Viva Laughlin - oh my god I hate this shit

What did we do to make us deserve this?

You may think I am being extreme when I say Viva Laughlin is one of the worst shows ever produced. You have not yet seen this show, so you do not understand. It truly is that bad. This show is to television what child molestation is to sex. It takes something potentially beautiful and cruelly warps it into something disturbing and repugnant for its own sick amusement.

Lord Douchebag Von Asshole surveys his domain

Meet Ripley Holden, aspiring casino owner and loathesome fucking douchebag. He treats his children like shit and ignores his wife in order to sink his life into a casino (named "Viva!") that he does not have the money to open. He has a history of cheating on his wife, he attempts to buy his son's affection with expensive cars, and his emotional neglect has left his daughter so starved for attention that she begins dating a college professor who might be even older than her father.

And just so we're clear, this is the protagonist. The way the pilot is set up, we're expected to find him roguishly charming and likable.

Did I mention he's also a horrible singer?

That's right, this show has goddamn musical numbers. However, the producers insist that the show is not a musical, and CBS has been trying to avoid this fact for most of their ad campaign, all with good reason. This is because if the overall repugnance of the cast doesn't alienate their audience, the musical numbers will. Seriously, they are fucking awful. Now, I'm not saying that musical numbers cannot be incorporated into a televised serial drama. The BBC productions of the late Dennis Potter's The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven both used musical interludes to masterful dramatic effect. The difference here is that Dennis Potter was one of the greatest screenwriters ever born, whereas the writing staff of Viva Laughlin apparently wrote the pilot while huffing spraypaint out of a lunchbag. Let's watch another one of these chestnuts and try to figure out where they went wrong:

Now, Hugh Jackman is an extremely talented performer who I have nothing but admiration for. His portrayal of Wolverine was one of the primary factors behind my fanatical love of the first two X-Men movies, so I can't argue he's unlikeable, and he won a Tony in 2004 for his role in The Boy from Oz, so I can't argue that he's a bad performer when it comes to musical numbers. However, I don't care if you're the best singer in the history of musical theater, when you're doing a butchered karaoke version of "Sympathy for the Devil," you do not want want Mick Jagger's voice playing alongside you to remind people just how immeasurably better he is at singing the song than you are. Sadly, this is still the best musical number featured in the pilot. Aside from this, you will be treated to another one of Asshole Von Douchetoven's Elvis covers as well as the vomit-inducing nadir of the show wherein he dry-humps Melanie Griffith while they butcher Blondie's "One Way or Another."

Yes, you read that right. Melanie Griffith is in this show. Take a look at the following montage and while you're holding back the bile, remember that this was actually put together by CBS to promote the show:

At this point, it's easy to question what kind of a god would allow a creature such as this to exist. The fact of the matter is that Melanie Griffith is a Lich Queen who walks among us to harvest souls for her dark master, the ravenous Bal-Shoggoth.

SEXY.

To add to the overwhelming classiness of Ripley "Douchenozzle" Holden, remember when I mentioned that he cheated on his wife? This is what he was cheating on her with. In the image we're looking at, he is currently informing her that he is rolling for initiative on his "Turn Undead" spell. Just kidding, he's actually trying to tell her that he doesn't want to toss his hotdog down the cavernous, diseased hallway that is her nether regions even though he needs her to help him con her husband into investing in his dead-end casino for white trash too poor to stay in Vegas. Except he doesn't actually need her to con anyone, because her husband turns up dead in Ripley's office that very night, coincidentally while Ripley is avoiding his home and family the entire night and drinking bottles of hard liquor alone in his car. This seems like an airtight alibi to me.

So naturally, the cops get involved, Douchelington becomes the primary suspect, and that's where Detective Peter Carlyle comes in.

"Oh hey, fancy meeting you here in the driveway of your own house. It's kind of funny how we keep running into each other whenever you go outside to get into your car. And then we meet again wherever you end up driving to. Have you cut your hair recently?"

Detective Carlyle, a.k.a. Stalky Stalkerson, figures that the best way to prove a suspect's guilt is by stalking and having sex with the suspect's wife. I wonder why Chris Meloni never realized the brilliant simplicity of this approach throughout his long tenure on Law & Order: SVU. So anyway, Stalky accosts Douchey's wife on numerous occasions throughout the episode, posing as a prospective homeowner in their gated community. While meeting her in such secluded romantic getaways as her driveway and the produce aisle of the supermarket, he subtly probes her for information in a manner that can only be described as entrapment. Meanwhile, he's thinking about a different kind of probing while positioning that ass for enTAPment.

Aside from this parade of living excrement, we've got Douchelord threatening to beat the shit out of his daughter's boyfriend, his son selling his car so Douchebag can sink the money into the financial black hole that is his casino, Douchemonger's pathetic attempts to salvage his failing marriage while he is clearly incapable of expressing human emotion, Hugh Jackman's personal assistant running around making bedroom eyes at both Hugh and The Lich Queen, and a bunch of other shit I drank myself to sleep for a week after viewing in order to forget.

Despite the fact that Viva Laughlin has been universally derided as one of the worst shows of the season along with Cavemen and Big Shots, CBS picked this up for 13 episodes. I doubt even half of them will air. Then again, if CBS had any dignity at all, they would have never even allowed the pilot to make it to the public, so there's always the chance that this will be raping the airwaves for its full order of episodes.

Verdict: Fuck you.

Would I Watch It? I cannot reiterate enough how much the very existence of this show fills me to the core with loathing.