Bravo describes Miami Social as a show about "the lives of a group of hot, young professionals – corporate types by day and party animals by night – as they navigate the sometimes murky waters of Miami's hottest locales." However, those who have seen it, say the show - which airs tonight at 10 p.m. ET/PT - is populated by seven relentlessly shallow socialites who could have been culled from any city in the United States. The cast includes a divorced couple, George French and Sorah Daiha, who are still friends and live in the same apartment building. Two cast members are reality show alums: Katrina Campins, was on The Apprentice and Hardy Hill was on Big Brother. Homosexuals are well (or perhaps poorly) represented in the cast. Michael Cohen, who used to work at In Touch, is openly gay. Fashion producer Ariel Stein is alternately described as an openly gay or bisexual man. But, it seems his biggest claim to fame is either hating fat people or being vice president of the company that gave us The Wearable Towel. Rounding out the cast is Maria Lankina, a bisexual Russian photographer who ships her 13-year-old daughter off to a Swiss boarding school in an early episode. Below, we take a look at the reviews for Miami Social.

Variety

Taking vacuity to a new level, Bravo's Miami Social might provide a wake-up call to a network that risks running out of rich and fabulous people to profile. Lacking the connective tissue of the Real Housewives franchise, this new docusoap feels heavily directed and still manages to feature a loosely aligned group without a single redeeming quality among those in it, other than the cut of their jaw line or the size of their boobs. So what's Miami Social about? It's about an hour, and a long one at that.

The Boston Herald

Bravo even attempts to goose Miami Social with two veterans of other unscripted franchises: Hardy Hill is well-known to fans of CBS' Big Brother; Katrina Campins was a contestant on the first season of NBC's The Apprentice. Katrina's marriage disintegrates in the opener. That might mean something if Katrina didn't act like a cyborg. George and his fiery Russian girlfriend Lina fight a lot and make up a lot. George's ex-wife, Sorah, lives in the same apartment complex and finds herself drafted as a negotiator in their ongoing war. Maria steels herself to say goodbye to her daughter, heading for a private boarding school. Hardy's girlfriend wants a baby. The two gay men in the mix could set the gay rights movement back 20 years. Ariel, an ex-model turned fashion show producer, is pathological about people he finds unattractive. Having drinks with friends, he interrupts to point out, "Oh, my God! I look so good in this reflection - and hot." Who, outside of an asylum, speaks that way? The various Housewives shows work because everyone has or knows somebody like at least one cast member in their own lives. But few have friends like these and even fewer would admit it. Beyond the relatability factor, there's another problem: These people are boring.

The Los Angeles Times

It is a comely enough group, and the Miami Social cocktail-hour conversations seem less fake than other show-enforced cast get-togethers, with Cohen happily burbling Addison DeWitt-meets-Paul Lynde banter and Stein providing central-casting bitchy. Early episodes deal with couple problems — Katrina separates from her husband-business partner, Lina lies to George, Hardy's girlfriend Trixia wants a baby. But when the only real moment of tension comes during an argument over Kim Kardashian — Cohen depicts her harshly, while Stein, self-proclaimed Kardashian pal, defends her — one does begin to worry. The presence of Cohen alone [who used to work at In Touch] seems to indicate that our celebrity feeding frenzy has overfished its waters and led to cannibalism. So if you find yourself longing for an all-night marathon of Friends or even Days of Our Lives, you will not be alone.

The New York Daily News

The early candidate for the most obnoxious member of this crowd is Ariel, who organizes fashion events. He distinguishes himself tonight by arriving at a restaurant after the rest of his party, checking out his table across the room, and getting on his cell phone to tell the owner he wants "the fat girl" removed before he will sit down. And so it goes. And like so many "reality" shows that have little to sell beyond neuroses and obnoxious, self-centered behavior, Miami Social in the end feels tedious and a little sad.

The New York Times

Ariel thinks of himself as a person of considerable importance: he produces fashion shows in Miami-Dade County. But as long as Miami isn't New York or Paris or Milan, saying you are the biggest fashion producer there is like saying you are the biggest auto maker in Tuscaloosa. Ariel claims to be attracted to both men and women, but mostly he is attracted to himself. "Oh my God, I look so good in this reflection," he remarks, "and hot." ... Fat people in particular gross him out, and you get the sense that if he could institute zoning laws to prevent them from entering South Beach, he would be moved to civic purpose. "What if you were born an ugly girl?" he asks rhetorically. "I mean, you can be an ugly guy, but an ugly girl? That's so depressing, every day waking up and knowing that you're ugly."

