dudes: let's write stuff abt MIAMI VICE, the TV show

Humiliated--that might be the right word.

The show peaked quickly: from '85 to 1986 really. At a sixth grade dance, every guy wore turquoise or salmon pink pseudo Armani jackets and sockless espadrilles (David Rieff's excellent book on Miami mentions how thoroughly the look had permeated the city, and how officials exploited it). But I don't remember anyone talking about the show or dressing like Crockett or Tubbs from '86 onwards.

man ed o'neil just went ham on some porno guys

What was the episode where an arms dealer demonstrated his wares on CROCKETT'S CAR? This sequence, and Crockett's reaction, are the only parts of MV I remember watching. Also, I suspect this is the highlight of the series--am I correct?

That was Jeff Fahey in When Irish Eyes Are Smiling (season three).

I watched the entire series on DVD over the course of two months last year. It is fantastic almost throughout.

the first season of this has some hints of how good it gets later but there's a lot of bad jokes and bad fake accents and it doesn't look nearly as good as it did later. just watched an episode where crockett and tubbs infiltrate a boat race to try and get at a drug shipment, with crockett getting into the race by hustling the drug dealer at a pool game. at least three minutes of the last half of the episode are devoted to a shirtless tubbs making out awkwardly in bed with the dealer's mistress. great show!

I like how the writers decided Crockett dealing with this estranged family or w/e wasn't going anywhere and dropped that plot sideline right at the start

Tubbs doll:

http://www.figurerealm.com/Galleries/miamivice/RicardoTubbs-GreenSuit.jpg

lol love the OP's enthusiasm

s1e1 surprisingly moving?

http://i.imgur.com/i0DGacS.jpg
You got a leak your department the size of the east rivuh

http://i.imgur.com/Y0sRTX4.jpg
Alright that's it. Any questions?
Yeah, I gotta question. You roll some fruit for that shirt or what?

http://imgur.com/3zn8p4P.jpg
You were my partner...thanksgiving...birthdays

http://imgur.com/LCseL5Q.jpg
in the air

ok gotta rewatch that

I just remember the subplot of Sonny's family (divorce?) that they backgrounded and how Olmos doesn't appear much until later

olmos wasn't their original captain so that's why he didn't show up until episode 4 or whenever.

yeah Castillo is the original captain until he gets murdered and they have that whole epic revenge episode

err....not castillo, I mean Rodriguez

Golden Triangle 2 parter the highlight of season 1, despite it's kind of cop-out ending. I always thought if they were going to make a sequel to the Mann movie, they could have cribbed it from that

Is it worth it watching the whole season? Or should I just skip to those episodes? Cause I watched a bit of ep 2 and it seemed kind of schlocky

it takes a lil bit to get going, I started enjoying it by episode 3. once they start having two-parters and the stakes get epic it gets more fun. The Ed O'Neill episode is weird, it feels like it belongs later in the season.

the two I noted have a notably darker tone than the rest of the season.

Golden Triangle is Olmo's star turn
Also who knew Josie Packard is in this? : )

I have never seen MV, but just learned that one of them had a pet alligator and want to give it a try. Studio could have added a gator or two to the marketing of this show if they had wanted to appeal to folks like me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awzOq_XKA_o

Tim Capello!

Cappello

I’m just starting with it but Tokyo Vice seems decent so far.

It’s interesting to me that there’s basically a whole subgenre of police procedurals indebted to The Wire. (Maybe Tokyo Vice will resolve the apparent dysfunction easily idk.) But Narcos Mexico was another one that really dug into the dysfunction.

Sorry, thread derail.

Just watched the Pilot for the first time since 1984. I loved this show so much as a 12 yo and thought Sonny Crocket was the coolest thing ever.

What a great show! Has any other TV show, let alone a network TV show, edited scenes with music so completely? The version of "All Night Long" by the latin band in the scene in the club when Tubbs meets Calderon is perfect. Philip Michael Thomas really great job with the contained rage in that scene. In fact, he's as much if not more of the star of the episode as Crocket.

er, as Johnson.

The "In the Air Tonight" sequence rules.

Side note, loved how Crockett and Tubbs p much never arrested anyone, they just killed them

That pilot pretty much nailed it, iirc the rest is really hit or miss.

Side note, loved how Crockett and Tubbs p much never arrested anyone, they just killed them

Not in the Pilot! Crockett convinces Tubbs to arrest Calderone instead of blow him away in cold blood. Calderone jumps bail (by seaplane, natch, it's Miami) at the v end. Maybe this is where they learned their lesson.

Kind of echoed in the beginning of the movie, where they let the bad guy get away, saying something like "we will get him next time."

Second episode very good as well - Ed O'Neil doing ersatz Popeye Doyle.

Maybe it's the SD, but I did find some of the show looked surprisingly cheap.

there are some good sequences later in the first season. the multi-part episodes are pretty dope

E3 Spoilers: Sonny and Rico, tracking down a gang of murderous drug dealers who killed one undercover cop and put the other in a coma, get their big break when they recover a staticky cassette tape recording of the shooting on which coma-cop post-shooting barely whispers a description of the gang. After huge deal of time and effort to clean up the recording, Sonny and Rico proceed to decipher this near-death rattle description while screaming down the highway at night in Sonny's convertible Ferrari.

