“There was this brief period of history, from New Year’s Day 1959 to about October, when Fidel was open for business. He had inherited a country that was in turmoil and he was trying to resuscitate and revive the economy. And some Americans were interested. I even found an old Life magazine story about some entrepreneur who was getting into the business of harvesting bat guano out of Cuban caves. By the fall of 1959, Castro was pushed to — or moved to, depending on how you see it — [Soviet premier Nikita] Khrushchev, and then it was game over.

“But Meet the Press is from that short little period before. Castro, we’ve all seen him thundering from the podium for five hours. But in this little clip, he’s kind of quiet and sweet, he was really pitching himself: ‘I don’t like Communists, I like the American people.’ It’s a fascinating moment. You can sense his desperation.”

It’s difficult to imagine another show on television that would use Castro as a character, much less take the trouble to illuminate his political evolution. But Magic City is very much a distillation of the lore and legend of its South Florida setting — perhaps even more so than the iconic Miami Vice, which created as much Miami fashion as it borrowed.

Among the pivotal plot points in the new season are mobster Santo Trafficante’s purchase of a warehouse in Hialeah and the construction of an ornate Middle Eastern-styled whorehouse in Opa-locka. (The latter was inspired by the real-life Madame Sherry, mistress of a legendary Miami Beach brothel known as the Moorish Castle and its Hialeah successor, the Rancho Lido. When she published her memoirs in 1961, they were so scandalous that their sale was banned within Miami city limits.) There are constant references to the political and cultural clashes between Miami Beach’s WASP old guard and its Jewish newcomers. And derisive cracks about the sloth and gullibility of Miami Herald reporters — yeah, people loved to dump on the lamestream media even before the Internet.

City as character

“Miami is definitely a character in the show,” says Glazer, a 1970 Miami Beach High grad whose father was an electrician at the hotels like the Fontainebleau and Eden Roc that inspired Magic City’s Miramar Playa. “It’s almost like a driving force. I take inspiration from the town, both now and then.

“A character like Madame Sherry, she’s soooo Miami, how are you not going to make use of that? It gives something unshakeable to the fiction of the story, grounds it in something so incredibly real. There are some incredibly operatic things happening this year, but almost all of them are inspired by real Miami events.”

Which take place in Miami locales. Every single scene in Magic City is shot in Miami, either on the show’s massive hotel-interior sets in the old Bertram Yacht building near the airport, or on the streets. The Deauville doubles for the Miramar’s swimming pool and beach, side-by-side mansions on Indian Creek have roles as the opulent homes of various characters, and East Flagler even gets a heavily disguised cameo as Havana.

“The original idea was that we’d shoot two-thirds of each episode on our sets and one-third outside, but we went out a ton this season,” says Glazer. “I can’t be totally irresponsible — the show is expensive as it is, and the cost starts to climb immensely the minute you go out the door. But we’re in Miami. I love to see Ben Diamond out on Indian Creek, or Ike Evans driving his Cadillac down Collins.”

Not that Glazer is above, once in a while, sticking it to the place he grew up. He takes his revenge on his old buzzkilling nemesis Lansky with a malignant Jewish mobster character named Sy Berman, played by James Caan. “He was, well, suggested by Lansky,” Glazer says. “But Lansky liked to present this image as a modest, calm, businessman-accountant type of guy. Sy is much more, let’s say, muscular.”