Chad Hodge on the set of The Playboy Club

It was during a summer internship with a casting director in LA after his junior year at Northwestern University that Highland Park native Chad Hodge, 34, realized what he wanted to do with his life. “I was reading scripts for my boss every night—it’s called ‘doing coverage’—and I hated every single script I read that summer. I couldn’t believe people were getting paid for this.” Then the casting director handed Hodge a script she was considering taking on. It was 1998, and that script was American Beauty, which went on to win five Academy Awards (including Best Original Screenplay).

That script changed the course of Hodge’s life. “I knew I wanted to try [writing], but I didn’t know if I’d be any good at it,” he confesses.

When he returned to Northwestern for his senior year, Hodge took every writing class he could and began working on his first screenplay. “Now looking back, it was pretty bad… but I guess it was good enough to know that I wanted to keep going.”

Once he graduated, he headed for the Hollywood Hills. After a six-week stint at the William Morris Agency (“the hours were really long and didn’t leave any time to write”), Hodge’s Northwestern connections helped him land an interview at NBC.

What was supposed to be a general meeting turned into his first big break: He passed along two of his screenplays, and six months later NBC asked him to rewrite a pilot they had in development. Hodge rewrote the half-hour comedy called All About Us—three weeks later they were shooting it, and two months later it was on the air. “That was my first writing job—I was 23.”

Fast forward 11 years and at least a half-dozen more pilots, and Hodge is Hollywood’s new golden boy, serving as creator and coexecutive producer of one of the most talked-about shows for the fall season, The Playboy Club.

How did a North Shore kid land such a plum gig? “I did a pilot with NBC called Midnighters, and we had a great time working together, so they came to me and said, ‘We want to keep working with you, and we have this project with 20th Century Fox and Imagine Entertainment [Brian Grazer and Ron Howard’s company] that we need to find a writer for—we think you’d be the perfect person.’” All they told him was that it was to be set in the original Chicago Playboy Club in the early 1960s and should center on the beautiful Playboy Bunnies—it was up to Hodge to come up with the rest.

Coming back to Chicago to film the show is like life coming full circle for Hodge, although the hectic pace of TV doesn’t allow for much free time to explore his old stomping grounds. “It’s really, really nice coming home, and the city’s been great to us,” he says.

There’s been some media debate about whether the show is degrading or empowering to women—the same kind of debate that’s been swirling around Playboy for decades—and Hodge welcomes it. “I love that [the show] inspires a conversation. That’s what makes great drama.” With input from Hef and a few former Bunnies, Hodge has portrayed the women who worked at the clubs as strong, hard-working individuals. “The most common misconception is that the Bunnies were hookers or strippers,” says Hodge, “but nothing could be further from the truth.”

The Playboy Club airs Mondays at 9 PM on NBC.