Vegas couldn't be hotter if it were the dashboard of a stalled convertible in the middle of Red Rock under the noonday sun in late July.
This sizzlin' city has scorched the tube lately, Stripped naked on a scale normally reserved for those coastal bastions of reverential obsession, The Big Apple and The Big Orange.
The '03-'04 season is the year of The Big Cherries, a jackpot of PR for the R&R capital of the world.
Let us inventory our riches:
• Our idiot-box renaissance commenced a couple of seasons back with that King of Cadavers, that Crown Prince of Corpses, that Goombah of Grossness, CSI. An unlikely successor to our last High Priest of Hip, '70s cheese-o-rama Vega$ (of all the potential icon replacements for Bob Urich's cool-dude detective, Dan Tanna, we wind up with William Petersen's maggot-loving, uber-geek science dweeb Gil Grissom?), CBS' tippy-top-rated drama undrapes local terrain never before so widely exposed: a non-Strip Vegas of Henderson, Boulder City, McCarran, UNLV, Rainbow Boulevard, Lake Mead and similarly un-glam elements of our multi-tentacled metropolis.
• Back on the Street That Made Us What We Are Today, which also steals its share of imaginatively icky CSI murders, there's NBC's seriocomic sin-soap, Las Vegas, starring Smilin' Jimmy Caan aiming his nosy cameras at all the slots 'n' sluts in the fictional Montecito. This is as close to a Vega$-style throwback—scripted series, swaggering characters, neon at hyper-wattage, the Strip at its Strippiest—we've got this season.
• Just Off The Street That Made Us What We Are Today, the Palms scored with MTV's The Real World and followed up with Bravo's Celebrity Poker Showdown. Downtown, the beleaguered Binion's Horseshoe delivered the World Series of Poker, and a royal ratings flush, to the Travel Channel, and the Golden Nugget is poised to pick up the Fremont Street slack this summer as the site of Fox's The Casino, letting viewers peekaboo into the operation of a gaming palace. The same setup sends cameras off-Strip in the other direction when the Discovery Channel parks at Green Valley Ranch for American Casino.
• Speaking of which, the Stations property provided sanctuary, and screaming headlines, as Michael Jackson's temporary hideaway, spearheading a frenzied Vegas news cycle that included: Prez George Dubya at the Venetian in November; ex-Prez George Herbert Dubya at the Orleans this week; Vice Prez Dick Cheney last week; ongoing yelping by Sen. Harry Reid and others over Yucca Mountain; coast-to-coast footage of Las Vegans frolicking in a dusting of snow and frantically awaiting helicopter rescue from car roofs to escape rising flood waters; hand-wringing over Vegas-as-New-Year's-terrorist-target; and the oops!-she's-hitched/oops!-she's-not nuptials of some dippy dame from Bayou country.
• Filling up the fringes has been a flesh parade of Vegas-y specials: another season of E!'s Vegas Showgirls; a similar one-shot documentary on HBO; Vegas-centric Wild On! adventures; Strip-cruisin' cabbies and copulatin' backseat couples on replays of Taxicab Confessions; and a week-long wallow in our neon naughtiness on the Travel Channel. Fear Factor still slithers in for periodic refreshers in nausea-inducement, as do the Billboard and ESPN self-congratulathons, and Jay Leno brings The Tonight Show to Paris Las Vegas in May.
Even the one notable Sin City flameout, FX's dark, moody Lucky, was a critic's pet.
Tote it up and TV '03-'04 is a Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority wet dream come true.
With only one nagging, niggling little risk: demystifying the mystique that makes us Vegas.
Yes, it's outwardly insane to argue against an explosion of exposure for a city fueled by mass-marketing to the tourist trade. True, the porno-fying of American culture (Jenna Jameson as VH1 commentator!) lubricates an increasingly titillated populace for Sin City benders. But there's something to be said for holding back in a seduction between lovers, including the one between Vegas and the world.
TV turns the extraordinary ordinary with astonishing speed. The ultimate media beast, television is an insatiable, pop-culture-fed Tasmanian devil powered by imitation and repetition that reduces trends to trivia ("familiarity breeds contempt" was surely coined for the box) and chops indelible memories into assembly-line snapshots by its vast accessibility. A commonplace instrument that eventually makes anything fresh and exciting ... commonplace.
(God's nifty little joke on us: The more impressive the technology we concoct, the harder we are to impress, and the more we entertain ourselves, the less entertained we feel.)
Vegas will always attract hard-core hell-raisers, but luring closet hedonists ensures the healthiest tourist industry, and nothing tempts like the promise of taboo pleasures. And what, traditionally, is taboo about Vegas? In the national imagination, everything from carnal thrills to big-money chills.
But the red-light glow of the forbidden that bathes this sumptuous Gomorrah can flicker and fade when the treasures beneath our teasing veil of wickedness become just more between-the-ads filler up and down the remote and around the clock for rote consumption in the virtual-reality safety of your plasma-screen TV in Bumblecluck, USA.
That's a bracing slap of ordinariness to an extraordinary city.
Beware the "blessing" of TV's ardent gaze.
Vegas thrives as a seductive mystery woman. Not a nattering fishwife.
Steve Bornfeld's column is open 24/7 for your dining and dancing pleasure. Reservations: [email protected]