LAST EDITED ON 06-15-04 AT 03:58 PM (EST)

>Is this really a REALITY show? I mean why were
>the cameras waiting for the card counter at the airport?
> The show seems totally staged and I didn't really
>enjoy it.

The show is definitely quasi-reality -- it looks like every one of these "Big Roller" or "Frat Pack" subplots are going to be folks who simply left where ever they came from knowing they'd be getting filmed for a reality show when they arrived in Vegas.

What Burnett did with The Casino is similar to what he did with The Restaurant -- run ads and casting calls looking for people who were "going to Vegas" (of course, Burnett was paying the airfare, so who's to say any of these folks were "going" to Vegas otherwise) during the filming period and felt they might make interesting TV (The Restaurant did a similar thing, looking for people who were interested in proposing, celebrating a big promotion, etc., but then the behind-the-scenes stories proved more interesting than these dumb patron stories so its focus changed.)

Here's a January casting call:

http://www.realitytvworld.com/index/articles/story.php?s=2203

The frat pack was a fairly obvious example of this -- none of these guys would have been in Vegas otherwise, one of them musta just seen the ad and figured he could talk his virgin friend into letting them exploit him for a free trip to Vegas. Heck, if the guy didn't act so damn ackward, I might even wonder if he was really a virgin or if even that fake was just a ruse to get a free trip

-SB