It's probably only a matter of time before every business in Las Vegas has its own reality show. We've already had The Casino and The Club, and now we've got The Wedding Chapel and The Burlesque Show. The Pawn Shop can't be far behind. To be fair, one of the new offerings is actually quite good, showing that the problem with these shows is not so much the paucity of good ideas as the incompetence in execution.
That incompetence is overwhelmingly evident in Las Vegas Garden of Love (ABC Family, Mondays, 9:30 p.m.), a horribly contrived and patently fake show following the family who owns the titular wedding chapel. The show focuses on 15-year-old Johnny, the cousin of chapel owner Cheryl, and his adventures are right out of the sitcom playbook. Almost all of the interviews and voice-overs are clearly scripted, and many of the other scenes look staged, as well.
The saddest aspect is that a number of publications, including the Weekly, have reported on all sorts of shady goings-on in the wedding chapel industry, but the show is more interested in little Johnny's wacky staged dates and the chapel monkey—yes, the chapel monkey. There's an Aaron Spelling-produced pilot in development for next season that takes a fictional approach to this same subject, starring Tara Reid and Mark-Paul Gosselaar. It probably won't get things right, either, but at least it won't have pretensions to reality.
If you've lost all hope of finding genuinely interesting and well-made shows about Vegas, you'll be pleasantly surprised with Forty Deuce (Bravo, Thursdays, 11 p.m., beginning April 7). The four-part series follows Forty Deuce owner Ivan Kane as he brings his popular burlesque club from Hollywood to Mandalay Bay. Produced and directed by Zalman King, infamous for his soft-core porn series, Red Shoe Diaries, Forty Deuce is both sexy and artful, playing more like a theatrical documentary than a typical basic-cable reality program.
It helps that King has a finite arc to follow, and that Kane, his wife and co-owner, Champagne Suzy, and his dancers are each interesting on individual levels. King doesn't rely as heavily on having cameras follow his subjects everywhere they go; instead, he uses interviews, montages and arty re-enactments to tell the story. Of course, as with any good reality show, there is plenty of drama and King captures it in a way that makes it both interesting and appealing.
Back on network TV, the latest chapter in the sitcom death watch comes courtesy of two new mid-season shows: The Office (NBC, Tuesdays, 9:30 p.m.) and Life on a Stick (Fox, Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m.). One is a copy of a successful British series while the other appears to be a copy of every sitcom ever aired. The Brit copy, The Office, is the better of the two, mostly because it offers an alternative to the average American comedy. It's shot in a mockumentary style with no laugh track, following the desperate lives of workers at a paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Like most viewers coming to NBC's version, I've never seen the acclaimed original, so at least the jokes are new to me. The humor, though, based in awkward silences and uncomfortable situations, mostly falls flat. Like Fox's overrated Arrested Development, The Office is more admirable than actually entertaining.
But at least it's not Life on a Stick, a terrible comedy about two losers working at a Hot Dog on a Stick-esque joint and dealing with typical family sitcom travails. Predictable, annoying and completely unfunny, Life on a Stick is everything that's wrong with sitcoms and perfectly demonstrates why no one's watching them. It makes The Office look like the most brilliant thing on television.