The press release says that “The Strip,” the new UPN series from action-movie producer Joel Silver, is “filmed entirely on location along the glittering oasis known as the Las Vegas Strip.”
All I could think, getting my first look at Tuesday’s opening episode (8 p.m., WPWR-Ch. 50) of this late addition to the UPN fall schedule, was: How unfortunate that vacationers, even Las Vegas vacationers, are being inconvenienced for the sake of this low-rent knock-off of Silver’s “Lethal Weapon.” Parking restrictions, bright lights outside hotel-room windows at night, and not even the opportunity to brag, back in Cleveland, about your brush with Hollywood.
To say you saw the new UPN series “The Strip” being made is likely to have as much cachet as saying you were in the stadium for the final game of the World Football League.
Anyway, Guy Torry and Sean Patrick Flanery are fast-talking Vegas cops who, right after the obligatory opening violent chase/arrest scene, quit the force for the least likely of reasons, in a photogenic but equally unlikely place, and wind up doing undercover security work for a billionaire casino owner.
Their first private-sector case ought to be a search for the missing `N’ in Flanery’s last name or a tailor who could make Torry stop dressing like a sign from that “glittering oasis,” but instead there’s some ill-plotted business about the kidnapped wife of a casino high roller.
Flanery plays a Vegas native who eats fast food — in every single scene, without becoming the Caesars Palace blimp — and wears his hair as if he just stuck his finger in a light socket. He also is inclined to prattle on about the supposed character of the city, as in, “Vegas is the kind of place where a dullard ex-cop can walk around eating burritos and looking permanently shocked.”
Torry plays a married, more responsible Philadelphian, so in love with his wife, we learn, that they have done it in nearly every room in the house. His character tic is rampant pop-culture references, an exhaustive and exhausting list that includes Scooby Doo, “Free Willy,” Dirty Harry, “Rain Man,” Taco Bell and “Sling Blade.”
If Danny Glover had been this insufferable with Mel Gibson, they might never have gotten through even the first “Lethal Weapon.”
UPN calls “The Strip” “testosterone-driven,” which is the kind of language networks use when they don’t want to outright say that their target audience is those 18- to 34-year-old American men who thought “Speed” was too complicated, even after they had seen it for the fourth time.
To satisfy that demographic, the writers offer up the above-mentioned not-just-in-the-bedroom reference, the supposedly comic figure of a horny drag-queen hooker, a smattering of showgirls and a plot more skimpy than their outfits.
The target audience will also feel right at home with the pulsing, porn-movie-style soundtrack and — because this is Joel Silver — large-seeming explosions that destroy a pick-up truck and a desert mobile home, or, more likely — because this is Joel Silver on a TV budget — scale models thereof.
Silver has another series on TV this year, the strong and smart (but apparently endangered by early low ratings) Fox comedy “Action.” Call “The Strip” Silver in a slumming mode.
It’s the kind of show that usually shows up in syndication, starring somebody like Dennis Rodman and, not coincidentally, watched by somebody like Dennis Rodman.
Yesterday Once More: What if you could go back in time? Would you, on the way to a business lunch last Tuesday, buy a winning ticket for Wednesday’s Lotto game? Take back the bad-corporate-soldier things you said to your boss at that lunch? Order the flourless chocolate cake instead of the disappointingly French toastlike cherry-chocolate bread pudding?
Would doing all of the above constitute an abuse of the time-travel privilege?
Different people have different levels of ambition and imagination, but we have probably all thought, at one time or another, about heading back in time, even if just to get started on that career-making project more than a day ahead of deadline. (Those of us who haven’t will probably be watching “The Strip.”)
Tuesday’s “Nova” (8 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11), the fine PBS science program, brings us in its new episode serious scientists who have a whole lot of ambition and a whole lot of imagination, and a number of them are thinking that time travel is not just another science-fiction plot device or childhood fantasy on the order of: What would you do if you could freeze everybody and everything in the world except yourself?
According to “Nova,” it started, at least publicly, with physicist Kip Thorne suggesting to the popular astronomer Carl Sagan that wormholes, tunnels in the fabric of space and time, would be an efficient way for Sagan to have his heroine travel across the universe in the book he was writing, “Contact.”
Thorne got to thinking that wormholes could be turned into not just space machines, but time machines, for reasons that he considers “obvious,” have a lot to do with Einstein and make some sense when explained by Thorne with the help of “Nova’s” visual aids. Thorne published his highly conditional thoughts in a journal and got the headlines in the popular press he had dreaded: Scientist Building Time Machine, and the like.
But he also opened some small floodgates, it seems, for colleagues to start discussing this stuff in a more public way, a discussion they continue here. Complicating an already very complicated matter are conflicts between Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and quantum physics, the possibility of many parallel universes and, of course, the grandfather question: If you went back and killed your own grandpa, would you cease to exist, making it impossible for you to go back in time and off gramps, etc.?
If you want to know more, this program kicks around time travel smartly but not tediously. It is not afraid to excerpt the “Simpsons” episode in which Homer goes back in time and sneezes, thereby setting loose germs that kill the dinosaurs. But it also brings in Thorne, Hawkins, other top eggheads and Sagan himself.
The latter’s appearance offers no conclusive proof of time travel. Sagan died in 1996, but he seems to be in this program by virtue of videotape preservation rather than a leap through a wormhole into a future where he not only is not dead but wants to spend his bonus time with TV journalists.
