Entertainment

NBC Cancelled This Expensive Crime Series 23 Years Ago, but It’s Found New Life on Streaming

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While impressive new shows are coming out all the time, many series that have already completed their run are impossible to beat. Fortunately, in the age of binge-watching, streaming services allow subscribers to access and fall in love with shows long after their conclusion. This enables such shows to remain relevant and, in some cases, gain an entirely new audience. The phenomenon can be seen in the reemergence of series like Gilmore Girls, Suits, and, more recently, Las Vegas has joined this group. The NBC series may be 23 years old, but even after all that time, it is a popular purchase on the Apple Store, proving that this five-season show has a lot to offer.

The comedy-drama is NBC’s most ambitious story, as seen by the massive cost of the pilot alone. Premiering in 2003, Las Vegas explores the staff of a fictional casino in the famed city. The series initially met strong viewership, but that gradually declined throughout its run. However, Las Vegas has received a second chance through streaming, opening itself up to a new audience who can enjoy all the shocks and drama of the series despite the decades since its release.

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What Is ‘Las Vegas’ About?

There are many shows about a workplace, but Las Vegas is unique because its setting offers a rare level of drama. The series follows the security team of the Montecito Resort and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip. As you would guess, the glamorous background of Sin City makes for plenty of stories, as the characters deal with everything from power outages to rival casinos to bomb threats. While this concept has potential on its own, the characters and the constant drama in their lives make it that much better. Las Vegas primarily follows the head of security and surveillance, Ed Deline (James Caan), and his protégé, Danny McCoy (Josh Duhamel). As the former director of counterintelligence for the CIA, Ed can be strict, but he’s also a father figure to his employees, particularly Danny, who has his own past as a U.S. Marine. With exciting character backstories and pasts that always seem to resurface, Las Vegas creates an endearing cast.



















































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Collider Exclusive · TV Medicine Quiz
Which Fictional Hospital Would You Work Best In?
The Pitt · ER · Grey’s Anatomy · House · Scrubs

Five hospitals. Five completely different ways medicine goes sideways on television — brutal, chaotic, romantic, brilliant, and ridiculous. Only one of them is the ward your instincts were built for. Eight questions will figure out exactly where you belong.

🚨The Pitt

🏥ER

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💉Grey’s

🔬House

🩺Scrubs

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01

A critical patient comes through the door. What’s your first instinct?
Medicine under pressure reveals who you actually are.





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02

Why did you go into medicine in the first place?
The honest answer says more about you than the one you’d give in an interview.





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03

What do you actually want from the people you work with?
Who you want beside you under pressure is who you are.





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04

You lose a patient you fought hard to save. How do you carry it?
Every doctor who’s worked a long shift has had to answer this question.





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05

How would your colleagues describe the way you work?
Your reputation on the floor is usually more accurate than your self-image.





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06

How do you feel about hospital protocol and procedure?
Every institution has rules. What you do with them is a choice.





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07

What does this job cost you personally?
Nobody works in medicine without paying a price. What’s yours?





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08

At the end of a long shift, what keeps you coming back?
The answer to this question is the most honest thing about you.





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Your Assignment Has Been Made
You Belong In…

Your answers have pointed to one fictional hospital above all others. This is the ward your instincts, your temperament, and your particular brand of dysfunction were built for.

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Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center

The Pitt
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You are built for the most unsparing version of emergency medicine television has ever shown — one that puts you inside a single fifteen-hour shift and doesn’t let you look away.

  • You need your work to be real, not romanticised — meaning over drama, honesty over aesthetics.
  • You find purpose inside the work itself, not in the chaos surrounding it.
  • You’ve made peace with the fact that this job takes from you constantly, and gives back in ways that are harder to name.
  • Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center demands exactly that kind of person — and you would not want to be anywhere else.


County General Hospital, Chicago

ER
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You are the person who keeps the whole floor running — not the most brilliant in the room, but possibly the most essential.

  • You show up, do the work, absorb the losses, and come back the next day without needing the job to be anything other than what it is.
  • You care about patients as individual human beings, not as cases to solve or dramas to live through.
  • You believe in the system even when it fails you — and you understand that emergency medicine is about holding the line just long enough.
  • ER is television about endurance. You have it.


Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, Seattle

Grey’s Anatomy
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You came to medicine with your whole self — your ambition, your emotions, your relationships, your history — and you have never quite managed to leave any of it at the door.

  • You feel things fully and form deep attachments to the people you work with.
  • Your personal and professional lives are permanently, chaotically entangled — and that entanglement drives both your greatest disasters and your most remarkable saves.
  • You understand that extraordinary medicine often happens at the intersection of clinical skill and profound human connection.
  • It’s messy at Grey Sloan. You would not have it any other way.


Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, NJ

House
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You are drawn to the problem above everything else — the symptom that doesn’t fit, the diagnosis hiding underneath the obvious one.

  • You’re not primarily motivated by the patient as a person — though you are capable of caring, even if you’d deny it.
  • You work best when the stakes are highest and the standard answer is wrong.
  • Princeton-Plainsboro exists to house one extraordinary, impossible mind — and everyone around that mind is there because they’re smart enough to keep up.
  • The only way forward here is to think harder than everyone else in the room. That is exactly what you do.


Sacred Heart Hospital, California

Scrubs
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You understand that medicine is tragic and absurd in almost equal measure — and that the only sane response is to hold both of those things at the same time.

  • You are warm, self-aware, and funnier than most people in your field.
  • You use humour to get through terrible moments — and at Sacred Heart, that’s not a flaw, it’s a survival strategy.
  • You lean on the people around you and let them lean back. The laughter and the grief are genuinely inseparable here.
  • Scrubs is a show about learning to become someone worthy of the job. You are still very much in the middle of that process — which is exactly right.

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Part of what makes Las Vegas such a memorable series is the constant drama between the characters. Danny is often the center of this as he develops an on-and-off romance with his coworker and childhood friend, Mary (Nikki Cox), and also a similar dynamic with Delinda (Molly Sims), Ed’s daughter. These relationships add plenty of drama to the already fast-paced story, but that isn’t the only source of tension. Throughout its run, Las Vegas takes several shocking twists, ranging from the hotel changing owners to murder cases. Though it occasionally ventures into soap opera-like territory, Las Vegas‘ exciting story and lovable characters make for the perfect guilty pleasure watch.



NBC’s Underrated ‘True Blood’ Replacement Deserves a Revival

We’re leaving Bon Temps and headed for Texas…

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NBC Took a Risk on ‘Las Vegas’

Its five-season run and recent streaming success prove that Las Vegas was a good idea, but the series was a risky move for NBC. The pilot was an expensive endeavor, costing the network five million dollars for just one episode. With the advent of streaming, TV series have become more costly, but at the time, this expense made Las Vegas NBC’s priciest pilot (though it has since been dethroned). Ultimately, that risk paid off, delivering an exciting show, until it was canceled rather abruptly. Though declining ratings, high production costs, cast departures, and the 2008 Writers’ Strike ended the series too soon, Las Vegas is still worth watching, as many are discovering.

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Las Vegas is available to purchase on Apple TV, and it is gaining attention there, and rightfully so. With its lovable characters, shocking twists, and constant drama, the 2003 series is a perfect binge-watch. There is no show quite like Las Vegas, and that’s why it has stood the test of time, remaining relevant 23 years later.

Las Vegas is available to buy on Apple TV in the U.S.


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Release Date

2003 – 2008-00-00

Showrunner
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Gary Scott Thompson

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