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TELEVISION REVIEWS

Reviews | Just when you thought we'd hit rock bottom

ggarvin@MiamiHerald.com

• Miami Social, 10-11 p.m. Tuesday, Bravo

• Dark Blue, 10-11 p.m. Wednesday, TNT

It's easy to hammer Bravo's new pseudo-reality show Miami Social -- just watch me -- but it really does represent a singular achievement. Sifting through all the imbecilic, self-obsessed trash littering Ocean Drive to come up with the seven most pathetically vacuous, narcissistic excuses for human beings on all of South Beach was truly a Herculean task. Specifically, I'm thinking of when he had to clean the Augean stables of an eternity's worth of animal dung. (Miami Social cast, get your mommies to read you the story -- that is, if any of you actually were born and not hatched.) The show's casting director should be given some kind of award, then parachuted onto a lost desert island where he can never threaten us again.

Before we go any further, let's be clear about something: I'm not saying Miami Social is so bad it's good. I'm saying it's so bad it will make you regret being born with eyes. I'm saying it's so bad that if you saw a member of the cast burst into flame on the street, you wouldn't waste your spit putting him or her out. I'm saying Osama bin Laden, if he sees it, will weep bitter tears of frustration that he went after the wrong American city.

A stupefying concoction of idiotic hubris, faux glamour and neurotic self-absorption, Miami Social purports to follow ''a close circle of seven friends who make this city spin,'' including such civic heavyweights as a freelance editor, a freelance photographer, a South Beach party-planner and a real-estate agent who doesn't know how to figure square-footage costs. (At last! An explanation for the collapse of the South Florida housing market!)

And let's not forget George the mortgage banker, whose girlfriend proudly boasts that he has slept with ''the whole South Beach, and North Beach and Camden and Hialeah and Aventura, Sunny Isles.'' Coral Gables and Kendall, he'll do you next year; sorry, Naranja and Homestead, you'll have to wait until 2011. (Oh, and could you promiscuous ladies of Camden call The Miami Herald and tell us just where in the hell Camden is? We've never heard of that part of town.)

Whether any of these people actually knew each other before being cast is seriously open to question: Miami Social, even more than most so-called reality shows, reeks of contrivance and artifice. (The fact that two characters have been regulars on other reality shows does not exactly amplify its claims to authenticity.)

But certainly they have much in common, particularly a compulsive fatuity. Their conversations are numbing even by the standards of such previous South Florida reality-TV stars as Flipper and Gentle Ben. Like my dress? Are you wearing a bra? I don't have a flat ass. I want a guy who's hot inside and out -- I really want to meet someone like me. Or, facing a mirror: Oh, God, I look so good in this reflection. I'd sooner eat lunch with a mutilated corpse from CSI: Miami or Dexter than be trapped at a table with the Miami Social cast.

`DARK BLUE'

I watched an advance copy of TNT's new cop show Dark Blue immediately after Miami Social, which probably means you should approach the rest of this review with a certain skepticism: Anything, from Casper the Friendly Ghost to Roller Derby highlights, would look like Citizen Kane after an hour of Miami Social.

Nonetheless, Dark Blue is a more-than-casually- interesting take on cop shows, with Dylan McDermott (The Practice) starring as the flinty head of an undercover police squad so secret that it's completely off the LAPD books.

The moral dilemmas of undercover cops resonate in the post-9/11 world. How far would you go to infiltrate al Qaeda and capture Osama bin Laden? Would you stand by while crimes were committed? Would you commit them yourself? Would you appear in an episode of Miami Social?

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