Why this show failed, Yes Mad Men is involved.
Even before this show aired, people were calling it a Mad Men ripoff. While I tend to agree, I don't think that's necessarily why it failed. After all, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. The problem was that it was such a bad ripoff which never even tried to hide it (and if it did, then the writers are even worse than I thought). It's almost like they wanted people to know this was a Mad Men ripoff. Why else hire Naturi Naughton to play almost the exact same role as she had in Mad Men? In other words, the writing was lazy and predictable and was counting on the audience to just go with it without offering anything really new.
There is one particular bit of dialog during the pilot that I noticed that absolutely defined the problem. Amber Heard's character had asked Naturi Naughton's character what people said about Eddie Cibrian and Naughton answered: "That he's brilliant, that he's a fool, that he's a womanizer, that he's everything you could want, and everything you don't." Well, even before Mad Men ever aired, that line would have sounded incredibly cliche. The fact that it sounds like it was taken straight from the character description for Don Draper doesn't help, but that's OK, let's say the two characters were similar. The problem is that in Mad Men, you knew all this about Don Draper by the end of the Pilot without anyone every actually having to say it. The writers in Mad Men didn't have to tell you this about Draper because they'd done a good job of showing you what he was like. All the strngths, weaknesses, contradictions and secrets (with one major exception) were laid out for you in the pilot of that show. The fact that this line was written out and spoken in the Playboy Club was just weak. I literally cringed when I heard this and immediately knew this show was not long for this world.
I'm so ugly...that's ok 'cause so are you.