BFFL Best Friends For Life

By now, you probably know that I usually take my television pretty seriously. But all TV cannot be taken seriously. Aside from my comedies, I also have a few shows that I think of as TV Lite. The good thing about TV Lite shows is that you can do other things at the same time that you are watching the show. One of those shows for me is Las Vegas.

On most nights, Las Vegas is what Baywatch Nights would have been if it stayed on the air. A quasi serious, quasi comedy, completely exploitative look at the beautiful people in one of their playgrounds, in this case Vegas. The show usually wows us with the surveillance technology used in Vegas and the unusual proportion of fit looking hunks and babes populating the backdrop.

I have to say, however, that this 2 hour episode was a step up from the usual TV Lite. In this episode, some bad guys kidnap Ed Deline's daughter. Ed is the president of a casino called the Montecito. The bad guys put Ed's daughter, Delinda, in a buried coffin with 12 hours of air, and tell Ed that he will get the location of the coffin and the combination to disable the explosives, if he manages to steal $50 million dollars from his casino before Delinda's air supply runs out.

They also put an explosive charge/GPS tracker/audio monitoring device to Ed's ankle to make sure that he neither goes to the police nor tells anyone what is going on. It was actually a lot of fun watching Ed (James Caan) do his tough guy thing to get his daughter back and make good on his promise to kill the kidnappers. After all, the Ed character is supposed to be an ex-connected guy and ex-CIA wet work guy. This is NOT a guy whose family you want to threaten.

Of course, the show managed to sprinkle in the usual silliness, which included the brief introduction of a casino mascot, who was constantly drunk and groped the female guests, while never taking off his mascot costume or speaking. We also saw a Buddhist monk who seemed capable of beating the Vegas odds through prayer, and finally some yokels who won their state lottery and decided to make Vegas their playground for a weekend.

In addition to adding a bit of spice to the normal show, the kidnapping script served to re-affirm Ed's character as the straight man and a force to be reckoned with.

Labels: tv