Quotes of the Day
When conservative pundit and moral scold William Bennett was found, in 2003, to have lost millions of dollars gambling in Las Vegas and elsewhere, the reaction in some quarters was, Hypocrite! How could the author of The Book of Virtues be an honorary citizen of the city of vice and still speak for American values?
Bennett, it turns out, was ahead of his time. On TV — that barometer of the nation's morals and lack thereof — Las Vegas is on a roll. In 2000, CSI established the city as the 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.
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The 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 for it too.
Las Vegas knows all about balancing naughty and nice. In the '90s it tried to become a cleaned-up destination for families. But last year it decided to embrace its old-time illicit allure — and the free-spending adults that attracts — with an ad campaign touting the slogan "What happens here stays here." The city's rebirth as a racy entertainment locale couldn't have been better timed. "CSI really helped Las Vegas get on the map as an attractive town," says Las Vegas journalist Lonn Friend. "It's photographed in a really erotic way. The underlying ethos of this town is erotica."
And the casinos, once publicity shy, now understand the value of TV. According to CSI creator (and lifelong Vegas resident) Anthony Zuiker, the turning point came not with his show but in 2002 when MTV's The Real World taped a season in Vegas and drew an enthusiastic young audience. "Before that," he says, "there were a lot of problems when we were trying to shoot in Vegas. The executives at the casinos were afraid to show dead bodies." (Partly for budgetary reasons, the scripted Vegas series still shoot mostly in L.A.) Now even cartoonists are rolling the dice: this fall NBC launches Father of the Pride, a computer-animated series from the makers of Shrek, about a family of lions in Siegfried & Roy's Mirage Resort revue. (Fortunately for NBC, it was, ahem, a tiger that severely mauled Roy Horn last fall.)
Few people embody both eras of the city better than James Caan, who exudes old-Vegas raffishness like Old Spice and used to hang out with the kind of less-than-reputable locals he describes in terms 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 is an endless source of tales: "You can write a story about a king one week and a pimp the next."
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.
Then again, no one goes to Vegas to think about geopolitics. Look at today's Vegas shows and ask whether America's morals are more progressive or more conservative, and you have to answer yes and yes. Las Vegas, after all, is about sin, but also limits. As on Spelling's '70s soaps — in which characters learned pat little lessons when they overindulged — these shows offer both titillation and retribution. On CSI we get the former stripper who puts murderers in jail; on Dr. Vegas, the hot singer whose drug problem nearly kills her; on Single in Vegas, the party girls longing to settle down; on The Casino, the skirt-chasing high roller who picks up a woman — who turns out to be a man.
All this makes the perfect setting for an America in which Rush Limbaugh can be a recovering druggie and conservative icon — an America that wants the binge and the purge, the sin and the penitence, all in one neon package. Until we find a better metaphor for our split moral personality, what happens in Vegas will stay ... on TV.
- James Poniewozik