NBC’s The Playboy Club First Casualty of the 2011 TV Season

Matt Dinerstein/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via AP Images

As expected, TV’s class of 2011 has some promising new entries, and some bona fide duds. NBC has picked up two new comedies, Up All Night and Whitney, for a full season, but the party’s over for The Playboy Club. The underperforming drama, which launched amid much hype on September 19th, will be replaced on Monday nights with repeats of Prime Suspect until October 31st, when the news show Rock Center with Brian Williams debuts.

The Parents Television Council, which had blasted The Playboy Club over what it saw as its strong sexual content and called for sponsors to pull their spots from the show, issued a press release celebrating the cancellation, calling the show a “poor programming decision from the start” and a “violation of the public trust.”  However, an NBC spokesperson told ABC News Radio that the only thing that shut down The Playboy Club was poor ratings, not pressure from the PTC.