Tag Archives: reality shows

Wayne Newton Lands New Reality TV Show

Long dubbed “Mr. Las Vegas,” veteran entertainer Wayne Newton has landed his first reality TV show, which will focus on the women who run his life, both on and off stage. 

The iconic singer who has performed for over 40 years and in over 30,000 solo shows in Las Vegas will front the new show on American cable channel WeTV.   Release timing is being worked out.

Tentatively titled, “Wayne’s World,” the show will feature his wife and attorney Kathleen McCrone, her sister Trisha McCrone and Newton’s publicist and his 7-year-old daughter, Lauren.  Even his mother-in-law, Marilyn, will make an appearance – she runs the star’s merchandise empire. 

The announcement of the show comes after a super bad start to 2010 for Newton – his wife filed court papers in February in a bid to keep her assets separate from those of her financially-troubled husband, and his adopted daughter, Erin, suffered liver, kidney and respiratory failure and fell into a coma after giving birth to the star’s grandchild. 

The health crisis forced Newton to pull out of a series of lucrative engagements, so he could be close to his sick daughter, who is now on the road to recovery. 

Las Vegas police descended upon his Sin City ranch, while he was at his daughter’s bedside at the end of February, to try to collect court judgments relating to a bank loan Newton reportedly reneged on. 

Newton has blamed years of bad money management by his team of advisors for his financial troubles. 

He also has been accused of failing to pay storage fees to keep his private jet in a hanger at the Oakland County International Airport in Michigan.

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Las Vegas Pawn Shop Doubles as Reality TV Show, Proving Junk Sells

Well, it’s not all junk.  But many may think their dust-collecting, largely abandoned asset won’t bring much money- that is until they haggle with Rick Harrison, center, or his father, Richard, left, or son Corey who co-own a hugely successful Las Vegas pawn shop, Gold and Silver Pawn. 

Recession?  What recession?  Boom times are out the roof, thanks in no small part to the History Channel’s hit reality TV series “Pawn Stars.” 

Back in July, before the show started, the family business about 70 customers a day that showed up at the 713 Las Vegas Blvd. South address. 

And now? “We do about 1,000 a day,” said beaming Rick Harrison. 

The 35 episodes of national TV exposure have doubled revenue and generated a non-stop waiting line of 50 customers throughout the day, which usually ends at 11 p.m. 

The Harrisons have even added a surreal touch for their customers: a velvet rope for crowd control, ala a Las Vegas nightclub. 

Two of the more shocking items that recently arrived: a bronze medal from the 1960 Rome Summer Olympics and a 1998 Denver Broncos Super Bowl ring.  Rick Harrison said he paid $700 for the medal and $11,000 for the bejeweled ring.  The medal came from a shoebox found in a garage by a son-in-law who was cleaning up after his wife’s father died. The family, who lived in the Midwest, was vacationing in Las Vegas and decided to sell the medal. 

“Names aren’t etched on Olympic medals so we have no idea who it belonged it to,” Harrison said. 

Harrison said the ring owner identified himself as a former landlord of Bronco safety Tori Noel, a late addition to the team roster. The former University of Tennessee standout saw little action that year in Denver, the first of back-to-back Super Bowl titles, and suffered a career-ending injury the next year during training camp. 

It’s not the only Super Bowl ring pawned at Gold and Silver. Harrison said he purchased Brock Williams’ ring from the 2002 Super Bowl-winning New England Patriots. 

Williams, a former cornerback at Notre Dame, was paid about $2,000 for the ring. He never returned to buy it back, Harrison said.

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Las Vegas Lady Entrepreneur to Star in “Launch My Line”

Bravo’s new fashion reality TV show “Launch My Line” partners successful professionals with established fashion designers to do just as the title says:  create a fashion line. 

A graduate of the Harvard Executive Business School, Marilyn Crawford, who lives in Las Vegas, has established herself as the ultimate expert and spokesperson in business and entertainment.  Crawford is the CEO of Windsor PTM, a global strategic marketing company. She is also Chairman of 2810, a private business membership club. 

