Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Secrets of Playboy’ Season 2 on A&E, A Docuseries Where Former Playmates Explore The Magazine’s Mystique And Its Legacy 

Secrets of Playboy returns to A&E for its second season, promising more interviews with women who posed for the magazine as well as former girlfriends of Playboy founder Hugh Hefner across eight new hours of programming. The first season of the show revealed the dark side of the empire Hef built. Now, Secrets of Playboy will examine the ramifications of becoming involved with the magazine, and how being a part of the brand continued to affect women’s lives after they made the personal decision to pose.   

SECRETS OF PLAYBOY – SEASON 2: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

Opening Shot: “In 2002, they were doing their first ever nationally televised search for a Playboy centerfold,” former Playboy model Lauren Anderson says. And footage appears from the America’s Next Top Model-style Fox TV special Girl Next Door: The Search for a Playboy Centerfold.   

The Gist: In the early 2000’s, Hugh Hefner saw what he’d built dying. As print media became ever more diminished, the cache of Playboy Magazine was fading, and so the brand looked to expand its footprint. Rick De Oliveira was the showrunner on Girl Next Door: The Search for a Playboy Centerfold, and he says the special was designed as a way to mainstream the Playboy brand alongside the popular MTV reality programming of the era, stuff like The Real World and Road Rules. Of the thousands of applicants, De Oliveira says, it was the goal of the show to feature someone who’d embody what was known as the Playboy dream: plucked from obscurity, elevated to a new level of glamor and status, and “living the Playboy lifestyle.” And Jill Scott, who was a contestant on Girl Next Door, says that modeling for Playboy was also a good career move, for both the exposure and the paycheck. But with that exposure came becoming part of people’s perception of that lifestyle.

Carmella DeCesare, another contestant on the show, says the audition process was super intimidating. She was 18, and it felt awkward to be posing nude, something she’d never done before. But it was also exciting to be one of the twelve women chosen from thousands of applicants. Secrets of Playboy features Decesare, Scott, and former Girls Next Door contestants Lauren Anderson and Shallan Meiers watching footage of the special, and seeing it now, they all marvel at how young they were. “I wasn’t terrified of posing,” Anderson says. “I wasn’t terrified of Playboy. I was terrified of living in a house, and competing with eleven other women.”

As Girl Next Door continued, the women got a crash course in reality television production – cameras being present 24/7, and being fit into predetermined character profiles. “I was the ‘wild child,’’ Scott says, and she describes one episode where she was drinking in an LA club and started dancing on the table. “I know I wasn’t the only one, but they cut it so it looked like I was the only one.” Once there were only six contestants left, the nude photo shoot portion of the show began. Meiers describes how that made her feel like a product, not a person. And Jill Scott says the biggest shock was in the aftermath of the Fox broadcast, when Playboy released its uncensored version of the show. Just as Hefner had broken down each aspect of their appearance for the cameras, trolls and online commenters began to do the same thing. But her decision to pose would have even worse ramifications for her personal life back home.         

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Who’s ready for more secrets? The success of the first season of Secrets of Playboy has inspired A&E to expand the franchise with two additional limited series. Secrets of Miss America focuses on the history of and story behind the pageant, and Secrets of Penthouse, which premieres in August, will explore the legacy of Bob Guccione and his Playboy competitor.

Our Take: “As soon as someone finds out that I’ve been in Playboy, there’s an immediate judgment there,” Lauren Anderson says in Secrets of Playboy. “People think that because I showed my body, I act in a certain way.” And it’s that dichotomy – of their being both a spectacle and a source of derision, and of having to shoulder the load of society’s hangups about nudity and the female form – that becomes the biggest talking point here. Why is so much other stuff, stuff they couldn’t control anyway, wrapped up in these women’s decision to pose nude for a magazine? And particularly when none of the personal journeys that led them to pose are alike. In sharing their individual stories, the women interviewed in Secrets are able to take back parts of that perception, put a real person’s face on it, and not let it remain generalized and stigmatized. And while they mostly acknowledge that the mechanics of a Playboy shoot made them feel commoditized, the specific and personal decision to do it  at all has become a source of inspiration. “I found my power,” Jill Scott says of the experience, dismissing with one simple sentence all of the hateful commentary on her decision to pose. At the end of the day, none of that stuff matters. (Or put even more simply, haters gonna hate.) For her, being in Playboy presented her in “the way I wanted to be seen.”        

Sex and Skin: Stills and footage from Playboy shoots, all blurred for broadcast television consumption. 

Parting Shot: A producer asks Jill Scott why people lose their minds when they’re confronted with a naked woman, and the former Playboy model agrees that it’s a peculiar reaction. “There’s nothing wrong with following a dream,” she says of the individuals like her who decided to pose. “There’s nothing wrong with being naked. I just think it’s a way to shame women.” 

Sleeper Star: “Posing nude is liberating,” Carmella DeCesare says. “I did then, and I would do it now. It is empowering. You’re making a choice for you. And I felt good about it.” But in order to reach that level of acceptance, she had to first quit Girl Next Door: The Search for a Playboy Centerfold, and then reconsider her decision and write Hefner a letter asking to pose.    

Most Pilot-y Line: For Jill Scott, the decision to pose for Playboy came with an unwanted stigma that she couldn’t shake. “I was no longer Jill Scott,” she says in Secrets of Playboy. “I was Jill Scott who posed naked. It’s so wrong.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s the individual perspectives of the women who made the decision to pose and become Playmates that resonate most in Secrets of Playboy, as they take their personal power back from the brand and the public’s perception of it.  

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges