where you come for ?real people,? the salt-of-the-earth types who face believable situations in believable ways. This is not where you would set ?Dynasty? or ?Gossip Girl? or ?The Real Houswives.? ?
A show like ?Mike & Molly? belongs to that tradition of Chicago television, Podrazik said. ?But there?s also the image of Chicago as a crime mecca, which was established by the 1930s.? He cited a link between ?The Untouchables,? which ran from 1959 to 1963, and last year?s short-lived police drama ?The Chicago Code.? Meanwhile, a show like ?The Good Wife? reminds viewers that ?in Chicago, politics is a blood sport,? he said.
It may be tempting to see a new series like ?Boss? as reacting to current events and trends. The show appears at a time of political upheaval in Chicago, with a new mayor as well as changes in county government. But that is a happy accident. The program was in development months before Mayor Richard M. Daley announced he was stepping down.
In fact, decisions to set a show in Chicago usually reflect more long-term impressions. The city?s historic reputation for political high jinks helped place ?Boss? here, said Carmi Zlotnik, managing director of the Starz network, who strenuously denied any similarity between the lead character and either Daley or Daley?s father.
?The rich history of the ward system, the factionalized interests, the different layers of society all thrown into this ?most American of cities? ? Chicago has a personality of its own,? Zlotnik said.
The current love of all things ?60s, not to mention those bunny costumes, has given ?The Playboy Club? the most buzz. Among shows set in Chicago, it is an outlier in its emphasis on beautiful people and licentious behavior. But so was the real Playboy Club, said Chad Hodge, the show?s creator and executive producer.
?It was the most glamorous, sexy place on the planet,? said Hodge, a Highland Park native who graduated from Northwestern in 1999. ?This show is researched and accurate, but the tone is very much a perfected memory.? He augments the accuracy with appearances by Chicago jazz musicians like the trumpet star Corey Wilkes. The early Playboy Clubs were, in fact, employment havens for jazzmen.
Filming for ?The Playboy Club? and ?Boss? takes place in Chicago. But even the other Chicago-based shows, all of which film in Los Angeles, spend a fair amount of time in town, gathering exterior shots that root the action in local streets and architecture, as the producers strive to make the city itself an integral part of the story line.
?The city is definitely a character on our show,? said Andrew Stearn, executive producer of ?Shameless.? He said he had considered other cities but found the setting he wanted ?on the South Side, where families still live in row houses.?
Chicago feels like a confined space, Stearn said. ?You need to feel a little claustrophobic for our show,? he added.
He also said he felt he had ?met? the program?s dysfunctional characters while working as a producer for the long-running drama ?E.R.,? which was set in Chicago. ?The Gallaghers are the kind of family that would have gone into County General,? Stearn said, referring to the fictional ?E.R.? medical facility.
Zlotnik of Starz said that despite the title and plot of ?Boss,? setting it in Chicago had not been automatic. ?We looked at other cities ? some of which had slightly better tax rebates ? but when we thought of the city as a character, it had to be Chicago, with all the architecture, the neighborhoods, the ethnicity, the texture,? he said.
For Mark Roberts, the creator and executive producer of ?Mike & Molly,? it is less about the city as a character and more about the character of the city. ?I wanted to get some people on TV that you?re not seeing there any more, people who were a little more realistic,? Roberts said. ?Chicago had the right tone. It?s a big city that has the friendliness of a smaller town.?
To Podrazik, the television historian, that seems only logical. ?I don?t think it?s an insult to say that in Chicago some people weigh more than others, and some have lost a little more hair,? Podrazik said. ?So if you?re doing that show, why not set it where people like that are not so out of place??
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