September 24, 2012
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Cowboys vs. the Mob in Las Vegas of the ’60s
Sonja Flemming/CBSVegas, with, from left, Jason O’Mara, Dennis Quaid and Taylor Handley, on CBS on Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central.
September 24, 2012TELEVISION REVIEWCowboys vs. the Mob in Las Vegas of the ’60s
By MIKE HALEIt’s a tight race, but my vote for the drabbest and least informative title among the new fall television shows goes to CBS’s “Vegas” over some tough competition, including “Arrow,” “Revolution,” “Elementary,” “Partners” and “Nashville,” which is at least the entire name of a city.
(I imagine a conversation in which a development executive asks, “Wasn’t there a show on a different network, not too long ago, called ‘Las Vegas’?,” and another answers, “It’s O.K., we’re dropping the ‘Las.’ ”)
In some ways the title doesn’t do justice to the show, which has an amusing premise — cowboys versus mobsters, or “High Noon” meets “The Godfather,” with chorus girls — and a high-class actor, the often underrated veteran Dennis Quaid, making his debut as a TV series star.
In another way, however, the title fits, because beneath the period details and despite a cast that includes Michael Chiklis, Carrie-Anne Moss and Jason O’Mara, “Vegas” is something profoundly ordinary: a CBS crime procedural, with all the professionalism and limited ambition that tends to imply.
The pilot on Tuesday gets off to a brisk start, with Mr. Quaid on horseback charging across the dusty runways of the Las Vegas airport in 1960, running down the plane that has spooked his cattle. He’s a rancher and a former military policeman, and his character is based — extremely loosely, you would guess — on Ralph Lamb, who was sheriff of Clark County, Nev., through the 1960s and ’70s.
The hardheaded fictional Lamb gets into a dust-up with some airport employees and catches the eye of a Chicago mobster, Vincent Savino (Mr. Chiklis), who’s just debarked from the plane and is on his way into town to capture as big a share of the new casino action as he can.
It’s an elegant, economical opening that sets up the show’s battle lines: the cowboy sheriff will fight the city-slick gangster, as well as corrupt officials and greedy businessmen, for Las Vegas’s soul. There’s an element of romantic fatalism, since Lamb appears to be against development in general — he just wants to get back to his ranch — and we know how that will work out.
Of course, he still needs to be named sheriff, a formality the show accomplishes by the end of the first episode. A relative of the governor is murdered, and the mayor (Michael O’Neill), looking for someone he can trust, enlists Lamb to help with the investigation. During the entirely routine, inconsequential case, we’re introduced to the rest of the cast that will help Lamb solve future whodunits: his rancher brother (Mr. O’Mara) and son (Taylor Handley), and a female prosecutor (Ms. Moss of the “Matrix” films) who feels out of place in this frontier tale but looks great in snug wool suits.
Lamb moves across a colorful landscape of location desert scenery and soundstage re-creations of casinos and the old Fremont Street gambling strip in downtown Las Vegas. It’s fun to look at, as are the costumes and the vintage cars and airplanes. A scene in which Lamb and his brother track down Lamb’s son (just before an angry husband takes a potshot at him) is jolting for its view of a spanking-new cookie-cutter subdivision.
It’s all just window dressing on a standard crime drama, however, and while the pilot sets up running story lines involving the gangster and the officials he controls, they feel squeezed and a little perfunctory. It’s the CBS quality-control bargain: “Vegas” won’t be a wreck like NBC’s “Playboy Club” last season (to pick another show that tried to capitalize on a swinging 1960s backdrop), but the chances that its storytelling will be out of the ordinary are reduced.
The weight of making “Vegas” into something distinctive is probably on Mr. Quaid: can he prosper in the latter-day Bat Masterson role the way Timothy Olyphant has in FX’s “Justified,” and Robert Taylor has in A&E’s “Longmire”? It’s hard to tell from one episode — Lamb mostly comes across as uptight, marked by an unsettling squint.
But I wouldn’t bet against Mr. Quaid’s relaxing into the role and turning in one of the more watchable performances of the new season, even if he is playing just another TV detective.
Vegas
CBS, Tuesday nights at 10, Eastern and Pacific times; 9, Central time.
Produced by CBS Television Studios. Greg Walker, Nicholas Pileggi, Cathy Konrad, Arthur Sarkissian and James Mangold, executive producers.
WITH: Dennis Quaid (Ralph Lamb), Michael Chiklis (Vincent Savino), Carrie-Anne Moss (Katherine O’Connell), Jason O’Mara (Jack Lamb), Taylor Handley (Dixon Lamb) and Sarah Jones (Mia Rizzo).
Comments (1)
I am supposed to call myself a writer, because I have written a book, and it has won award in San Francisco, and Honorable Mention, in San Francisco Book Fair for 2012 as well as a First place award in Hollywood Book Festival 2012, a book called, ”Pinkhoneysuckle,” full of everything which I have known “Goodness and kindness,”Sorrow, Saddness, Dangerous People, and people not fit to bury — Those were the child abusers. Yet, it is all so unpredictable that people laugh their heads off through it — Southern Diaspora all the way to Washington, D.C. –I left few issues of faith, history, or sex relevant to the time untouched, and was open with sexuality–honest and heart felt love affairs.//Las Vegas fascinates me, for it is not like any place on earth, and I could not imagine any city where I could go, sit with people in different walks of life,, different ordinary Mr. and Mrs. Everyday, the midwestern Christian with one too many, finally voiding on the sidewalk, forgetting his/her manners, so with such fabulous material; why can a wonderful show come out of such a large morsel of splendid delights, there, just for the observant soul to find one’s self creating great stories.
Maybe we should let Las Vegas people tell us their Los Vegas stories, for people live lives there, and the strip is another place to be gone in to gently, for with such an incredible swatch of large city dynamics it is the taxi drivers, the coctail waitress, and every visitor which is going to help us divide real from illusion. Could it be that one needs writers who have been nurtured from their first breaths up on the dessert winds who see it for what it is — A city of about a million people, one which grew very fast from when it was cutting baby teeth back in the 1960s to the megalithic place which one can see like a star ship in the middle of land that a rattlesnake would fry on the concrete pavement of today, and it is a certainty that bambi is not going to wander in with a herd of little baby deer and feed on your veggies, for if everyone gardened extensively there on non-native species, then the Colorado could hardly make a dent in city water needs.
My husband and I first went when we were still a young couple, and that night the wind came up like no wind which I had felt before, and fortunately we were in our room when, suddenly, the lights went out on the strip, and here and there back up lights were kicking in, but after that, I just had to read a history of Las Vegas, and I got the idea of the brilliance which it took to start the first shovels of dirt, and through the years one had the mob tales, the tax dodgers, investors with Jewish roots — A whole lot of folks coming in from the rain to take a leap of faith and build a city. I asked myself on a later visit; “How does any child grow up sane in a place like this, and a cab driver put it in to perspective that the strip was for the tourist, and all other jobs were your every day, “This is your life job.”
I have never written a television show, but if I was going to write one about Las Vegas, I think I would ask people to show me where they live and to show me where they work, and what makes you happy out here? Ask a million people; Get a million answers, and you will find your show. Shots of the strip and strip shows might be better told by the folks who work in the back stage areas and help all that seems beyond our comprehension amazing and fun for a few nights happen; follow them and find your stories, and I could tell you something very sweet when the lights went out, and we were young, and the dessert wind blew like a wildfire.Barb