Well, if we have, it’s only that if we’re gonna try to create a television show that blends a family drama about a casino in Laughin, Nevada, with singing, you’d better at least have a major star or two in the cast in order to up the “must see” factor…which might well explain why “Viva Laughlin,” CBS’s new “dramatic television show with music” (choice of phrase courtesy of producer Bob Lowry), features recurring appearances by Hugh Jackman and Melanie Griffith…and while I haven’t seen the pilot yet, in the clips we saw before the panel, we bore witness to the former making his entrance by way of The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy to the Devil,” while the latter cooed Blondie’s “One Way or Another” through a seduction scene.
I’m not saying there isn’t a certain amount of curiosity there. I’m just saying, when the curiosity factor has passed, will the series be able to maintain that level of interest when that responsibility lands on the shoulders of the show’s regular cast?
Maybe that’s why Lowry is, at least to a certain extent, trying to downplay the level of music in the series, throwing out the stat of “two and a half to three” when asked how many songs he was anticipating to appear per episode. “The way I get the fraction out of it,” he explains, “is sometimes we use a reprise.
“What I love about this show — one of the many things that I love about this show — is we always have about four balls in the air,” explains Lowry. “We always have the grounded stories in the casino franchise. We have a murder mystery which we need to have in the air. We have a family drama, we’re juggling that. And how these three areas interweave with our characters and how they play off of each other within these three different dramatic elements. And then, fourth is music. So music doesn’t really outweigh the other three. It’s a question of balance. And I think if we were excessive with music or if music weighed more heavily in these four elements that I’m talking about, then it would be perceived more as a musical. When we’re approaching these stories, we’re telling story first. And I tell them what we are doing is addressing all of these stories as if music did not exist. Because if you were to remove the music, we still want to have a very entertaining, dramatic piece, so we need to have solid story to tell. And then, the music we use to enhance that is sort of an emotional soundtrack of our characters and to support the essence of the scenes.”
As far as song selections, don’t be expecting any Beatles; they simply aren’t down with licensing out their songs for…well, much of anything, really. (Just ask the producers of “The Singing Bee.”) And don’t go looking for Pink Floyd’s “Money,” either. “We wanted to use (‘Money’) because we’re about a casino, and we were simply denied the song. But,” shrugs Lowry, “there are a lot of songs about money.”
As far as how often we’ll see Mr. Jackman pop up during the proceedings, Lowry says he appears a few times during the first few episodes, but “he’s doing a movie in Australia now with Baz Luhrmann, and he has a terrific feature career, and his availability is purely limited to us. I hope we will be able use him more and more up until our 22 episodes, even though we don’t have a pickup for 22. I hope that we will go to 22 and (that) we will use him more.” (Adds star Lloyd Owen, “I think if he sees me getting too many good songs, he’ll start making more appearances.”)
Fortunately, the Tony Award-winning Jackman won’t have the pressure to do all the show’s singing…which, given his apparently rare appearances, stands to reason, really. Even so, star D.B. Woodside acknowledges, “I believe we can all carry a tune…which is good!”
As someone who monitors the release of TV series on DVD, however, I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows when Lowry admitted that he had no idea if, in fact, the songs in the show were licensed for DVD release purposes. I mean, I wouldn’t bet on this thing being the big fall hit, but crazier things have happened…and if it IS a success, can you imagine what a let-down it would be for fans to discover that, hey, sorry, we can’t actually do it. You’d like to think that people have learned their lesson after the issues with shows like “The Wonder Years” and “WKRP in Cincinnati,” but I guess we’ll see…