Hollywood Reporter

Housewives who have to be labeled "real" was just the warm-up; Bravo has now stepped fully into the Twilight Zone with its new reality series that focuses on the lives of alien beings, filmed in their natural habitat! Sure, it's called Miami Social, but don't be fooled — these are not people from our planet. Friends even before the cameras showed up, they are all things to all viewers: gay, straight, bisexual; married, dating, divorced; friends, bitchy, air-kissing. Their "jobs" deal with parties, photography, selling rich peoples' homes and celebrity gossip (the Kim Kardashian "reality whore" debate is awe-inspiring). They hint at a distant "bad economy" but clearly have no experience with it — living on another planet as they do — and spend hours sipping champagne on the beach and taking the day for mani-pedis. Real humans would drown in water this shallow.

Salon

Since we all secretly feel that we should be far richer and far more attractive than we actually are, any show about hot rich people is bound to enrage us. Why must we toil away at our lackluster jobs, when we could be teetering around town in bad shoes, letting smarmy macho men sip icy cold tequila out of our spray-tanned bellybuttons? Next, our envy sours to self-righteousness: What has our culture come to, that such vulgar indulgences are paraded in front of our faces every few seconds?

Although it's easy to mistake Miami Social for part of the problem, the show actually performs an important service to the public by revealing just how unspeakably dull the life of the club-hopping socialite actually is. Sure, stretching ugly tops over your enormous fake tits and spending way too much money at awful, overpriced night spots might sound like living the dream, but get to know these overly bronzed, gel-haired, empty-eyed souls a little better, and you'll no longer spend your afternoons at work (the way we all do) daydreaming about fishing your bra out of a South Beach trash can at 4 in the morning. Despite its strenuous attempts to glamorize the lives of these young, wealthy, ultra-beautiful denizens of Miami's hottest circles, Miami Social reveals them to be horribly mundane.

The Miami Herald

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.

While Bravo successfully copied both The O.C. and Desperate Housewives to create the Real Housewives franchise, it's unclear if the same formula can work for their new Gossip Girl knock off. The show, which premieres tonight at 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific times, 9 p.m. Central time, follows four girls and two boys who attend several unnamed private high schools in New York (with the exception of one social climber who goes to public school). The show is filmed in the same style as the Real Housewives series, but it seems focusing solely on minors presented some problems for Bravo. Though each of the cast members fits an obvious Gossip Girl stereotype, real teens can't be shown having sex or taking drugs so NYC Prep is comparatively tame. (As noted on Gawker, it's even hard to discuss the Chuck Bass-type cast member's seemingly confused sexual orientation, since he's an 18-year-old high school senior, not a ridiculous WB character.) Though the students are just as bratty and obnoxious as Chuck (or Countess Luann), critics say their adolescent angst is just boring and inane. Even hating them isn't as enjoyable, since the teens are just the product of parents who aren't present in their lives, who only appear on the show in a Charlie Brown adult-like capacity. Below, we check out what the critics are saying about NYC Prep.

The Boston Globe

When the characters on Gossip Girl act like jaded 45-year-olds, it's entertaining; they're fictional, reciting snappy dialogue. Real-life prep schoolers, sitting in fancy leather wingback chairs, come across as far less charming. On NYC Prep, we meet Sebastian, who hooks up with "between two and 16 girls a month,'' luring them with his fluent French and his flowing hair. We see aspiring singer Kelli and overachieving Camille, who wants her dinners with friends to be "productive'' toward her college application process. We get Taylor, the one public schooler of the bunch, who tries to keep up with her wealthier friends. They're interesting enough, but this show really centers on PC (for Gossip Girl fans: real-life Chuck Bass), an overconfident prep school senior who fancies himself a charmer, and spouts lines like "The thing about New York is, money flows like the wind.'' His foil is Jessie (in Gossip Girl terms: real-life Blair!), a snooty queen bee who speaks in a jaded monotone, plans charity events, and has used a personal shopper at Barneys New York since the tender age of 13. In tonight's premiere, Jessie grants PC an audience at a fancy restaurant. He throws a bottle of water at her in jest. She storms out. He grovels. She accepts his apology and swiftly belittles him.

