Las Vegas: The case of a previous WGA strike victim

It was ultimately the previous WGA strike which contributed to Las Vegas’s abrupt cancellation at the end of season five.

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has always fought to protect the rights of screenwriters and has even sometimes resorted to extreme measures like strikes.

Las Vegas, which used to air on NBC between 2003 and 2008, was cancelled due in part to a WGA strike back in 2008.

All about the Writers Guild of America (WGA)

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) officially organized as a labor union (then called “The Screen Writers’ Guild”) in 1933. They were created as an effort to secure a better future for screenwriters working all across the United States.

The WGA has now grown to include thousands of members who spend their time writing for motion pictures, television, news and online media. It still works tirelessly to protect the creative and economic rights of these members today.

Las Vegas: The case of a previous WGA strike victim

Although the most recent WGA strike, which was authorized by the union in May 2023, has been plastered all over the headlines for the past five months, it is not the first time that the WGA has had to resort to such drastic measures.

The WGA actually called on its members to strike all the way back in 2007 and 2008. This was to encourage higher residuals for writers from DVD sales and other forms of new media, in a very similar fashion to the current battle over streaming residuals.

And although some producers, including Las Vegas’s producer, Gary Scott Thompson, were brave enough to tell the Los Angeles Times that the show was “strike-proof,” it was ultimately cancelled by NBC quite abruptly near the end of this strike. This was just after the show’s fifth (and now final) season finale episode had aired.

To be fair though, the WGA strike was not wholly to blame for Las Vegas’s cancellation. In fact, the show had been displaying early warning signs of cancellation before the strike began.

Moreover, Las Vegas had already lost some of its main cast members and its prime timeslot by the time that it headed into its fifth season in September 2007.

It may, instead, be more accurate to say that the budget cuts that NBC faced as a result of the strike, were simply the last straw for Las Vegas, which was ultimately cancelled in February 2008.

And unfortunately for Las Vegas fans, Thompson’s last-ditch efforts to throw everything but the kitchen sink into the show’s season finale episodes in the hopes of getting it renewed for curiosity’s sake, were just no longer convincing enough to get NBC to keep it around for another season.

The Las Vegas cast changes

In most cases, major cast changes are a dead giveaway that all is not well behind the scenes of a television show.

And in Las Vegas’s case, the departure of the show’s lead actor, James Caan (who played the Montecito’s head of security, Ed Deline), marked the beginning of the end.

Caan, as well as Nikki Cox (who played Mary Connell) opted not to return for Las Vegas’s fifth season.

Although, the show did introduce a new owner of the Montecito named A. J. Cooper (played by Tom Selleck) to try and fill the gap in the final season, many fans will argue to this day that it was just never the same after Caan left.

Las Vegas’s declining viewership

As Las Vegas was heading into its fourth season finale in March of 2007, the show was bringing in 1.7 million fewer viewers than it had before it was moved to its Friday timeslot.

NBC had also cut this fourth season down to only 17 episodes (as opposed to the 22 episodes which had become the standard) in a foreboding move, which ultimately proved to be the correct decision, as the final season of Las Vegas saw another double-digit decline in ratings.

Will Las Vegas ever return?

One of the things that made the Las Vegas cancellation sting so much was the fact that the fifth season of the show ended with so many unanswered questions.

This famously resulted in hoards of upset fans bombarding the NBC offices with baby booties and baby dolls, as a subtle way of pleading for a conclusion to Delinda and Danny’s baby storyline (and all of the other Las Vegas loose ends).

But besides a few recent rumors that NBC may be working on a reunion special for the show, it seems unlikely that the show will ever be rebooted after such a sharp decline in ratings in its final season.