Often, life is a numbers game for Michael Gaughan. And his review of the first two episodes of “Vegas Stripped” is numerical in nature:
“I give it an eight,” said the owner of South Point hotel-casino. “It came out well, all things considered.”
Gaughan’s rating could be called a hard eight, as he is not the most lenient audience for the Travel Channel series focused on his hotel. Up to Wednesday’s premiere episodes, Gaughan has been either indifferent or skeptical about the project.
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said during a phone interview Thursday. “Tom (Mikovits) and our marketing team said they had a show they wanted to put on TV. The way I run my place, I let my department heads make the decisions. I approved this in general because it was going to be on TV, and it wasn’t going to be anything negative against Las Vegas.”
For Gaughan, the son of resort pioneer Jackie Gaughan and one of the Las Vegas’ leading authorities on just about any subject, protecting the city’s image is priority No. 1.
“I’ve been approached by people wanting to do TV shows about Las Vegas in the past, and have turned down the ones that are negative about the city,” Gaughan said. “This thing came along, and it’s like my daddy says, it’s good to keep your name in the public eye.”
Produced by Leftfield Productions, the company that brought the wildly successful “Pawn Stars” to History Channel, “Vegas Stripped” is scheduled to run in a half-dozen, 30-minute installments on the Travel Channel, with new episodes set for 7 p.m. Wednesdays. The show taped from October to December. Up next week is the hotel’s staging of the World Series of Team Roping.
“I’m looking forward to that,” Gaughan said. “I”ll watch that one.”
The premiere episode centered on the hotel’s Fetish & Fantasy Ball. The second offered an inside-out account of the hotel’s gourmet food truck festival and celebrity poker tournament. Gaughan had no trepidation about the food trucks and poker tournament, but the Fetish & Fantasy ball caused concern. Under his ownership, the South Point has engendered a primarily cowboy-old west image, particularly during the run of the annual National Finals Rodeo. It is not known as a salacious resort, not at all in the order the Palms as it was depicted when it hosted MTV’s “Real World Las Vegas” reality show.
“When they wanted to shoot at the Fetish & Fantasy, I wasn’t sure what to expect,” said Gaughan, who watched the first two installments at a party at South Point Showroom. “But they did it fun and funny. I was pretty nervous, though.”
The Fetish & Fantasy looks like a one-off event for the hotel, by the way. Gaughan said the Hard Rock Hotel has made a deal to return the bawdy Halloween costume party to the Joint for 2012.
“The Hard Rock came in and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse,” he said, countering the account in the show, which indicated the party would return to the South Point.
“Vegas Stripped” showcases all variety of South Point staffers, from Mikovits and hotel president Ryan Growney to cocktail servers and bellmen (watching Mikovits’ attempt to explain to Growney miscalculating the food truck event by at least $15,000 is pretty amusing, if you know these two). Mikovits, who is a consulting producer of the series, has been on cable TV before. While a student at Georgetown, he hosted the interview-highlights show "College Football Magazine." Among his subjects were then-Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning and then-Penn State coach Joe Paterno. Thus, Mitkovits is more comfortable with a camera crew in tow than your typical resort executive.
Who you will not see on "Vegas Stripped," however, is Gaughan himself.
“When I see the camera, I usually go the other way,” Gaughan said. He has appeared on the South Point-based reality show “The Linemakers,” a depiction of the inner workings of sports book betting, which aired on Velocity, which is owned by the Discovery Channel. The show has aired 24 episodes and begins filming again in the fall, in time for the college and NFL season, again at the South Point.
“I did appear a couple of times on ‘Linemakers’ because I am comfortable with sports betting,” Gaughan said. As for a possible on-camera appearance if the show does sign for another set of episodes, Gaughan chuckles and says, “I can’t comment on that.”
Follow John Katsilometes on Twitter at Twitter.com/JohnnyKats. Also, follow “Kats With the Dish” at Twitter.com/KatsWithTheDish.
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