Tonight I watched the premiere of what can only be the very worst reality TV show I have ever seen, The Casino. There are three major reasons why this show is awful. In ascending order of severity, those reasons are:
1. Like Las Vegas, a terrible show with a dishonestly good pilot episode, The Casino is a thinly disguised attempt to shove travel brochures in your face. You may as well be watching Travel Channel's Top 10 Vegas Resort Swimming Pools. (Mandalay Bay is #1 thanks to its wave machine.) These shows would be vastly more entertaining if they focused on the dark side of Mob-Free Vegas: disaffected employees, obnoxious tourists, and the general misanthropy that everyone who lives and works in Vegas seems to feel.
2. The Casino suffers from The Jury Syndrome. (Side note: If these show titles get any blander, Google will be of no use. Next up on ABC: 'The And') The Jury Syndrome occurs when a show tries to copy the formula made popular by The Fugitive, in which an engaging main character interacts with a rotating supporting cast; but then that show forgets it needs an engaging main character. The casino owners in this show are so "Look-At-Me-I-Watched-Swingers" obnoxious, that when they say the word "baby," it is like nails on the chalkboard of my soul.
3. OK, Mark Burnett. I know some scenes from Survivor are staged. I assume the same is true of The Apprentice, and I'm sure that The Restaurant is almost entirely fabricated. But I have never seen as poor an attempt as The Casino to convince me that it is, as its website promises, "unscripted." I guess if by "unscripted" you mean "improv," then okay. But this is ridiculous.
You would think that if they're going to perpetrate a reality show, they'd at least make its conflicts enticing, right? Wrong. Here's an example conflict: the new lounge singer is asked to step aside so that a Nevada polician can butcher a song. First of all, this is such a stupid little crisis, that this guy has to stand off stage for five minutes while a wheel gets greased, and he makes it seem like a deal-breaker. But forget about that, because the whole thing is entirely fake; the scene in which the lounge singer is confronted by the entertainment director looks like a botched re-enactment, complete with slow reaction times and poor acting.
Oh, yeah, it gets worse. Consider the following subplot: A 'professional gambler' arrives in Vegas and decides to go to The Casino. Somehow, the show's cameras knew he was coming and followed him from the airport; and, even though he has television cameras following him, he almost slips under the receptionist's radar.
Now, this supposed card-counter -- who the casino knows about but mysteriously doesn't ask not to play blackjack -- makes it clear that he is looking for chicks. The camera inexplicably focuses on a woman in a hat and sunglasses, playing blackjack with some loser. We see about a half-minute of this footage, when suddenly Mr. Card Counter sidles up and talks her into going to his suite. In response to an improbably direct question from the dealer ("Did you notice that your girlfriend just left with that guy, and she isn't coming back?"), the loser claims that Ms. Hat was actually a guy. Cut to the suite, where Mr. Card Counter and Ms. Hat are lightly making out or something, and Mr. Card Counter twice remarks that Ms. Hat has a sexy, deep voice.
Say it ain't so, Mark Burnett. One would think that a man of your considerable resources and reality-TV resum? could put together something a little bit less obviously fake. What were you thinking? O, how I long for the days of Joe Schmo.
Thank God one of you watched this. Had I had time this morning, I planned to write a lengthy condemnation of this absolute piece of shite. Of course, were I to have written it, nobody but me would have seen it. The show was so bad, it almost makes me want to boycott anything with "Casino" in the name. Almost.
The only character with any air of "reality" about him was the virgin guy. I believe that a person like that might exist, and might, in "reality" act as that guy did when faced with the situation he was. Specifically, a guy like that might actually blow a chance to get laid when several filthy sluts, one clad only in whipped cream, are served up to him on a silver platter. That guy could have been real. Oh, and I guess the sluts.
Everything else about the show was so transparently scripted, and scripted incredibly poorly. One of those sluts could have written a better script for the pilot. In whipped cream. On that poor virgin bastard's hairy back.
That felt good. Back to the law.
Did you notice that those three sluts, while up in the hotel room trying to de-virginize the nerd in what must have been the Worst Party Ever, were simultaneously downstairs watching the Card Counter throw dice?
Sure, it's possible that after the party, those three random women decided to hook up with the other non-casino employee that had cameras following him everywhere. But...why?
Might I suggest Discovery's "American Casino"? (possibly to be set against "The Casino" during my face off review week)
Since I set up a season pass in TiVO, I actually watched the second episode as well. The second episode was every bit as bad as the first. I'm trying to figure out the connection it has to Mandalay Bay. The first episode the "professional gambler" just had to stop by Mandalay Bay to draw some money on his account. The Episode last night a "high roller" that normally plays at MB ends up at the Butt Nugget. And these "swingers" also end up in a suite at MB and at MB's ultra lounge Rum Jungle.
They start the trailer of every episode flying over MB in slow motion and then high speed to old town Vegas making all the other strip hotels just a blur.
In the show, they blur out "Coors Light" on the beer bottles and can't say "Louis Vuitton", but Mandalay Bay is mentioned or shown several times during the show. I suspect that Mandalay Bay has some vested interest in the piece of crap show.
Interesting theory. Mandalay Group resorts do seem to permeate television-Vegas: Las Vegas is filmed at Mandalay Bay, and I've seen many a Fear Factor Las Vegas in which people slid down the Luxor pyramid or climbed around the top of the Mandalay Bay. (Curiously Excalibur is largely ignored.)
It's extra-strange when you consider that Mandalay Bay is the most innocuous-looking resort on the Strip. No weird theme, not even a weird color scheme like the Rio...no particular reason why you'd choose to show it.