‘Casino’: All tease, no strip

It’s NASCAR weekend in the city of sin and sunburned drunken loudmouths are pouring into the lobby of the Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino after a long day at the track. At the same time, limousines and town cars serve up tuxedo-clad high rollers and their dolled-up trophy dates, who follow statuesque showgirls to a flashy fundraiser and once-in-a-lifetime concert by Jewel and Tony Bennett.

“Come on, baby, give me a smile!” an inebriated man in desperate need of aloe vera yells to a showgirl greeting guests at the entrance to the party. “Come on! Don’t you like me? I bet I can make you smile!”

The mannequin-like woman does not flinch. But the cameras sure do. In seconds, one of the 18 crews taping Fox’s new unscripted drama, “The Casino,” courtesy of reality guru Mark Burnett, trains its cameras on the man as security runs up to escort him away.

“Classic!” the cameraman says. “The rednecks and the millionaires are converging. That’s what I love about Vegas. You see everything here.”

But you won’t see it all on Fox, thanks to events spawned by the two-second Super Bowl halftime breast-baring: the FCC broadcast decency crackdown, which led federal lawmakers to debate decency without reaching any conclusions and then led broadcasters to engage in extreme self-censoring. Even Fox, the network that gave us the raunchy “Married With Children” and enticed committed couples to cheat on “Temptation Island,” is pulling in the reins.

The result? The drunk guy could stay, if the producers find him compelling, but footage of a whipped cream “bikini” is out. A model prone to flashing will probably never make it on screen; and a classic Burnett moment involving a combined bachelor-bachelorette party that goes awry when one of the female partygoers gets into a fight with a stripper is under reconstruction.

“We were pretty surprised,” says “The Casino” executive producer James Bruce, who also led the productions of both installations of “The Restaurant” for Burnett’s company on NBC. “It’s a pretty racy show, and with the new broadcasting standards, it’s more challenging. It’s Vegas, so there’s a lot of bad behavior. It’s a fine line. We thought it looked like a bikini, but they just freaked out over there.”

The offensive scene in the first episode showed a party in a suite at the Golden Nugget in which a nude girl applies a whipped cream bikini. But viewers won’t see much of her creative apparel. Instead, “We do a lot of reaction shots. A lot of oohs and ahs. It’s completely crazy,” Bruce says, laughing.

It seems crazy to the same producers who have successfully pixilated body parts on “Survivor” for the more conservative CBS, even amid the Super Bowl breast scandal. For “Survivor All-Stars,” which concluded in May, they merely expanded the digital blur covering regularly nude contestant Richard Hatch’s genital area, which suited that network’s decency standards. “That’s the amazing part,” Bruce says.

But Mike Darnell, Fox’s executive vice president of alternative series and specials, says the network won’t allow producers to digitize breasts or other body parts when the context is sexual, even if it’s insinuated. In the case of the whipped cream bikini girl, the scene ends with a virgin frat boy licking off her “swim suit.”

Yet in a sign of how confusing and subjective the new decency rules are, bare backsides shot at a nudist camp on the network’s “Simple Life 2” are simply covered by large happy faces. The difference? The funny faces are just that, Fox says.

“You can get away with provocative themes on television, but it’s all in the contextual nature,” Darnell says. “There are ways to cut around everything. It’s not like you don’t know in advance and can’t go around it. Right now, in this environment, that’s just something we won’t do.”

What does please Darnell is that his network is finally in business with Burnett, whose unscripted dramas “Survivor” and “The Apprentice” have transformed network television. “The Casino” is a documentary-style unscripted drama that follows the guests and employees of downtown Vegas’ Golden Nugget Hotel & Casino and is held together by best friends Tim Poster and Tom Breitling, the new owners who took over Jan. 23 in front of the cameras.

“The Casino” is paced like a movie, with aerial shots that linger over the Strip and beyond and character development that includes following ambitious lounge singer Matt Dusk, who longs to perform in the showroom, and casino host-in-training Tommy Sunstrum, whom Bruce calls a “loose cannon.” Some guests were cast from casinos in other cities; others who were traveling to Las Vegas anyway responded to queries on a website and were selected by producers.

“Las Vegas is a fascinating setting,” Burnett said. “Where can people have the most fun and get rich in 24 hours? We considered many casinos, but the story of these two young kids who have strength, character and perseverance was a unique prism from which to tell this story.”

Poster, 35, and Breitling, 34, who met while they were in college, are well regarded in the business world for the successful Las Vegas-based Internet travel company Travelscape they sold to Expedia in March 2000 for $105 million. Last year, they decided to join the gaming business and gambled on the landmark Golden Nugget, in the city’s seedier downtown, a tougher sell for tourists and high-rollers than the Strip’s glitzier hotels.

That challenge becomes an important story arc that begins in the second episode with the arrival from Los Angeles of Geoff Mills, his fiancee and his brother, who initially forgo the Golden Nugget for the Strip’s shiny lights but are lured back by Poster and Breitling. They become so enchanted with the Golden Nugget that Mills and his fiancee wind up returning for their wedding there toward the end of the 13-episode series.

The flashy and fun show offers a slice of Vegas by following the journeys of two or three guests per episode, a la “Love Boat,” as Bruce likes to say. That includes watching someone lose $200,000; an unexpected turn for “Big Chuck,” the card counter; and Poster’s having to answer to the Gaming Commission about an acquaintance with ties to the mob. There are also appearances by Andre Agassi, Poster’s friend and hotel investor; Barenaked Ladies; Jewel and Tony Bennett. And a surprising twist in the first episode that Bruce says he wishes he could deliver on every episode.

And then there’s the sex. Lingerie models hang all over Breitling. Frat boys hire strippers to initiate an inexperienced buddy. Girls flash and go topless. Everybody is hooking up ... or trying to.

“Vegas is all fluff and fun, and there’s this undertone of danger,” Bruce said. “Everybody is hustling everybody, and people feel free to behave outrageously. The goal of the show is for people to have fun and enjoy the ride.”

Now if only Bruce could figure out how to depict Vegas’ raw sexuality without setting off the censors. How do you tone down a scene involving a group of models at a nightclub who become so excited in front of the cameras that one of them takes off her top? Or in the case of the bachelorette brawl, how do you preserve the drama without the element of stripper sass?

“Those are the conversations we are all having now,” Bruce said. “We are self-editing. Sometimes the power of suggestion works just as well. But sometimes that’s not enough and we still have to find a way to cut around it. It just makes the work harder because these things are all traditional Vegas. We all want to push the envelope.”

Darnell, known for taking chances himself with shows like “Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?” “Joe Millionaire” and “Temptation Island,” says that’s not necessary to attract viewers and keep them tuned in.

“Quite honestly, that doesn’t make a difference in whether the show is good or not,” Darnell said. “What makes any show interesting is how interesting the stories are and how good the drama is. How provocative you can get generally does not make the difference. Vegas is by its nature a compelling place. Can Mark Burnett weave his magic on the casino world? That’s really the question.”