Montecito Resort and Casino

I have inexplicably become a fan of the NBC Monday night television programme Las Vegas.

By most measures it is a truly dreadful show; it’s more like a “sexed up Love Boat in the desert” than anything else. Cleavage is important. And the show truly jumped the shark when Lara Flynn Boyle’s guest start run came to and end by flying her off the edge of the hotel, carried on wings created by her puffy dress.

But, for all those reasons, Las Vegas makes for compelling (if mindless) Monday evening entertainment. It helps that it’s on late, after Catherine has gone to bed and G. has packed up his bike and ridden up to NoEu.

Most of the show is shot in and around the Montecito Resort and Casino. I’d simply assumed that this was a real Las Vegas hotel; this assumption was bolstered by the fly-over shots of the city in the opening credits clearly showing the Montecito on the Las Vegas strip.

Turns out that I was wrong: it’s all a fiction: the Montecito doesn’t actually exist. Here’s what Wikipedia says:

Many of Mandalay Bay’s interiors and exteriors (including its wave pool) have been used as Montecito exteriors, although (according to the Internet Movie Database) interiors are now filmed in a California set that is a replica of the Mandalay Bay. In several episodes, the fly-through video clips inaccurately depict the movement of the camera into a casino which is clearly the Mandalay Bay - not the Montecito. Many of the interiors and exterior shots of the casino can be shown depicting Mandalay signage and names.

Surely it can’t be too long before NBC opens a real Montecito in Las Vegas?