It's the last day of shooting on FX's new series "Lucky," and 150 extras are on hand to stage the World Series of Poker, the event that signaled the beginning of the end for compulsive gambler Michael "Lucky" Linkletter a year before.
John Corbett, playing Lucky, comes in to pay his entrance fee. Already 6 feet 5 inches tall, Corbett sports a pompadour that adds a couple more inches. This, combined with sleek suits and cool shades, makes him look as little as possible like his last TV role, that of easygoing, country-cabin-owning furniture designer Aidan Shaw on HBO's "Sex and the City."
The gambling venue (the exact location of which Corbett would like to leave to the audience's imagination) is no Glitter Gulch fantasy palace. The leather (or is it vinyl?) on the bar stools is cracked in places, and the carpet has seen better days.
This may be a show set in Las Vegas, but, as Corbett says between takes, "We're not at the Bellagio."
It may not be a long way in distance from the strip to downtown, but Corbett says, "That's our experience, pawn shops and penny slots. Our experience of Vegas is pretty much the Fremont Experience, the Golden Nugget, the Golden Gate."
"This is a downtown show," says executive producer Mark Cullen, "and these are downtown people."
Rolling back 13 half-hour episodes in time, the series opens Tuesday, April 8 (occupying the former time slot of "The Shield"), with Lucky at his lowest ebb (to that point, anyway). After winning $1 million at the World Series of Poker, he's blown the cash, lost his new wife and now has to scrape together $8,000 to repay her parents for her funeral -- but he has quit gambling.
With the help of pals and con men Mutha and Vinny (Craig Robinson, Billy Gardell), and the death-defying paraplegic The Trake (Seymour Cassel), he succeeds, only to be mugged by desperate Danny (Kevin Breznahan).
Forced to borrow from a peripatetic loan shark (Dan Hedaya), Lucky faces the prospect of gambling to pay him back. At the same time, he meets fellow compulsive gambler Theresa (Ever Carradine), who's looking to him for help in battling her own addiction.
Does Lucky triumph in the end? It would be a pretty short series if he did, but the game's not over yet.
"You don't want him to gamble," Cullen says, "you don't want him to gamble, you don't want him to gamble. In the end, he's gonna gamble."
After that, Lucky's going to look in the mirror and have a chat with himself about it. "The mirror is a continuing force throughout the show," Cullen says. "For us, with Lucky being a card player, always keeping it tight to the vest, not showing his hand, the mirror became the only time he's really honest."
Executive producer Robb Cullen, Mark's brother, also plays Lucky's car-dealer boss, Stan. "The story of Lucky," Robb explains, "is a guy who is a great gambler who doesn't want to gamble but has a compulsion to do it. That's the conflict that he plays every week."
"And a lot of times," Mark says, "he is his own worst enemy, in that he always does the wrong thing, but for the right reasons. He sticks his neck out all the time."
"I wouldn't qualify Lucky as a bad human being at all," Corbett says. "I don't think he steals. His friends will, but he won't. He doesn't. He has some ethics."
After several seasons as a regular on "Northern Exposure" and a season as the star of "The Visitor," and especially after coming off the success of "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," Corbett wasn't particularly interested in the TV grind.
But the quirky pilot script for "Lucky," and a promise of 13 episodes completed over three months, got him interested.