When she was three years old she got the fashion bug–  a woman who lived down the street from her made clothes that Crawford designed with the help of her father. 

Fast forward, now Crawford figures if she could catch a fashion guru’s eye, she shouldn’t have a hard time launching a fashion line.  She envisions a clothing collection designed for the “average-sized woman,” which Crawford describes as 12-14.  She says her line would be a cross between Miranda and Samantha from the TV show “Sex and the City,” and, like those two characters, make a loud statement. 

Meanwhile, not to let grass grow under her feet, Crawford continues to travel extensively around the globe for her business and entertainment clients which include: Coca-Cola, Sony Universal, Master Charge, CNN, Volvo, Larry King, Russell Simmons and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. 

Crawford has been named “Woman of the Year” from Arts Horizon and TD/Commerce Banks, and has received The International Women’s Exchange Compass Award, The Humanitarian of the Year Award and Ebony’s Entrepreneur of the Year Award. 

“Launch My Line” premieres Wed., Dec. 2 at 11 p.m. (PT) on Bravo.

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Strip Club Reality TV Gives a Zesty Taste of Las Vegas

Embodying Las Vegas craziness, decadence and adult strip club allure, the new Playboy TV reality show King of Clubs is filmed in Las Vegas at the legendary Palomino Club, the venue’s second foray into adult TV (the first being the humorous lap top dance/quiz program Show Us Your Wits.) 

The show follows the Gentile family as they take over the only strip joint in town with a full-nude license and a full bar, plus dancers who are as young as 18.  But this show is not just merely a half-hour’s worth of lap dances and nudity on the small screen. 

King of Clubs premiered on September 25, and though sexuality is a strong component of each episode, it’s easy for the viewer to become wrapped up in the stories of the individuals involved in the night-to-night operations of the Palomino Club. 

The family running the club presents an interesting dynamic, but also that the show reveals that strippers aren’t as dumb as tacks, the prevailing stereotype. 

If you don’t subscribe to Playboy TV, no sweat.  Las Vegas locals and military are always free at the Palomino Club and they’re considering adding the channel to their cable package just to get the show. 

And even if you aren’t intrigued by the business side of King of Clubs, there’s plenty of titillating content.  One upcoming episode, for example, features “Design a Vagina” night, complete with a naked backstage cat fight.

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Las Vegas Bachelor Millionaires Star in “Megan Wants a Millionaire” VH1 Reality Show

TJDiabTwo of the bachelor millionaires on VH1’s popular new reality show, “Megan Wants a Millionaire” are from Las Vegas.  The two Las Vegans are 38-year-old TJ Diab, left, CEO of Johnny Loves Vodka, and 31-year-old Corey Thomas, director/founder of The Web Squad. CoreyThomas

VH1 estimated Diab’s net worth at $6.5 million and Thomas’ at $5 million.  

Both Las Vegans made it past the first round, which premiered Sunday with 17 contestants.

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Five Thousand “I Do’s” on New Las Vegas Wedding Reality TV Show

Did you attend the wedding of controversial ex-NBA player Dennis Rodman to bombshell entertainer Carmen Electra at the Chapel of the Flowers in Las Vegas?   Did you “miss” your own wedding, perhaps being a bit too tipsy to properly take it all in?  Or maybe you have the urge to soon get married in Las Vegas, but get a case of uncontrollable itching and hives when contemplating a visit to a chapel? 

Have no fear, for here’s your opportunity for a vicarious semi-holy redemption. 

Released on the heels of TLC’s super buzzed “Jon & Kate Plus 8” reality TV show, the cable channel premiered Friday their newest reality show, “Happily Ever Faster.” 

It’s Las Vegas kitsch at its lively – and extraordinary – best, documenting weekly the wedding trials and tribulations of the Chapel of the Flowers, located in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada– the city long-recognized as being the distinctive destination “Wedding Capital of the World.” 

