"Vegas" and "Last Resort"

CBS's new period crime drama "Vegas" premiered Tuesday night and ABC's submarine adventure series "Last Resort" premieres tonight. I've seen both pilots now, so let's have a look.

"Vegas" is immediately eye-catching because of the high-profile cast and beautifully recreated 1960s setting. Dennis Quaid stars as Ralph Lamb, the new sheriff in town who would like nothing more than to run his ranch in peace, but Vegas needs a law man, and there's no one better for the job. It's fun to watch Quaid get into fistfights, rough up a gang of bikers and their lawyer, and play the kind of super-masculine cowboy hero that you don't see much anymore. With the help of his newly deputized brother Jack (Jason O'Mara) and Assistant DA Katherine O'Connell (Carrie-Anne Moss), Lamb quickly establishes himself as a major force to be reckoned with. This is not a welcome development for Vincent Savino (Michael Chiklis), a volatile Chicago mobster who has come to Vegas to make a name for himself, and has a few initial skirmishes with Sheriff Lamb during in the hour. Clearly we can expect more in the weeks to come.

Out of all the networks pilots this year, "Vegas" looks the best. It's got the dusty open desert, the glitzy interiors, and shimmering views of the vintage Strip, complete with all the old casinos that fell victim to the wrecking ball. It looks like a show that should be on HBO, Showtime, or AMC, but the big question is, does it match up in quality? Despite the involvement of the mobster Savino, "Vegas" strikes me as more of a Western. Lamb is a no-nonsense, punch first and ask questions later kind of sheriff and gets several hero shots astride a horse, wielding firearms, and intimidating suspects. A lot of emphasis is placed on his background as a rancher, a man of the vanishing frontier. Not a very nuanced character, to say the least, but this is just a first impression. The real test for "Vegas" is going to be what happens next week and the week after as we chart the progress of Lamb and Savino and see if there is any complexity under these familiar exteriors. And I certainly hope that Carrie-Anne Moss gets more to do than just show up looking lovely in a different outfit for every scene. "Vegas" could easily settle for being yet another CBS crime procedural, and I'm sure it would be a very good one, but it has the potential to be a lot more with this kind of talent involved.

"Last Resort," on the other hand, left me kind of baffled. I enjoyed the first half where the crew of a nuclear submarine, led by Captain Marcus Chaplin (Andre Braugher) and XO Lt. Commander Sam Kendall (Scott Speedman) are ordered to fire on Pakistan and start a war through questionable channels. Their refusal results in the sub being marked as rogue by the US government, which has possibly been compromised by some kind of internal struggle. Then Chaplin decides that their best course of action is to take over an island with a NATO communications outpost and declares that he'll hold it until the crew can figure out what happened and how to clear their names. Other players include navigator Lt. Shepard (Daisy Betts), her father Admiral Shepard (Bruce Davison), who will be their contact in Washington, Kylie Sinclair (Autumn Reeser), a weapons manufacturing lobbyist, Sophie Girard (Camille de Pazzis) with NATO, and finally suspicious islanders Julian (Sahr Ngaujah) and Tani (Dichen Lachmann).

The trouble is that the first episode tries to do too much. It introduces over a dozen major characters at a breakneck pace, so nobody gets much time to make an impression besides Captain Chaplin and Lt. Shepard. The reams of plot crammed in here could have easily filled twice the amount of time allotted for it, especially toward the end as the crew of the sub take over the outpost, deal with a potential mutiny, and make their intentions known to the rest of the world. I found the depiction of life aboard the sub very strong, so it was a disappointment to realize that "Last Resort" was probably going to be spending the majority of its time on a tropical island well above water. The more I think about it, the more "Last Resort" looks like "Lost," which had its big series mysteries, but spent a great deal of time on the interpersonal conflicts of all these stranded souls who had been thrown together by fate. So while the show is billing itself as an epic adventure with the big submarine and all, the scenery's not going to change much from week to week. The pilot really should have spent more time in getting us invested in the characters, because that's clearly where the bulk of any interesting drama will come from.
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