The eye candy was good, and it has potential because of the multiple characters and plot lines they could develop. But the story lines were so ridiculous in the opening (and presumably finely honed) episode that I suspect the writing will fail miserably a few episodes into the show.
Among the other writing failures previously noted, there were two more that stuck out as silly: 1. The street bum parlaying his $400 check into $1.2 million in about 15 minutes, and 2. the blackjack cheater deciding to go all in for $3 mil. on one hand, just as the heat is on and the table is about to be shut down. And the house LETTING him. What if he drew frigging blackjack? Why wouldn't he just scram while he could?
Unfortunately, the writing reeks of shallow research and clumsy writers. They jammed enough plot lines in to fill two hours had they done a reasonable job of fleshing them out. All the effort was put into the visuals, which were way cool, especially the opening segment. My guess is they wasted a lot of production time on those and had to short-sheet the story production to finish by deadline. Or they ran out of money after blowing it on the visuals and had to cut the story way back, which meant a 2-hour debut became one hour.
