• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, January 2, 2018

Happy New Year and fasten your seat belts: The first new TV show of 2018 is a comedy that takes place entirely on an airplane.

It's “LA to Vegas,” a sitcom premiering Tuesday night on Fox (January 2) about the crew and passengers who regularly take weekend round trips between Los Angeles and Las Vegas on a fictional airline called Jackpot.

The show relies almost entirely on the quality of the repartee between this static group of characters who gather twice every weekend within the body of the same airplane. As a result, "LA to Vegas” is a very talky show.

Unless the show's producers intend to expand the show's scope outside of these claustrophobic confines in subsequent episodes (I watched the first two), then the future of this show would seem to be just as restricted as the interior of this airplane's fuselage.

This show has an impressive list of credits. Will Ferrell, Adam McKay and Steve Levitan are listed among the show's six executive producers. Levitan, the creator of “Modern Family” and other shows, directed the “LA to Vegas” pilot.

If this TV show was a movie, Ferrell would play the addle-brained pilot. On the TV show, that role goes to Dylan McDermott (pictured above), who is perfectly fine in it.

So are the other characters and cast members -- including the flight attendants (Kim Matula and Nathan Lee Graham), the weekend stripper (Olivia Macklin) and the weekend gambler (Peter Stormare).

And where the aforementioned repartee is concerned, it is certainly witty and screwball-ish -- which is to say that the cast members give every line their all. And yet, despite all the skill involved in bringing this scenario to life, the show has a “who cares?” quality.

Of course, this wouldn't be a network sitcom if at least some of the dialogue wasn't tasteless. For reasons I cannot explain, the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963 is referenced twice in the first episode of “LA to Vegas” in terms meant to be comedic. To apply a phrase used by young people these days, these JFK references are an “epic fail.”

The thing that struck me most about “LA to Vegas” was something I began to observe and then mentioned in several reviews of new TV shows near the end of 2017: With all of the choices that viewers of video content have these days -- from YouTube to SVOD and other TV broadcast and cable networks -- there is nothing in particular that is so noteworthy or attractive about “LA to Vegas” that it will likely draw audiences away from all of these other options.

In other words, it’s not enough for new TV shows today to be merely competent. With its more-than-capable cast and marquee names behind the scenes, “LA to Las Vegas” is certainly that. Once upon a time, that was enough for a TV show to succeed, but not these days.

It's also true that the avalanche of new content that presents itself all the time lately on a more or less constant basis has made it impossible for me to predict which shows will have staying power and which will not.

Having said that, there is certainly much to enjoy about “LA to Vegas.” Whether it sticks around for an appreciable length of time is a whole other story.

“LA to Vegas” premieres Tuesday night (January 2) at 9 Eastern on Fox.