Viva Las Vegas

ROBERT VOETS/CBS
Shooting a scene for CSI

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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 ass"?)

In one sense, the Vegas trend is an old story mindless escapism in the mold of Aaron Spelling's Fantasy Island and, yes, the Robert Urich Vega$ (though, for his part, Spelling says some of the new, decency-cautious series "make Vegas seem like a church"). But the new programs also show how some of our mores have changed. Consider the casino-based series, which place the viewers' sympathies with management that is, with mammoth businesses predicated on systematically beating the little guy, one hand at a time. TV once made populist heroes of rascally underdogs like Bo and Luke Duke and con men and cardsharps like Bret Maverick. Today The Cooler and the Ocean's Eleven remake notwithstanding we more often root for the overdogs, the entrepreneurs and the security chiefs who use military-grade surveillance technology to protect their shekels from card counters and scammers. "Nobody cheats in my casino!" exults Caan in Las Vegas, even though "his" casino actually belongs to a multibillion-dollar corporation.

This renewed willingness to pull for the Man may reflect America's changed role in the world. We're no longer the freewheeling adversary of gray, monolithic communism but rather the world's only superpower. We are the house, and we set the odds.