The multimillion-dollar family-run Chapel of the Flowers has been in the wedding business for almost 60 years.  The husband and wife team of Jason and Holly and their staff marry over 5,000 couples a year, routinely running around like possessed demons (the good kind), spewing forth married couples faster and better than hamburgers fly off the grill at fast-food hamburger joints.ChapeloftheFlowers

Amid it all, somehow the staff retains their sanity and even their zest for Las Vegas weddings, offering a tasteful approach to matrimony that sets them apart from many chapels on the Strip. 

Punctuated with “Oh my God!” “Holy crap!” and “Hustle, hustle!” utterances, Chapel of the Flowers wedding planner Melody approaches each wedding with boundless energy and a unique breath of fresh air- despite many wedding couples not bringing their tuxes, dresses – even rings – on their wedding day; hearing the same old stories from wedding couples ad infinitum, but acting like it’s the first time; and rectifying one mess after another- all the while proving, though, that stereotypical Las Vegas kitschy wedding dramas can be indeed transformed with panache in a heartbeat into an elegant affair.  Melody appears to effortlessly eat, sleep and breathe weddings, meeting five to 12 couples or more in person daily, and gets the job done quickly and efficiently under the most severe time constraints. 

More than merely documenting 15-minute quickie wedding packages – with an Elvis impersonator thrown in for good measure from time to time – “Happily Ever Faster” explores Chapel of the Flowers wedding services which are also sometimes performed off the Las Vegas Strip (yes, believe it or not, there is more to Las Vegas than one-armed bandits and gawdy neon). 

And while other wedding reality television shows may have an occasional to or from Sin City visit, this is the only wedding show so far that is based in Las Vegas.  

With the Las Vegas wedding industry facing economic challenges [as reported by Las Vegas Backstage Access on January 11 and June 20], the show may prove to be just the stimulus ticket needed to aid Las Vegas’ wedding tourism- and ancillary wedding support businesses,  as well.

So, if your champagne flute hasn’t spilled over with the plethora of wedding reality television shows, including We classics “Bridezilla”, “Rich Bride, Poor Bride,” or “My Platinum Wedding,”  TNT’s “Wedding Day,” or CW’s “Hitched or Ditched,” – and approximately 13 other current wedding shows (and that’s not counting all the additional wedding dress, cake and accessory television show spin-offs!) – then consider taking a break from watching Kate Gosselin’s spankings and Jon and Kate’s dual infidelity flaps, by checking out this half-hour show that starts at 7:30 p.m. (PT) Friday’s on TLC.   It could quite possibly be your “cuvee champagne” television offering.

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Plenty of Lights, Camera and Action in Nevada

Lights, camera, action! Producers for feature films, reality shows, commercials, and other film projects are flocking to Nevada in droves, despite the sluggish economy. 

One reason that Nevada continues to draw film crews from around the world is that the locations are nearly impossible to economically replicate. 

“It’s hard to recreate the Las Vegas Strip in front of a green screen,” says Dannette Tull of the Nevada Film Office. “And the gaming – we’re obviously known for that. And we have unique locations, which is what makes Nevada so special.” 

The Nevada Film Office’s slogan is “Your Imagination, Our Locations.”  Nevada continues to be an industry leader in attracting film projects – despite the failure of a recent tax incentive bill to get out of the state legislature. 

Film projects in Nevada have accounted for more than $100 million in revenue for the past nine years in a row.

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Paris Hilton on the Cheap in Las Vegas

Paris Hilton often calls Las Vegas her partying home.  Now that lifestyle may become even more of a regular reality, albeit more austere, as season two of her reality TV show “Paris Hilton’s My New BFF” faces the grim reality of diminished glamour brought on parishilton2by economic facts of life. 

Contestants of the show have to face the realities of living in a mansion that costs half as much as the home of the show that was rented last season.  If that’s not enough indignity to suffer, trips to New York and Tokyo are out this year, as the show’s production budget has been cut by 10 percent. 

