Nearing 40 years since Airplane! hit the big screen, the airline industry hasn’t run out of gas for laughs with Fox’s LA to Vegas.
“This is my reinvention,” Golden Globe winner and Emmy nominee Dylan McDermott said about making the jump from dark dramas like American Horror Story to the new comedy series executive produced by Adam McKay and Will Ferrell’s Gary Sanchez Productions.
“I couldn’t do another drama,” said McDermott, “I had to reinvent myself.”
Cracking the series was an easy one for writer/EP Lon Zimmet: He used to fly this air leg all the time when he was fresh out of college. While he had a hard time breaking into the industry with internships, he was good at poker — being the son of a professional player. So once or twice a month Zimmet would fly out to Sin City, and many of the characters on the show from the drunks to the strippers are folks he actually encountered.” Olivia Macklin plays Nichole, a college girl who is trying to make her way as a professional stripper; and in fact Zimmet once flew with a very nice, unassuming young woman who would shoot Brazzer porn films once a month.
Zimmet was very specific about the writers he hired for the show: It wasn’t just about lampooning the outrageous personalities but capturing the humanity of it all. “I have a lot of writers with their own Vegas stories. For example, we have a guy who use to fly out to Las Vegas with briefcases full of cash to place bets for high-stakes gamblers,” said the writer/EP. “He would come back with a fraction of that money.”
But with TSA now doing body searches on passengers, the overcharging for luggage and customers being forcibly removed off flights, the sky’s the limit for material.
Says series director/EP Steve Levitan: “We play with all of that stuff, especially in Episode 4. We explore all the ways that the airlines are trying to screw with you. We’ve done a deep dive with how the airlines are trying to mine your money.”
LA to Vegas airs at 9 PM Tuesdays on Fox.