Amazon today announced it has greenlit the Amazon Original Series American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story. The docuseries combines archival footage, interviews and cinematic reenactments to tell the story of Playboy magazine’s charismatic founder Hugh Hefner and his impact on global culture and history. The 13-episode season will premiere exclusively on Amazon Prime Video in the US, UK, Germany, Austria and Japan in 2017, and be available via the Amazon Video app for TVs, connected devices including Fire TV, mobile devices and online at Amazon.com/originals.
Produced by Stephen David Entertainment and Alta Loma Entertainment, American Playboy begins in post-war America and takes us through the launch of Playboy magazine in 1953 and the next six decades of Hefner’s life and career. As he built his empire, Hefner became both a social justice advocate and a target of the conservative movement, battling with the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover while becoming an outspoken defender of civil rights. With unprecedented access to more than 17,000 hours of never-before-seen footage from the Playboy archives and Hefner’s personal scrapbooks (which number more than 2,600 and constitute a Guinness World Record), American Playboy will be the Hugh Hefner story in his own words. The 90-year-old Hefner has been deeply involved in the development and production of American Playboy, imbuing the series with rich first-person accounts and never-before-told stories.