With the recession continuing to eat into advertising revenue at TV networks, a popular solution has emerged – even cheaper reality TV.   This after reality shows already were TV’s low-budget alternative, costing about $950,000 per episode, versus $1.7 million for a scripted drama. 

MTV, which plans to air the new Hilton show this summer, is filling more air time with new reality series rather than reruns, but, even so, its programming costs are down 17 percent per half hour, said Tony DiSanto, head of programming at the channel. 

Sorry, Paris.

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Holly Madison Sets Sights on New Las Vegas Gig?

After being the main love squeeze for Playboy mogul Hugh Hefner for seven years, breaking up, and recently breaking up from Las Vegas illusionist and Luxor headliner Criss Angel following a four-month live-in relationship, Las Vegas resident, actress, and “Dancing with the Stars” contestant Holly Madison, 29, says she is has no interest in hollymadisongetting back into another relationship anytime soon. 

But what she is wanting is to stay in the TV reality show business but move into “the production side of things.”  One of the three co-stars of the hit TV reality show “The Girls Next Door,” Madison now has her sights set on a Las Vegas project to be a reality show producer.  The concept reportedly would be a combination of “Girls Next Door,” and “The Hills,” with a little bit of the “Crazy Horse Paris” style topless revue thrown in just for good measure. 

“I want to establish my own brand and my own career and not be mooching off something else,” says Madison, who is now immersed into dance rehearing six hours a day at the Delgado Dance Studio in Summerlin.  Madison had no prior dance background before becoming a last-minute addition to replace the injured Jewel on “Dancing with the Stars” and remains in the competition with her dance partner Dimitry Chaplin.

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Cerda’s Enjoy New Las Vegas Home from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

The Cerda family in Las Vegas woke up the morning of March 10 to a call from Ty Pennington and the crew from Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and on March 19, they went to sleep in a completely rebuilt, environmentally friendly home designed around the special needs of their children. cerda

While Wright Custom Home/Wright Engineers and more than 500 volunteers were demolishing and then framing out a new house in northwest Las Vegas, the Cerda’s were relaxing in Maui and trying to adjust to the change in their future.  Occasional video showed them limited progress on the building and they had no idea what the final structure would look like. 

After exiting the limo that whisked them home from McCarran International Airport, Chuck Cerda kissed the Extreme Makeover bus.  Surrounded by family, friends and well wishers, the Cerda family shouted “Move that bus!” and for the first time, saw their new two story home in Las Vegas. 

The Cerda’s children, Molly and Maggie, both suffer from Combined Immune Deficiency Disease (CIDD) which makes them more susceptible to lung and upper respiratory infections.  Because of their condition, the girls have limited contact outside the home that makes it even more important that the house be in pristine condition.  The HVAC system will filter the air better than a standard home heating/cooling system.  An advantage that was noticeable soon after entering the residence when Terri Cerda realized her daughter Molly wasn’t having breathing difficulties and didn’t require a nebulizer treatment. 

In addition to the valley volunteers that helped to build the new house, many local businesses contributed build related or maintenance assistance.  Walker Furniture donated furniture for the main rooms; Alarmco donated security services; Freedom Exterminators gave pest control treatments; and The Soroptimist International of Metropolitan Las Vegas provided a musical touch, donating oboes, a flute and $2,000 worth of music lessons for the girls. The four Las Vegas Raising Cane’s restaurants encouraged customers to donate a dollar to every ticket and gave the funds directly to the family to assist with ongoing expenses. 

However it wasn’t just the Cerda family who benefited during the home build.   The United Blood Services bloodmobile parked at the spectator site and visitors and volunteers took the opportunity to donate to the Vegas valley blood bank.  And the Three Square food distribution center in Las Vegas was the recipient of a non-perishable food collection also conducted at the spectator site. 

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition currently plans to air the Cerda family episode on May 10.  The television series airs Sundays at 8 p.m. on Las Vegas ABC affiliate KTNV channel 13.

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