This new CBS drama is a pleasant surprise, basically CSI: Las Vegas from fifty years ago. Dennis Quaid and Michael Chiklis are perfectly cast as the gravelly-voiced cowboy sheriff (based on the life of the real Sheriff Ralph Lamb) and the gangster (who really wants to be Donald Trump).

From what I've seen so far, it's less a gangster series than a classic whodunit, with the series arc (the how-to-run-a-casino part being far more interesting than the gangster part) developing in background. There's nothing wrong with formula television when the formula works so well.

Yeah, there are the plywood sets and the anachronisms (funny how hardly anybody smokes in this alternate-universe Las Vegas). But if they keep it a straightforward police procedural, one crime tackled per week, and steer clear of Emmy-bait melodramatic turns, I'll keep watching.

Labels: television reviews