Review
MIAMI VICE: SEASON ONE
Various directors, U.S. 1984
The ’80s, in all its ridiculous glory, has no better summation than Miami Vice. In what was essentially a police drama, creator Anthony Yerkovich and producer Michael Mann combined every indulgence the decade boasted (conspicuous consumption, money, fashion, drugs and gratuitous use of hair products) against the background of a cop-buddy show. The indulgence within the show was matched by the show itself – from the cinematography and the lavish sets to the million-dollar budget for each episode, Mann changed the landscape of television forever by essentially making a movie each week. No one, before or since, has managed to take a genre so stale and reinvent it so dramatically, elevating it from predictability to stark drama.
In its first season, while introducing the world to deck shoes and pastel suits, Miami Vice made its name by refusing the happy ending and creating complex characters. Twenty years later some of the fashion doesn’t hold up, and the music is undeniably dated, but what stands out is how forward-thinking the show was. No network show on television since Miami Vice left the airwaves has boasted as multiracial a cast, including the large numbers of Hispanics who filled out both heroes and villains to Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett and Philip Michael Thomas’s Ricardo Tubbs. And the show, despite debuting in 1985, already knew the hopelessness of the war on drugs and portrayed the frustration and hypocrisy of it with gusto. On top of this, the quality of the guest stars is a credit to the show (while you might remember a pre-Moonlighting Bruce Willis making an appearance, you probably don’t remember John Turturro, Ving Rhames and Joan Chen). Despite its flaws, the first season of Miami Vice is both an entertaining nostalgia trip and a troubling reminder of just how stale – in storytelling, style and sheer adventurousness – network television has become. |
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