Word: casino
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...place to be stylishly murdered. But in the past year, it has been joined by shows from Las Vegas on NBC to the reality dating show Single in Vegas on WE: Women's Entertainment to Celebrity Poker Showdown on Bravo and two summer reality shows, Fox's The Casino and Discovery's American Casino. And there's more to come in the fall...
...superficial attraction of Sin City for TV is obvious--sin. "People go there with a certain desire to let go of their inhibitions," says Jack Orman, an executive producer of CBS's forthcoming Dr. Vegas, with Rob Lowe (The West Wing) as a playboy casino doctor. "That generally leads to trouble, which leads to dramatic situations." But for all the sex and show girls, a closer look at the programs reveals Bennettian contradictions: libido and law, hedonism and moralism, revelry and regret. They let the audience, vicariously, be bad and get spanked...
...like "I know he's not a shoe salesman, but I don't know of any violent crime he committed." Today on Las Vegas--one of the few new series to click with viewers last fall--the former Godfather gangster plays the head of security at a top-flight casino. The show's tone is hardly dark. The Elvis theme song--"A little less conversation/A little more action"--aptly captures its cheerfully vacant spirit ("I don't know what kind of drama awards we're gonna win," Caan says dryly). But old Vegas or new Vegas, says Caan, the town...
Writing about the pimp, however, is more sensitive, with networks still cowering from the FCC's decency crusade. Just ask Casino executive producer Mark Burnett (Survivor, The Apprentice), who ran into interference from Fox's censors for, among other things, a scene in the show's debut featuring a stripper in a whipped-cream bikini. "If you don't have an accurate portrayal of what really goes on there," Burnett says, "it's hard to know where to turn. I'm not even allowed to put a naked body with blurs on it, which is what we do on Survivor...
When sex fails, there's always violence--American Casino has caught several Cops-style run-ins between security guards and drunken guests--but both reality shows must also rely on the picayune dramas of the service industry. (Will the lounge singer keep his artistic integrity or be forced to do Billy Joel covers? Will the sugar sculpture collapse? Will the chef's twice-baked fingerling potatoes, as promised, indeed "kick...