Variety

Ultimately, the main problem with NYC Prep is that the show never gets better than its title — lacking the sociological insight to score as a documentary or the hyper-real situations and "characters" that would make it sizzle as a soap. As crass as it sounds, for something like this to truly pop requires a little more Less Than Zero than merely Clueless, which is what we initially glean from our encounters with the half-dozen featured teens.

At first blush, the boys register more strongly than the girls, perhaps because they appear less concerned about (or more oblivious to) the prospect of looking like self-centered little bastards. So pretentious 18-year-old P.C. lords over underclassmen, while 16-year-old Sebastian will surely make his folks proud by cavalierly saying, "Some girls like it if you're an asshole to them." See you on The Bachelor, kid.

Salon

Who wouldn't instantly resent and pity these [parents], who can't be bothered to raise their own kids, leaving it to the service industry professionals of NYC — boutique clerks, restaurant delivery people, spa attendants, prep school administrators — to do it for them? And yet, who wouldn't instantly envy these people, who luxuriate in their vacation home while their irritating teenagers sift out their petty troubles on an overpopulated island far, far away? NYC Prep drags out the people we know just well enough to recognize that they're very, very different from us — that grandstanding thug at work, the chick down the hall in college with the tennis courts in her backyard, the ex-girlfriend's spouse who speaks four languages and summers in Martha's Vineyard — and shows us why they're so different. We ogle their many advantages and indulgences, then soothe ourselves with how twisted and pitiable they are, swimming in such a toxic, decadent, big-city marinade. We already know that they turned out wrong, but now we know why.

The New York Times

Viewers are no longer shocked at tableaus of conspicuous consumption - limousines, personal shoppers, weekends in the Hamptons - even when the careless spendthrifts are children. If anything, this paean to Upper East Side plutocrats looks a little out of date - if the camera panned the other side of Madison Avenue, it would show darkened store windows and "for rent" signs. But Bravo, home to other reality shows like The Rachel Zoe Project, specializes in pinpointing stereotypes and inflating them into full-blown cartoon caricatures. The deliciously vulgar heroines of Housewives of New Jersey shop and bicker, spend and shout, without ever falling out of character. On NYC Prep, PC in particular struggles to insert a little self-awareness and humor into his role as the spoiled preppy ne'er-do-well, but the script keeps veering back to the Gossip Girl playbook.

The L.A. Times

On NYC Prep (which airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m.) though, these young people evince, above all, a need to best the unbestable, awkwardly accentuating character traits well past the point of parody. Much as with The Real Housewives of New York, the kids featured here have the air of parvenus. Certainly, by whatever metrics the social hierarchy is determined, there are others who rank higher, likely thumbing their noses at this collection of would-bes and aren't-quites.

The Washington Post

These kids dress very well, never seem to get dirty, and have what appear to be near-flawless complexions. But their small talk is just as small as less affluent kids', perhaps smaller — much of it infinitesimal. They don't even gossip much about one another, though some appear capable of the kind of Machiavellian schemes portrayed in movies about the young and the bratty. Unfortunately, the most dramatic action in the premiere is a boy rolling a bottle of spring water across a restaurant table and into a snobby girl's lap. She is not amused.

If only these little dears were fascinating, or at least more interesting than they are on the first installment. From the looks of the previews at the end of the hour, things will be heating up in future episodes, and the first might be viewed as a scene-setting preface to battles, tattles and conspiracies to come. But how many viewers are going to stick around?

The Boston Herald

The cable network can't show its mostly underage cast indulging in sex and alcohol binges without being viewed as an accomplice and opening itself up to legal sanctions. So it is forced to focus on teens who come off as second-rate imitations of such Gossip mainstays as Blair, Serena, Chuck and Jenny...

Bravo does its level best to shove these kids into a bad light. Their on-camera confessionals all take place in a faux study in an oversized leather chair surrounded by piles of books, as if to ram the point that despite their families' wealth, these kids will never attain true class or sophistication.