Vegas

Great, breezy show whose best feature is that it was filmed on location in fabulous Las Vegas. Created by Spelling-Goldberg productions in the same vein as its previous heavyweight crime series Starsky & Hutch and Charlie's Angels, it featured the same types of plots, music, action and parade of beautiful people and period heavies only now in a much more exciting locale!

Robert Urich was perfectly cast as private detective and Vietnam vet Dan Tanna, replete with a showgirl secretary, Beatrice and bumbling guy Friday, Binzer. Tony Curtis was really only present during the first season as casino owner Philip Roth, whose retainer to watch over his various Vegas hotel holdings basically allowed Dan to do a lot of pro-bono detective work. After appearing in the pilot, Greg Morris didn't join the regular cast as Lt. Dave Nelson until season 2 and then stayed through the series' end effectively replacing Tony Curtis' Roth as the authority figure in Dan's world. And no one could forget Tanna's amazing drive-in pad.

While there seemed to efforts to try and make Tanna a deeper character with complex emotions, we're talking seventies TV, so it was unfulfilled. Things had to be wrapped up with a neat, little bow in an hour with no time wasted on a character's personal struggles. Same thing with the plots which were great on the surface but rarely fully developed. But it was escapism at it's best given the setting and the setup.

To the person who commented last...he had one big thing on the series totally backwards. Naomi Steven's character was throughout the 1st season only, at the very end of the 1st season..Greg Morris became the main police friend/help character for the rest of the series and Naomi Stevens was gone after only 1 season...for the better too. Greg Morris appeared only once before his reg role and that was in the pilot episode.

This was def a great series all around. The first season was kinda silly and lame (but watchable). But as the 2nd season started, and major changes were made (in writing, production etc), by the show's final episode in late 1981, it should have had many seasons to go. But of course, like all quality TV...the masses only like crap, and Vega$ was everything but...so it was gone just as it was hitting its peak.

This series def deserves a true DVD release...stop releasing a zillion editions of garbage like "My So Called Life", "Friends" and all this reality TV garbage thats killed television and get this example of what once was quality prime time TV out there!

I just wanted to note a couple of errors in the comments by raysond and add a couple of comments of my own.

Antonio Fargas was a guest star on Vega$ but never had a recurring role in the show. Bart Braverman played Dan Tanna's sidekick Binzer for the run of the show. Greg Morris played the proverbial police force contact for Tanna rather than his boss. Morris left the show after the second season and Naomi Steven's role was expanded to fulfill Tanna's need for somebody who could get the bad guy's records and deliver backup at just the right time. Tony Curtis, as Philip Roth, was as close as Dan Tanna had to a boss. Since Tanna lived on the premises of Roth's hotel, he had first dibs on his services but Dan was very much his own man.

Poster raysond also suggests that Robert Urich subsequently reprised the Dan Tanna role in the Spenser for Hire television series. Vega$ was actually a reprise of the Dan Tanna character which had first appeared in Charlie's Angels. However, the only commonality between Vega$ and Spenser for Hire was Urich's tough guy personality. Both shows had their own very unique styles, having to do as much with the values and lifestyle of the lead character as with their vastly different locales. Vega$ was the product of David Mann who would go on to greater fame as the creator of Miami Vice, another show that was known as much for its back drops as its actors and scripts.

Spenser for Hire was based upon the Boston private investigator in a series of novels by author Robert Parker (Parker continues to write Spenser novels although the character is getting a bit old in the tooth:)). As much as Vega$ and Miami Vice were dependent upon their backdrops: locales, clothing and vehicles; Spenser for Hire was dependent upon character and dialog. This was due in part to the ongoing participation of Robert Parker who is known for very well crafted dialog. The show was as much about Spenser's relationship with sidekick Hawk and love interests Susan and Rita as it was about the cases he handled. Urich played Spenser in four TV movies several years after the series ended.

Urich was a good actor who could be depended upon to deliver a credible performance in whatever role he took on. He will never be mentioned in the same breath with a Jack Nicholson or Clint Eastwood but his presence on the small screen has certainly been missed.

This had to be one of the coolest shows on television. The thing that really made it great was the pacing of the show and its mix of the old Las Vegas and what Vegas was becoming. The other thing that made this show what it was were the numerous cameos of some of the brightest stars that would appear in Vegas on a regular basis such as Dean Martin, Wayne Newton and other members of the Vegas elite. However, all the glitz and glamour would never have mattered if it wasn't for the late great Robert Urich who made this role his own.

Vega$...the show where P.I. Dan Tanna drives his car into his living room...Vega$...where Dan Tanna never runs after the bad guy, he walks after him (and still manages to catch up with them) ...Vega$... featuring Tony Curtis as the man who appears in the opening credits and precious little elsewhere in the show...Vega$...where a glitzy showbiz soundtrack and a montage of glittering casino shots actually masks a show about a fairly shabby P.I. surrounded by badly dressed guest stars. I think this show deserves repeating for it was totally unlike any detective show before or since; think CSI meets Magnum P.I. meets Night of a 1000 stars and you get close as to what this show was like.