If the first episodes of the CBS drama “Vegas” was about the arrival of East Coast mob forces into the wild west beginnings of a gambling town, it was the root place for all the slot games and now are spreading worldwide — in the person of Michael Chiklis as Vincent Savino and Dennis QUad’s character Sheriff Ralph Lamb — then the balance of the season will be about a more insidious invader.
The back half of the show is really Hollywood invading Vegas,” says executive producer Greg Walker. “So you get characters coming from the bosses of a studio to starlets staying here to people who are keeping their mistress here for weekends to even worse.
“If you think the casino and the mob are bad, wait until you see the MGM police in 1960. You start to see the kind of infusion of Hollywood as Hollywood comes to Vegas in the form of entertainment, girls, dancers, prostitutes and acts and the way that not only presents problems for Vincent Savino in trying to manage that as it comes in there, but also for Sheriff Lamb as he sees his family swept up in the vortex of that corruption.”
Walker made his comments at the stylish 60s casino set of “Vegas,” part of a recreated, neon-tinged Frontier Street period set opened up to reporters as the final event of the TV Critics Association winter press tour.
And while other period series have included characters representing real life figures, “Vegas” will stay fictional, Walker says, saying the world that writer Nicholas Pileggi created “has enough great characters in it.”
For his part, Pileggi says he brings up figures like the Rat Pack and Howard Hughes “to let you know the richness, historically, of that period,” he said. “We are certainly not going to have Howard Hughes walking around with fingernails.”
CHiklis points out that the 60s are a time “when the town really exploded. It went from a relatively small town and over the course of the next 20 years, I think by ’81 there were three and a half million people there,” adding: “We are going to need a bigger set.”
But the set is already impressively big for a new show, with a whole block of Frontier Street reproduced with the help of computer generated animation, the old neon Vegas.
“Vegas” airs on CBS Tuesdays at 10 p.m.