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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.