Magic Town - Season One (2012 Mitch Glazer)

Mitch - who wrote Cuaron's Great Expectations and co-wrote Scrooged) - was himself a cabana boy at a Miami Beach hotel (the Deauville), and the beautifully design Miramar (production designer Carlos Barbosa and set decoraor Scott Jacobson) is based on such real hotels as the Fontainebleu (seen in Goldfinger):

We think it might have been pitched as 'Mad Men + Hotel + GF 1&2 / Sopranos'. 

Not sure Jeffrey Dean Morgan with his three expressions is quite the man for the job. Olga Kurylenko (fine as usual) could play a young Audrey Hepburn. Danny Huston is meatily enjoyable, and Elena Satine is rather good as platinum hooker. With Steven Strait and Jessica Marais as the sex-addicted and suicidal lovers, Christian Cooke the other brother (one dodgy, one straight, you see?).

Certainly some dumb moments (you would catch a balcony-swinging thief by watching the outside of the building, wouldn't you? And leave town if told your life was in danger) and a certain predictability to some (not all) events, a visual fascination with (bodies in) water and 150% nudity guaranteed. Some rather ugly violence against women and pervy moments unpleasant. Still, as guiltily pleasurable as eating an entire box of chocolates, even the ones you don't like.

Lushly shot by Gabriel Beristain (whose most interesting credit is Derek Jarman's Caravaggio, though looking at the screen shots as a reminder, it looks like he didn't catch the artist's darkness well - how to go from 1959 Miami to Caravaggio's use of light in one review).