Season 1
South Beach is a primetime television drama that ran in the US from January 11, 2006 until February 22, 2006 on UPN. Created by Matt Cirulnick, one of its executive producers is entertainer Jennifer Lopez.
It was cancelled after eight first-run episodes.
The show premieres in South Africa on SABC1 on Monday 30 July, 2007, at 22h00.
Synopsis
Vincent and Matt are two friends from Brooklyn who decide to move to glamorous South Beach in order to seek out better opportunities. Vincent has aims of meeting with beautiful women and getting ahead by any means necessary, while Matt supposedly only wants to make enough money to go back to university, since his dad blew his college fund.
However, as it turns out, Matt has other reasons for going to South Beach as well.
Several years previously, Matt was dating Arielle. However, he broke up with her so as to not interfere with her dreams of being a superstar fashion model and pushed her to Miami.
There, Arielle met and fell in love with Alex Bauer, the young manager of Nocturnal, South Beach's hottest nightclub. Nocturnal, in turn, is located inside the glitzy Hotel Soleil, where models, celebrities, and other members of the rich and famous regularly spend their sojourns at South Beach.
The Hotel Soleil is owned by Alex's mother Elizabeth, a shrewd businesswoman who believes her son is weak and does not have a head for business. On top of that, Elizabeth seems to have a penchant for dating younger men that are her son's age.
Matt's arrival in South Beach caused friction with Alex, who was jealous of his previous relationship with Arielle. Elizabeth didn't help things when she gave Matt a job at the Hotel Soleil (thus ensuring that he and Arielle would be seeing a lot of each other) and evidently also had an eye for him as well.
Things culminated in a fight between Alex and Matt at Nocturnal; however, Alex ultimately apologised to Arielle about the fight, and Matt agreed to respect Alex and Arielle's relationship.
Vincent, meanwhile, originally took a job at the Hotel Soleil as a "spray boy" for female guests who were tanning poolside. However, he soon fell into the dubious employ of one Robert Fuentes, an investor in the hotel who happens to have links to Miami's underworld, and plans to use them to gain greater control of the operations of the hotel.
For some time, Fuentes has been pressuring Elizabeth to establish a casino in the Hotel Soleil, but she constantly rebuffs him.
Matt and Vincent came to South Beach to escape their dull existence.