NBC has ordered its first drama pilot for the 2011–2012 season, and it’s a historical series about Playboy bunnies. The show will be set at a Playboy club in New York in the sixties, a setting Gloria Steinem knew was a rich one back in 1963 when she went undercover to write “I Was a Playboy Bunny†for Esquire . (Let’s hope the new show turns out to be harder hitting than the eighties TV-movie adaptation of Steinem’s article, A Bunny’s Tale , starring a young Kirstie Alley.) This pickup inaugurates a new, hopefully better, drama programming era for NBC, and is also the latest attempt by the major networks to prove risque historical dramas can work somewhere other than cable. It’s the Mad Men effect in effect. [Deadline]