Too many people have had their noses planted up Playboy’s ass for too long to see the forest for the trees. That’s why this piece is required reading.

Susannah Breslin writes on www.trueslant.com – Chicago magazine has a long feature devoted to whether or not Playboy magazine will survive. I worked for Playboy for years. My conclusion? I doubt it.

For five years, I worked for Playboy TV. Granted, it wasn’t the magazine, but we were subject to the same rules to which all divisions of Playboy Enterprises, Inc. were subject, and it wasn’t the freewheeling, nonstop party workplace you might think.

I worked for a small production company out in the San Fernando Valley that had been contracted to produce “original programming” for the Playboy network. The hallways usually reeked of pot, and the occasional naked girl did pop up, but most of the time, it was work. Work that happened to involve naked people.

Myself and several others were “talent” on a show that was something like “60 Minutes” if Andy Rooney overdosed on Viagra. Intellectually challenging it was not. Each episode featured, as I recall, six “stories.” They were around 10 minutes long, and the single, bottom line, most important thing that dictated whether a story was “worthy” or not was whether or not the viewer at home was going to be able to jerk off to it.

We traveled across America, to London, Amsterdam, Mexico. Everywhere we went, people recognized the Playboy logo. The rabbit head was like a magnet to which they flocked. At some point during nearly every shoot, a young woman would sidle up to one of us, wondering if maybe? We could help her? Get into the magazine? We could not.

When I worked for Playboy TV, we were the company’s dirty little secret. Back then, Hef et al. were still trying to pretend that there was pornography and then there was, well, them. Still, what the channel was churning out amounted to porn, and, for a time, at least as I heard it, it was smut that kept the rest of the boat afloat. At a certain point, Playboy caved, and, among other forays into the hardcore racket, bought Club Jenna, a destined for obscurity adult production company spawned by adult actress Jenna Jameson and her then husband.

Ultimately, though, it was too late to play catch up. The internet and its 24/7 free orgy of hijacked porn killed the baby-faced centerfold and by contrast made the Playboy enterprise look dusty, archaic, and old. Why check out Miss June when you could watch “2 Girls 1 Cup”? The floodgates had already been opened, and a worldwide recognized brand was squandered because the man at the top was stuck in the past.

So, forgive me if I don’t exactly buy Chicago’s lengthy quasi-rimming of Playboy editor Jimmy Jellinek [pictured] as the young turk who just! may! save! Playboy! yet!

After all, he’s the guy responsible for putting a nude Marge Simpson on the cover.

“At one recent Playboy party held at the old Gold Star Sardine Bar,” Chicago reports, “Jellinek was so drunk that he fell out of a shopping cart appropriated from a grocery store next door.”

Meanwhile, the company’s stock price continues to plummet (by 80 percent in the last decade), the number of issues the magazine prints annually has shrunk (from 12 to 11), and when Hef’s daughter Christie stepped down last year, they were $156 million in the red. Now, the company is on the block. So far, no one’s buying.

Jellinek insists the magazine will survive.

“Dude, you’re talking about the world’s strongest brand—something that’s as recognizable as the Golden Arches and the Nike swoosh,” he asserts.

“You’ll see more magazines die off. Playboy won’t be one of them.” Of course, the problem isn’t really Jellinek; it’s Hef. Next month, he’ll turn 84, and, so far, he has steadfastly refused to give up his position as overly-involved editor-in-chief of the magazine. He runs the magazine with the same tightfistedness that I remember all to well, and, in doing so, has effectively strangled the bunny in his choke hold.

One day, Playboy will be like Tiki torches, a random relic of a culture that, by and large, no longer exists. Still, I’m glad I got to work for the house that Hef built. I went to the Mansion. I hung out in the Grotto. I met Hef. Amidst the playmates, the monkeys, and the acolytes, he seemed happy. Too bad it wasn’t meant to last.