Fox goes 'North'

I am astonished that Fox has never put "North Shore" (7 p.m., Ch. 13), or something like it, on its schedule before.

Here we have a prime-time soap opera set in Hawaii . . . which means there's a good excuse to have very beautiful people wearing very little as they swim through all the suds.

From the looks of tonight's premiere, this is fairly decent (if largely predictable) soap opera. It's sort of "Hotel" for the 21st century, with regular characters interacting with guests at the fabulous Grand Waimea Hotel, which caters to the wealthy and famous.

Taking center stage are Jason Matthews (Kristoffer Polaha), a local boy who's the general manager of the hotel, and Nicole Booth (Brooke Burns), the new director of guest relations. Turns out they used to be an item and didn't part under the best of circumstances.

The soap bubbles get thick in the first hour, with passion rekindled and extinguished; a hotel employee charged with rape; a guest who isn't what she seems; and another guest who misses his car. Really.

Fox wants this to be the new "O.C.," but it's not that good. "North Shore" definitely needs a sense of humor.

On the other hand, "The O.C." pilot wasn't that great either. So maybe there's hope for this one.

THE CASINO (8 p.m., Ch. 13) is the latest test of the theory that just about anybody can star in a reality show. At least anybody who's rich.

Tom Breitling and Tim Poster are a pair of 32-year-old buddies who created Travelscape.com and sold it to Expedia.com for $105 million. They took $50 million of their own money and $175 million from investors to buy the Golden Nugget Hotel and Casino — "old-school Vegas at its finest," we're told — and the show is about their attempts to bring it back to its glory days.

As reality series go, this one isn't bad. It's just that, after all the faux drama we've seen come from the masterful editing of producer Mark Burnett's team ("Survivor," "The Apprentice," "The Restaurant"), it's hard to know how much of this is really real.

And the drama depends on viewers worrying about whether Tom and Tim will succeed — which is a little tough given the fact that, if they lose every dime they've invested, they're still loaded.

But there are other stories about the guests, including a professional gambler who doesn't know his date isn't a woman and a guy whose buddies try to give him a jump-start in, um, dating that includes a whipped-cream bikini.

Hey, this is Fox we're talking about, you know.