The casino. The place we go to have fun, spend some money, possibly have some drinks and party until the small hours. It is a business that has been around for decades, and it comes as no small surprise that the TV and film world have enjoyed a healthy relationship with gaming for many years. In this new feature, we look at three of the best TV shows from years gone by to have featured or been set entirely within the four walls of a casino.
Like most businesses currently, the gaming industry also has a huge presence online and there are thousands of websites that point you in the right direction and throw you some offers, a bit like this one for a Rivers Casino bonus code. But, for the purposes of this article, we’re staying with the big casinos out there in the real world, and for our first TV show, we’re heading for the gambling mecca of the world, Sin City itself.
Las Vegas was a U.S. network television show that aired Stateside from 2003 to 2008 and we’ve always had a soft spot for it here at THN. The show boasted some huge names and the cast was led by The Godfather legend James Caan, and hot property Josh Duhamel, who would later go on to star in the Transformers movies. The show was based in a Las Vegas attraction called the Montecito Resort and Casino – a fictional resort – and was syndicated throughout the world. It revolved around Caan’s former CIA man Ed Deline who is sent to Nevada and to the Montecito to take charge of its security. Las Vegas also featured some pretty awesome guest stars too, with the likes of Jean Claude Van Damme, Alec Baldwin, Elliott Gould, Sylvester Stallone and Rachel Leigh Cook all popping up in various episodes throughout its five season run.
We stay in Nevada’s brightest city for the second film on our list, the similarly titled Vegas, which ran for just the one season back in 2012. The show was co-created by one of the film world’s biggest names in crime story screenwriters – Nicholas Pileggi, the man responsible for writing the hit movies Casino and Goodfellas. Vegas had a cast led by Dennis Quaid and Micheal Chicklis (he of The Shield fame) and was set in the 1960s. It focussed on Quaid’s lawman Sheriff Ralph Lamb and his dealings with Chicago mobster Vincent Savino just when the mob was starting to take control in blossoming desert city.
Finally on our list is a show you may not have heard of because, like Vegas, Dr. Vegas only ran for the one season back in 2004. Starring a dynamite, very well-known cast that included Rob Lowe and Joe Pantoliano, as well as Amy Adams and Tom Sizemore, Dr. Vegas revolved around Lowe’s Dr. Billy Grant, a Harvard graduate who is hired by a hotel and casino in town to be their in-house physician. The show chronicles Grant’s run-ins with the hotel’s manager Tommy (Pantoliano), and his relationship with other employees of the resort. The show’s theme song was famously Connected by British band Stereo Mc’s, but sadly viewers didn’t star connected with the show as Dr. Vegas sadly came to an abrupt halt in the autumn of 2004.
