Las Vegas has a unique collection of folklore. It’s steeped in showgirls and charismatic mobsters, fast-casual weddings and fabled film casino heists. We’ve all heard some of these tales, but what about the stories beneath the stories?

In the newest season of the podcast Spectacle, Las Vegas artist and journalist Brent Holmes examines how our development into a presumed paradise of vices came to be and how our transgressional culture shifts have moved the needle of America.

Produced by Neon Hum Media, the national podcast highlighted reality TV in its first season. To Holmes, Vegas feels like a relevant sequel in the sense that it, too, gets pegged as one-dimensional entertainment.

“People very frequently say, ‘Oh, well that’s where you go to get drunk and gamble and party.’ But all of these things are reflective of the greater zeitgeist of our civilization and how our culture works,” he says. “In a lot of ways, just like with reality TV, Las Vegas pushes forward certain ideas we begin to hold common later on.”

The history buff explores that dynamic through “the popular media lens” in Spectacle, using films like The Hangover, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Showgirls to pull back the curtain on pop culture’s distorted representation of our city and the historical subtext behind it.

Holmes’ Showgirls episode stands out for how it wades in deep, highlighting performers from the famed Folies Bergère and Jubilee shows and posing the questions we’ve all been dying to know. Did the women really have to go on brown rice diets? Were the understudies truly cutthroat enough to trip the star down the stairs? The episode acknowledges the film’s camp but dives beneath the shiny surface.

“We got to have a real conversation about what it was to be a woman in that industry at that time and what it was to be African-American in that industry,” Holmes says of the episode, which also covered the infamous “ebony line” of Black entertainers. “I also really love the Historic West Side episode talking about the Moulin Rouge. I’m very proudly Black, and I definitely like having conversations around the contributions of African-Americans to the larger culture.”

Las Vegas shoulders such a culturally rich history, it’s hard to know where to begin or end. Spectacle covers a wide spectrum that’s as varied as it is enticing. One minute, listeners learn how Vegas became a boxing epicenter, the next they’re being introduced to divorce ranches and the revival of the Vegas residency.

Holmes and his producer enlisted the help of local historians, Strip performers, journalists, sex workers and filmmakers to tell these pivotal stories. As the son of famed Las Vegas entertainer Clint Holmes, Brent even consults his own memory to help drive the narrative.

In Episode 1, the host recalls growing up around the bustle of showbiz, his father singing in late-night clubs as showgirls tucked the young Holmes into bed. It’s these truly only-in-Vegas moments that bring a whole different perspective to our city’s beating heart.

“The one thing I hope people take away is that we’re not just a cardboard cutout city. We’re not just a playground. We’re a real place where people have complex and intensive lives,” Holmes says. “If you are living here, I hope we unearth some things you didn’t know about a place you might consider home, so you can appreciate it even more.”

Spectacle: Las Vegas just wrapped its 12-episode season. Holmes, who regards podcasting as a “powerful medium,” says he’d love to do more hosting if the right project comes along.

“I find a lot of other things really fascinating about the world, and I feel like we should have more broad and complicated dialogues around them,” he says. “If I have the opportunity to be a voice in a conversation that I don’t think is being commonly held, then that’s really beautiful.”

Spectacle: Las Vegas episodes available on Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher and at neonhum.com

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