Today’s Guest: Michael Cristalli, Marc Saggese, Las Vegas attorneys, inspiration for CBS-TV series “The Defenders”
The story is a good one: Las Vegas law partners Michael Cristalli and Marc Saggese thought Fox was going to do a reality show based on their clients and cases. And, no doubt, that would have been pretty cool.
MARC SAGGESE podcast excerpt: “You get into trouble in Vegas, we’ll get you out of it.”
You can LISTEN to this interview with Las Vegas lawyers MICHAEL CRISTALLI and MARC SAGGESE, inspiration for the CBS drama THE DEFENDERS, by clicking the audio player above!
And then an odd thing happened: CBS picked up the show as a weekly scripted drama. Instead of following around Cristalli and Saggese with cameras, the Eye network saw greater value and potential into taking the bigger-than-life characteristics of the pair, casting a pair of real TV stars, Jim Belushi and Jerry O’Connell. From what I’ve seen, it looks like the producers chose well.
The result is “The Defenders,” a new series that will take its place on the CBS fall schedule on Wednesday, September 22 at 10 p.m.
“The Defenders” will give us another take on life in the up all night city of Las Vegas, a place that has already been good to other networks for long runs of “Vega$” (with Robert Urich) on ABC and “Las Vegas” on NBC (with Josh Duhamel). And, of course, Vegas was the starting point of the many versions of the CBS hits, “CSI.”
So what’s the deal with Cristalli and Saggese? Are they really like the characters depicted by Belushi and O’Connell? More or less? Let’s find out.
Marc Saggese Website • Twitter • LinkedIn • Facebook
Michael Cristalli Website • LinkedIn
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