Nerding Day: Viva Laughlin

Was I the only one who was super bummed when The Sopranos turned out not to be a musical? No, I was not! I know for a fact that Hugh Jackman felt the same way because he tried to make a jaunty mafia-coded murder mystery musical, and it got canceled after airing just two of its eight completed episodes in America. In Australia, where it aired concurrently, they gave it a generous one episode before flushing it down the toilet backward.

Viva Laughlin was a remake of a popular BBC series called Blackpool, which was renamed Viva Blackpool when it aired on BBC America. Blackpool got a full season and a TV movie in England, which is an American six seasons and a trilogy. I think it succeeded while Viva Laughlin failed for a lot of reasons, better acting in general being the big one, but it was also much campier than Viva Laughlin. You might think that singing and dancing about murder couldn't possibly be not campy, but somehow Viva Laughlin did it. I don't know how to put it any other way; this is the straightest musical ever made.

The weirdest thing Viva Laughlin did is have the characters sing popular songs like "Sympathy For The Devil" and "One Way Or Another," but instead of recording a new version of the song, or just playing the song and having the actors lip sync and dance along to it, they did both. It was weird, distracting, and also had to have been so expensive. No one likes hearing people sing along to the car radio. It really highlights how they are not as good of a singer as the person being produced in a full recording studio, but for some reason, CBS decided to turn that annoying concept into a television show. Every song sounds like an unwelcome duet between one good and one bad singer.

To introduce this concept, they start with the main character, Ripley Holden, in a car listening to "Viva Las Vegas" and singing along to the radio. Then he gets out of the car, and the music follows him into his under-construction casino, where he gets up on a table and dances a little. No one around really joins him or reacts in any way to his singing and dancing. They're neutral about the musical number happening around them. It feels like no one on the show is having fun.

You're immediately like, what is the premise here? Is this in the main character's head? If so, why not add some backup dancers? It kind of seems like this is really happening and all of these employees are used to their boss throwing down the old soft shoe sometimes and have learned to cope with it. It's like they took a musical and somehow sucked all of the joy and whimsy out of it. To replace the joy and whimsy missing from the musical, Viva Laughlin replaced it with terrible dialogue, worse acting, and attempted symbolism that fell completely flat.

There's a big neon sign that says "SIN" in Hugh Jackman's office for his bodyguard to stand menacingly next to because that's what he does. Get it! He's the bad guy and he sins! His intro song is "Sympathy For The Devil" because he's bad like the devil! Also, remember how I said the first musical number in the show was the main character dancing through his casino and climbing onto a table. The second one is the antagonist dancing through his casino and ends with him climbing onto a table. They had one idea for a cool dance in Las Vegas and they were not afraid to do it twice in the first fifteen minutes of the show. At least the second time, they included Hugh Jackman in a pleather business suit that was so shiny you legally can't go swimming in it during harbor seal mating season.

Now that we've seen the rival casino owners Ripley Holden (some guy) and Nicky Fontaine (Hugh Jackman) do their one dance we get into the plot of the TV show. Ripley is attempting to open a casino in Laughlin, Nevada that would rival Nicky's. In order to try to stop this, Nicky pays off the wife of one of Ripley's investors, Buddy Baxter, to convince her husband to pull his money from the casino, which is the inciting incident of the episode. Ripley goes to Bunny (played by Melanie Griffith) for help, and she is desperate to have sex with Ripley for some reason. They duet on "One Way Or Another," where the double entendre is that one way is her vagina and the other is all other holes. Melanie Griffith sings like nobody asked her if she could do that before they cast her in the show.

Even though Ripley won't sleep with Bunny, she agrees to talk to Buddy about his investment, but the day after Ripley and Bunny do their dance routine, Buddy Baxter is found dead in Ripley's office. I saved this part of the show to address the lousy dialogue because it has one of the most baffling character interactions I've ever heard. The detective investigating Buddy's murder tells Ripley, "This is the part where facts and forensics usually fall together like raindrops from the sky."

Ripley rightfully responds, “That makes no sense.”

The detective says, "Most things don't," then grins like he has dropped the most amazing observation on us. This feels like a cheat code for bad dialogue. You can have a character say nonsense and then smile real big and maybe the audience will think, oh no, was that profound? Even though it was objectively nothing.

There are also some attempts at fun noir dialogue that fall really flat, like when Ripley's son finds out he's been accused of murder, and Ripley says, "This is a gambling town, open a vein, and rumors pour out!" Which is a pretty violent defense against a murder accusation.

Due to a lack of total confidence in the show's entire premise, the singing and dancing stop when the dead body is found. If the show were going to be campy, this would be where they would double the pop music. They should have had Bunny sing "My Boyfriend's Back," and Buddy get up to dance with her. Instead, the show is no longer a musical until they reprieve "Viva Las Vegas" at the end. It's as if the show looks you in the eyes and says, "A man has died! This is a gritty crime drama now! How dare you suggest we make Hugh Jackman dance on a table again."

So, you might be wondering if Ripley killed Buddy Baxter, and the answer is, maybe? His son finds a gun taped under the tool chest in their garage and decides to hide it. He also has his wife lie and say they were together that night when, in fact, she doesn't know where he was, and also, neither do we, the audience. I don't know if we're supposed to root for Ripley. I think he's supposed to be a good guy, but the writers tried to show us that he's a good guy by having him give his son a sports car two weeks after his birthday and telling him to bang a lot of chicks in it. Aw!

One of the funniest things about Viva Laughlin is the reviews. You can tell that 2007 was not an ideal year for TV reviewers. They were battle-scarred by the television program Cavemen. Several of them brought it up in their Viva Laughlin reviews as a comparable show.

The badness of this show might be hard to describe, but I think the thing that paints the best possible picture for you is the fact that several critics saw a remake of a successful BBC show and said, "This has the vibe of the starring vehicle for the Geico Cavemen." The actor who played Ripley was demoted to doing radio plays and video game voice acting for 15 years. His career only recently recovered when he got a fairly big part in the Amazon Lord Of The Rings TV series, which famously also has not done well. I hear Hugh Jackman's doing fine, though!

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Michael Lehr, who is standing in front of a neon sign that says SIN, and then you look a little to the right and it says SINGLE SERVING AMERICAN CHEESE PRODUCT. 

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