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BY JOHN CROOK Tuesday, Sept. 25 – looks like a throwback to a TV drama from several decades ago. It stars Dennis Quaid in his network series debut as Ralph Lamb, a local cattle rancher pressed into service by the Las Vegas mayor (Michael O'Neill) when the town's sheriff goes MIA under mysterious circumstances. The time is 1960, and Vegas is in an awkward transition from the bump-in-the-road casino town familiar from Warren Beatty's "Bugsy" into the glitz magnet that it would become. Certainly a financial boom is in the offing, however, and that has caught the attention of the Chicago mob, which has dispatched Vincent Savino (Michael Chiklis playing a composite character) to look after its interests – which, from all appearances, are in direct conflict with the values and interests of Lamb and his fellow locals. "Basically, 'Vegas' is about cowboys vs. gangsters," Quaid explains, laughing. Except that's just the beginning of things. Co-created by Nicholas Pileggi ("Goodfellas") and Greg Walker ("Without a Trace"), "Vegas" starts out like an archetypal battle of good (morally upright Lamb) and evil (corrupt mob guy Savino), At first glance, "Vegas" – the heavily hyped CBS drama premiering but watch for things to start moving from black-and-white into shades of gray as the story unfolds, Quaid says. "I'm not interested in playing just a traditional hero," Quaid says flatly, "although he starts out that way. I would sort of put (Ralph Lamb) in the category of a character from Sam Peckinpah's 'The Wild Bunch,' where you felt that at one time this person had a moral center and knew who he was – and how that Western world was defined at that time – then along came automobiles and suddenly these men felt as if they were out of place. That's what happened to Las Vegas, too." A fourth-generation Mormon whose family roots in the area went back to the 19th-century Indian wars, the real-life Ralph Lamb, like his friends and neighbors, felt understandably threatened by the influx of crime figures into Las Vegas, Quaid adds. "There was always vice on some level, with gambling, and prostitution was legal, but then the mob came in and the local people really started feeling as if they were having their town taken away from them," the actor says. "When Ralph Lamb became sheriff, he was fighting to preserve that or at least keep it from completely taking over, trying to preserve the rule of law and keep the community together." Yet while Ralph may come into his new job with the best of intentions and a strong sense of right and wrong, viewers can expect to see the seductive power of his position starting to work its corruptive power on this man. Keyshawn Johnson, Cris Carter, Chris Mortensen, Stuart Scott, Adam Schefter and Steve Young. 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