With “Playboy Club” already canceled and “Pan Am’s” ratings losing altitude (wordplay!), things haven’t gone well for period dramas looking for success in the wake of “Mad Men.” But that could change now that we’ve got our first look at “Magic City,” Starz’s late-’50s drama about a Miami hotel and the mobsters who run it. Here’s the description I posted from Variety when I wrote about it last December:
As Frank Sinatra rings in a new year in the grand ballroom of Miami Beach’s most luxurious dream palace – the Miramar Hotel – its visionary leader, Ike Evans, must deal with the Mob, his complicated family and a city in the midst of dramatic change as Fidel Castro takes control of Cuba, just 200 miles offshore. By day the hotel at the center of “Magic City” is all diving clown acts and cha-cha lessons by the pool, but at night Miami Beach reveals a darker truth. Dopers, dealers, strippers, gangsters and those who arrest them drift together to hear the top nightclub acts perform. Just beneath the surface, racial tensions stir. Ike must deal with all of this, even while global intrigue is brewing right under his roof.
There’s a lot to like here: violence, bikinis, Olga Kurylenko (Quantum of Solace), Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Watchmen), bikinis, the underrated Danny Huston, and violence. Did I mention bikinis? Yes? Twice? Okay, just checking.
“Magic City” debuts next spring. Trailer below, with screencaps on the following pages.
