Let’s get this straight: “Magic City” (9 p.m., Starz) is not a “Mad Men” imitation. It is patterned on “The Godfather: Part II.” In fact, it copies from the first two “Godfather” films with audacious gusto. It’s also entertaining.

There’s a moment when a curtain blows out of a hotel window just as it did in “Part II” before Johnny Ola breathed his last. The somber score seems almost plagiarized. “Magic City” opens on Dec. 31, 1958, the day before Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Since this cable drama is set in Miami and not Havana, we don’t get to see the culmination of the revolution as we did in “Part II.” But “Magic City” does star Alex Rocco, well-known to “Godfather” fans as Moe Greene.

The action centers on Miami’s fictional Miramar Playa hotel, run by the handsome Ike Evans (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) with a compartmentalized mind and a reserved midcentury cool that may remind some of Don Draper from “Mad Men.” Behind his handsome facade, Ike is exhausted from straddling the line between legitimacy and Miami’s underworld, run with psychopathic efficiency by gangster Ben Diamond (Danny Huston), a man known as the Butcher.

Of the three episodes available for review, the first is weakest on character development. “Magic City” emphasizes the shiny surface of things, seemingly confident that its audience is already well-schooled in mob atmosphere and lore. It lacks the novelistic depth of “Mad Men” or “The Sopranos,” and it has yet to show either of those shows’ flair for developing strong female characters. But viewers who have already committed the first two “Godfather” movies to memory are in for a treat.

Tonight’s other highlights

• Edie Falco appears on “Who Do You Think You Are?” (7 p.m., NBC).

• The search for the source of illegal downloads on “The Finder” (7 p.m., Fox).

• “The Way of the Cross From Rome” (7:30 p.m., EWTN) commemorates Good Friday with Pope Benedict XVI.

• A shopkeeper’s murder reverberates in two worlds on “Grimm” (8 p.m., NBC).

• Vigilantes and shape-shifters join forces on “Fringe” (8 p.m., Fox).

• Danny reopens a closed case on “Blue Bloods” (9 p.m., CBS).