Stream It Or Skip It?

In the U.S. and a lot of the world, Playboy was a revolutionary magazine that not only had “tasteful nudes” in its pages but talked openly about sex, feminism, abortion and other leading-edge issues of the 1960s and ’70s. In Italy, though, the magazine that did all of that was Playmen, led by Adelina Tattilo. A new drama on Netflix tells a fictionalized version of how she came to lead and transform the magazine.

MRS PLAYMEN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Adelina Tattilo (Carolina Crescentini), publisher of the Italian erotic magazine Playmen, is celebrated by the UN as one of the most influential people in the world.

The Gist: A few years earlier, Adelina is going to a party thrown by her husband, Saro Balsamo (Francesco Colella), the publisher of Playmen. He’s celebrating the fact that one of the biggest actresses in the world, Brigitte Bardot, will pose nude for the magazine, and he reveals her photo on the cover. The two seem to be in a good place, especially after he ended an affair with a singer, but then the singer comes up on stage and Saro has to assure his wife that there’s nothing more between them.

Meanwhile, a young photographer named Poggi (Giuseppe Maggio) takes pictures of a young woman named Elsa (Francesca Colucci); he encourages her to take her clothes off, saying that the photos he takes of her naked will be just for them.

The next morning, Adelina wakes up and Saro isn’t there. When she can’t find him, she goes to the Playmen offices, right in time for a police raid. The Bardot issue is being seized all over Rome, and the offices are being turned upside down by the cops due to indecency charges. With Saro not there, Adelina gets arrested instead, as she finds out that Saro made her editor-in-chief right before he disappeared.

It seems that the charges against her are going to be more serious than anything Saro faced, and she still doesn’t know where he is. She makes demands to the staff to tell her, and she finds out from the managing editor Chartroux (Filippo Nigro) that Saro has gone into hiding because the police was also looking into financial improprieties that Saro committed in order to keep the magazine running and his lifestyle intact.

When she finally meets up with Saro, he hands her pornographic pictures to publish in the magazine. Instead, she sees the photos of Elsa that Poggi was developing and decides to put her on the cover of the next issue, with a story that has some social underpinnings to accompany it. She also decides to have it distributed on a Saturday, when courts are closed and a seizure order can’t be issued.

She soon finds out that Saro is leaving Italy altogether until the heat dies down, leaving her with their two kids and with Playmen. She decides then and there to take over the magazine, given the title she already has, and make it into something different than just a magazine full of naked women.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Mrs Playmen, which is based on the true story of Adelina Tattilo’s run as the editor of Playmen, is similar to Minx, but a lot more serious.

Our Take: The idea behind Mrs Playmen is that Adelina is going to take Playmen from a magazine that was essentially a men’s lifestyle magazine with nudes to a magazine that took on important issues, especially ones that aligned with the issues that were prominent in the early 1970s: feminism, divorce, abortion rights. She makes it into a magazine more like Playboy, which had great photography and literary giants in the pages in between the nude photo spreads.

As we said, though, this isn’t like Minx: This story is not playing up Adelina’s remaking of Playmen for laughs. We’re not saying that the series is going to be super serious, but we’d imagine there are going to be a lot of issues that Adelina is going to have to overcome, not the least of which is the fact that the magazine is losing money and has a ton of creditors. But she also is going to have to fend off a constant campaign by the Italian government to declare the magazine obscene, and there will be accusations that what she’s doing has nothing to do with feminism or empowering women.

One of the most famous incidents involving Playmen will also be examined: unauthorized sunbathing photos of Jaqueline Onassis (Tania Watson), which were leaked by her husband Aristotle. It caused such a stir that Screw magazine stole the photos and published them in the U.S. It will be interesting to see how that incident is treated in a fictional retelling of Adelina’s story.

Sex and Skin: Well, it is a show about an erotic magazine, so what do you think the answer to the “sex and skin” question is?

Parting Shot: Adelina explains that Saro transferred most of his shares to her, “so technically, I’m your boss.”

Sleeper Star: Giuseppe Maggio’s young photographer Poggi is interesting to watch, if only because we’re camera collectors and we like the fact that Maggio is actually correctly holding and using the cameras Poggi uses for his work.

Most Pilot-y Line: That being said, we’re not sure what the side plot with Poggi and Elena is all about, aside from the fact that he tricked her into singing away the ownership of the nudes of her he took.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Mrs Playmen is an interesting look at how the world of adult magazines in the 1970s was similar in Europe at the time than it was in the U.S. It may take itself too seriously at times, but it’s an entertaining watch, especially for people not familiar with the history of Playmen magazine.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.