South Beach

Unlike "Baywatch," it's not as bad as it sounds -- or as good -- depending on your opinion of beach dramas built largely around boobs and biceps.

Serious about its silliness, this show grasps the concept of prime time as vacation time.

It's The O.C. meets Miami Vice, the MTV Video Music Awards, and Models Inc., plus just a dash of Hamlet for flow. [13 Jan 2006, p.71]

This latest attempt at a series with glamorous young people frolicking at an even more glamorous resort doesn't demonstrate significantly more depth than its unsuccessful predecessors.

Tawdry, empty and inept, South Beach is UPN's too-late-in-the-game attempt to transfer The O.C. to the other coast.

It marks a return to the 80's era of "Dallas," "Dynasty" and "Knots Landing," when the prime-time landscape was dotted with lurid, silly soap operas that provided the kind of catty catharsis that regular shows neglect.

In between all the poolside exhibitionism and dance-floor romantic politics, guns appear and faceless thugs are killed. That means our young cast members get to angst about whether they're truly in danger and some villain is going to force them to eat a loaf of bread at gunpoint.

[A] warmed-over hip-hop saga.

Maybe the best way to explain UPN's new drama South Beach is to tell you that when Vanessa Williams warns a young model that ''South Beach will eat you alive,'' I fully expected the next scene to be a horde of zombie parking attendants chewing the entrails of half-naked girls in the lobby of the Delano. Cannibalism is about the only thing missing from this delirious new trashfest of hard bodies and soft brains.

Filled with terrible dialogue.

"South Beach" could fall into guilty pleasure territory, but it really is as corny as it sounds.

Despite the many hard bodies on display, South Beach is flabby.

It's pointless to talk about who "stars" in this bloated music video, but the agents for both Vanessa Williams and Giancarlo Esposito need to be fired, summarily.

The dialogue and plot contrivances are banal, the acting is cartoon and the whole thing is more transparent than a see-through bikini.

You'd think that someone somewhere down the line... would have lobbied for the rudiments of a story, characters with texture and dialogue more sophisticated than shopping mall conversation.

The scripts are sophomoric, the acting wooden and the direction uninspired -- [the] show starts so thin it must have been on the South Beach Diet for months.