Take Three: Magic City

Magic City: Season 1, Episode 3 “Castles Made of Sand” (C)

It seems a bit early in this show’s life to be bringing in past lovers, not to mention two of them at a time. Ike’s business relationship with his sister-in-law is entirely awkward and full of sexual tension, but it’s not as bad as Cliff, who isn’t anywhere near subtle in the way he speaks about the fact that he considers Vera the one that got away, going so far as to offer her a job away from Miami Beach. Vera leaving Ike wouldn’t be nearly as deadly for her as it will be for Lily once her husband finds out just what she’s been up to with her lover on the side. Ike’s most interesting interaction with another woman wasn’t actually with Meg but instead with Mike Strauss’ widow, who showed up to ask him to stop sending money to her every week. She managed to get a job as a pastry chef in his kitchen rather easily, and she even seemed to buy the fact that he had nothing to do with Mike’s death, something we know to be patently untrue. Ike’s efforts to get gambling legalized weren’t terribly productive, but politicians should be careful about how they behave in public, lest they make themselves prime targets for blackmail, though the most resilient can manage to survive even that. In its third outing, this show continues to be rather shallow and vapid, presuming its characters, events, mysteries and plot developments to be far more intriguing than they actually are.