Leaving Las Vegas

I’m not sure which is the more surprising news: that James Caan is leaving NBC’s Las Vegas, that Nikki Cox is getting fired from Las Vegas, or that Las Vegas is in fact still on the air.

Then again, anyone who’s seen the show could probably have guessed that it was just a matter of time before Oscar-nominated Caan had enough of the show — even if they hadn’t read his 2005 Playboy interview, in which it was clear that Las Vegas was not a credit he wanted on his tombstone.

And even canning Nikki Cox (officially because of budget cuts) is only surprising at first. The show, though essentially CSI-with-boobs, only occasionally made much use of Nikki’s most obvious assets — at least not when I was watching it — and in general her character seemed unintegrated with the rest of the cast. If I had to guess, I would say that it was Nikki herself who was at fault here: She was initially hired to play a prostitute, but, unwilling to be the show’s sex siren, had her character rewritten as the wholesome hostess — an unlikely (and, ratings-wise, useless) character for a show like Las Vegas. And whatever sex appeal she still offered by virtue of having the biggest rack on the show was later undercut when she apparently starved herself and, from the look of her, had some work done on her face that left her looking like some sort of duck hybrid from The Island of Dr. Moreau.

In the end, then, the big news for the show is not who’s leaving or who’s being given the boot, but that the show’s still on and returning to our living rooms (at least in theory) for a fifth season.

Would that “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” were true.