You need more than a strong heart and nerves of steel to get hooked on Viva Laughlin (debuting tonight at 10 on CBS3), the story of a family guy trying to live his dream and open a Nevada casino. You need a very forgiving disposition.
It will move to its regular Sunday-at-8 slot this weekend, but CBS figures if it slaps the show on immediately after its most popular series, CSI, Laughlin will get the biggest sampling possible, before people scramble to switch channels.
The strategy worked fine on ABC Tuesday, as millions stuck around after Dancing With the Stars for the beginning of the comedy Samantha Who? Incredibly many of them stayed to watch the whole show.
Will viewers display the same kind of inertia tonight after our hero, Ripley Holden (Britisher Lloyd Owen), breaks into a stirring rendition of "Viva Las Vegas," while dancing through the shell of a casino he's building?
There's a chance. "Viva Las Vegas" is a very popular song, and if the Dead Kennedys, the Gipsy Vagabonds and the Blues Brothers, not to mention a million vocalists across the lounge-lizard spectrum from Engelbert Humperdinck to Bruce Springsteen, could click with it, why not this TV show?
But there's a problem. Not that the musical numbers seem fake. They're fun. But that the whole thing swings the needle of incredulity off the scales on the TV fish-o-meter.
The series is called Viva Laughlin, supposedly set in the nowhere gambling town of Laughlin, Nev., just across the bridge from Bullhead City, Ariz. Favored by wintertime retirees and summertime Jet Ski riders, it's a world away from Las Vegas glamour.
Not on this show, where production numbers light up the screen; the main casino looks suspiciously like Las Vegas' trendiest, the Palms, and the scenery looks more like the tonier neighborhoods in the San Fernando Valley near L.A. than the stark desolation of the Mojave Desert.
Casino finances, where $1 million is equal to about $10,000 in the normal world, are unreal. Gambling choices - Ripley lets it ride on roulette when any pro knows he'd get three, four or five times better odds at baccarat, craps or blackjack - are unbelievable. Even the police operate under fantasy methods that make the crew on Numb3rs look like beat cops.
The singing technique is novel, more karaoke than Broadway. Characters trill along with the original artists, so tonight Rip lip-syncs Elvis. And when Hugh Jackman swing-steps into the picture, introducing himself by singing "Sympathy for the Devil," the Rolling Stones recording plays, too.
That's swell, but there the swellness ends. Jackman will "recur," as they say, as the Snidely Whiplash character Nicky Fontana, who's out to crush everyone, including Ripley, but who somehow lets him win $1 million betting the red on roulette. And that's not giving anything away, even if the whole spinning-wheel, bouncing-ball extravaganza is filmed with the highest, suspenseful techniques.
Uh, if Rip don't win, he ain't got no dough, and there's no casino and then no show.
Besides casino high jinks, Viva is a family show; Ripley's foxy daughter (newcomer Ellen Woglom) is dating her drama professor. And a murder mystery. Somebody turns up dead in Ripley's office.
Time may tell if the overstuffed spectacle is a floor wax and a dessert topping, too, though only as prodigious a gambling man as Elvis himself would bet on Viva's surviving for too many episodes.
Old Swivel Hips didn't care a fig if he wound up broke, 'cause he'd always remember that he had a swingin' time. Those kinds of memories are as scarce as a royal flush in Viva Laughlin.
http://www.philly.com/inquirer/magazine/20071018_Jonathan_Storm___It_wont_set_your_soul_on_fire.html