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...
From 50 years and 3,000 miles away, Larry King can laugh about how South Florida nearly ended his broadcasting career before it really began, but it didn't seem that funny at the time. He was working the overnight shift at a little Miami Beach radio station when the phone rang.
BIG SCREEN OPENING WEDNESDAY Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (PG) -- Although the story supposedly grows darker in the sixth installment of the boy wizard's adventures, this is the first Potter picture to receive a PG rating since 2004's Prisoner of Azkaban, so it can't be that dark. Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint return to continue the battle against the evil Lord Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes), who gets uglier every time we see him.
You can divide the world into two kinds of people: Those whose hearts cracked a little bit last weekend at the news that Casey Kasem was doing his final radio countdown of the hits, and those who said, ''Casey who?'' OK, there's probably a third group, maybe the largest of all -- the ones who said, ``What's radio?''
BIG SCREEN I Love You, Beth Cooper (PG-13) -- Chris (Home Alone) Columbus returns to the director's chair for the first time since 2005's Rent for this John Hughes-ian comedy about a gigantic nerd (Paul Rust) who declares his love for the school hottie (Hayden Panettiere) during his graduation speech.
For all HBO's coy promos, Hung is not really a show about sex; it's got less coupling than any random 15 minutes of the network's True Blood. It's more like a casualty report from the battlefields of modern economics.
BIG SCREEN OPENING WEDNESDAY Public Enemies (R) -- Johnny Depp is the notorious bank robber John Dillinger, and Christian Bale is Melvin Purvis, the FBI man who brought him down, in director Michael Mann's sweeping crime epic, which is rumored to be more substance than action (think The Insider, not Collateral).
''I'm asking if you know fantasy from reality,'' the starship commander demands of one of his officers, and in Virtuality the question is anything but rhetorical. This sci-fi TV movie that Fox hopes to spin off into a series is like an existential Cuisinart, slicing and dicing the real, the virtual and the imaginary into something that's intellectually fascinating if not quite dramatically satisfying.
The Philanthropist, 10-11 p.m. Wednesday, WTVJ-NBC 6 There's a good reason why competently run television networks want to look at a pilot episode before they buy a series. Regrettably, you can see it for yourself Wednesday night if you watch NBC's ineffably stupid The Philanthropist. NBC's programming boss Ben Silverman reportedly purchased it sight unseen at dinner one night, and the only thing I can figure is the oysters had gone bad.
Neil Rogers, for decades an acerbic and often-abrasive South Florida radio talk-show host, has retired.
When it comes to, say, watching Janet Jackson's costume failure at the Super Bowl 12,000 times in slow motion (strictly for couture quality-control purposes, of course), TiVo is pretty handy. For psychosocial research into the mental state of American fathers, not so much.
BIG SCREEN OPENING WEDNESDAY: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (PG-13) -- This is the big one, the big kahuna, the movie expected to rule the summer box office. Director Michael Bay follows up his surprisingly effective smash hit from the summer of 2007 with the second of an expected trilogy of films about giant robots from outer space that can turn into cars and the befuddled teenager (Shia LaBeouf) who befriends them.
Watching Iran's fierce anti-government demonstrations on TV this week, Farah Pahlavi has marveled at how familiar it all seems, and yet how different. The young protesters are the same age as those who drove her husband Reza Pahlavi from power and chant some of the same slogans -- but there's one obvious difference. She hasn't seen a single demonstrator with a long beard, the trademark of the Islamic fundamentalists who seized power in Iran in 1979.
The Queen and I, 8-9:30 p.m. Wednesday, HBO2 Iran and the West, 9-11 p.m. Monday, National Geographic Channel Be Like Others, 8-9:15 p.m. June 24, HBO2
Timing is everything. Two weeks ago, a new drama about a rebellious nurse fighting arrogant doctors and a stifling hospital bureaucracy while sorting through a messy domestic life might have seemed like an intriguingly fresh perspective on the medical show. But that was BNJ -- Before Nurse Jackie. So now it's like, are any of the nurses vampires? Does the maternity ward have a dancing baby? Because otherwise, been there, done that.
BIG SCREEN The Proposal (PG-13) -- The trailers for this romantic comedy about an executive (Sandra Bullock) who forces her underling (Ryan Reynolds) to marry her so she can avoid deportation, seem to give away the plot, from beginning to end. Here's hoping the movie harbors some kind of twist ending to juice things up. Like maybe one of the pair was really dead all along! Or maybe she's really a he!
Local TV broadcasters finally enter the digital era Friday, and chances are slim that anyone will be caught by surprise.
In a startling burst of good sense, the Screen Actors Guild has ratified a new contract with Hollywood studios, ending any chance of another disaster like the 100-day strike by writers in 2008 that cost billions of dollars and wrecked two television seasons.
Nurse Jackie. 10:30-11 p.m. Monday. Showtime. ''Do you realize you're the only sane one there?'' an admiring doctor asks Nurse Jackie Peyton during a lunchtime break from the All Saints Hospital emergency room. The smile Jackie flashes in return is as blank and concealing as the surgical mask she wears at the hospital, where her world is in an increasingly wobbly orbit that could crash at any minute.
BIG SCREEN The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (R) -- Denzel Washington (as a New York City subway dispatcher) and John Travolta (as a baddie holding a train's worth of passengers hostage) take over for Walter Matthau and Robert Shaw in this remake of the 1974 classic. Directed by Tony Scott (Domino, True Romance), who unloads all his trademark camera pyrotechnics on what is essentially a feature-length conversation between two men via short-wave radio, peppered by bits of action.
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