Let us now write faux.MV plots

Strong disagree that this show peaked with the pilot! Surely it was the truly insane Sonny Burnett storyline - and generally some incredible high 80s set design / direction that makes it feel like a shampoo commercial - like, loving shots of swimming pools etc up there with Less Than Zero - I remember it being totally worthwhile up to the halfway point, think Don Johnson’s stubble reaching actual beard length is the cutoff point? Or did Tubbs grow a beard too? Also Jan Hammer stops doing the music so maybe that is when the magic fades.

Anywqy fuckin epic great show.

As with Moonlighting the early eps feel a bit doughty and still have some 70s DNA - the show flies when it jettisons all that and goes pure 80s sleek.

Where is this show streaming? It's not on Hulu or Netflix — if I want to watch it on Amazon Prime I'll have to pay, which I'm not going to do.

Never mind; I forgot to check Tubi, and of course it's there.

really wanted them to do a sequel to the Miami Vice movie and use the Golden Triangle two-parter from Season 1 was a jumping off point for the story.

*as

Just watched the Ed O'Neill episode — some surprising soundtrack choices (Devo, what I think was Al Jarreau) and pretty dark story-wise.

As with Moonlighting the early eps feel a bit doughty and still have some 70s DNA - the show flies when it jettisons all that and goes pure 80s sleek.

― meat and two vdgg (emsworth), Monday, July 10, 2023 9:52 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Just watched the Ed O'Neill episode — some surprising soundtrack choices (Devo, what I think was Al Jarreau) and pretty dark story-wise.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Tuesday, July 11, 2023 12:41 AM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is what I am finding fascinating - it feels cheap and 70s in some ways (some really obv soundstage parts they'd use CGI on now, a driving scene obv not in a real vehicle), but also pointing toward the nihilistic stories of later prestige tv. Really looking forward to some of the episodes with recurring characters and multi-part stories.

The music is absolutely critical, too. There are a ton of scenes that start without dialogue, just characters driving cars, piloting boats, or entering a new drug meetup, and the music just plays setting a critical vibe until the dialogue comes in, often over the music as it continues to play out. I don't remember another show where the music is so vital.

I had a mashup of the 'In the Air Tonight' scene + Ween's 'Demon Sweat' in my head for years and finally synced it up a little while back and was stunned by how well it works: http://www.youtubemultiplier.com/64ad50acdb839-miami-sweat.php

imagine if instead of "In the Air Tonight", they'd used Pac-Man Fever

You may say I'm a dreamer

Yeah my recollection is the show is trying to aim for more offbeat moments at the beginning, and only later does it really fully embrace the mood and true Miami vice vibe we all know and love.

I've only very glancingly scanned the thread in an effort to avoid spoilers, but is it possible that there hasn't been any discussion about the season three episode where Sonny goes full Will Graham and nearly loses his own mind while trying to get inside the head of a psychopath? Because goddamn was that episode ever excellent and maybe the craziest pre-Twin Peaks shit I've seen on broadcast television.

I remember that one, thought it was pretty silly and overdone...like Crockett really overplays it. Nice change up from the usual plots though

“I found out that Burnett and Crock-ett…are the same guy”

"It's over, Crockett. She's gone."

I have a maddening childhood memory of Miami Vice. I remember sitting down to watch this hip new show, and the theme music felt wrong. There was something off about it. And apparently I wasn't losing my mind, because the theme music from the first few episodes was mixed wrong:
https://miamivice.fandom.com/wiki/Miami_Vice_Theme

It didn't have the main melody, so it was just percussion and dugga-dugga-dug synthesisers.

I've always wondered if Vice was an influence on the 1990s wave of darker and edgier comic books, or if it was influenced by them, or by a common ancestor. Apart from the clothes and cars the other thing that made the show distinctive was the downbeat tone - Crockett's girl always ended up being shot in his arms by the villain, or the CIA swooped in and gave the chief villain immunity. It was a cartoonish attempt to emulate mature drama. And it was coincident with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns.

But on the other hand The Equalizer and even Magnum PI were downbeat at times, and Hill Street Blues predated them. The whole downbeat dark and edgy thing is something that young people seem to ignore about the 1980s. There's a perception that the 1970s was a massive bummer, but the 1980s was cocaine-fuelled happiness and big muscly men shooting things up. But it wasn't like that. The CIA were always the bad guys and there was always a corporate conspiracy. Even something like Robocop, which is ultra-80s, has a socialist undercurrent. Actual pure stereotypical 1980s media, like Cobra, is surprisingly rare.

Do I have anything else to say about Miami Vice? I have the impression that it was one of the things that killed off contemporary Doctor Who. Because until that point the production values of US television shows wasn't vastly superior to British TV. If you compare e.g. Jon Pertwee-era Who to Wonder Woman or Logan's Run the show doesn't look so bad. Even The A-Team didn't look particularly cinematic, and Airwolf and Battlestar Galactica had masses of stock footage.

Whereas Vice was convincingly, obviously superior on a technical level to anything the BBC could mount - especially on a regular basis, instead of just a one-off - and it just made our television look pathetic. And British commentators couldn't even dismiss it was trashy violent nonsense, because the writing was occasionally good. On a visual, cinematic level British TV didn't really catch up until the Matt Smith era in the mid-2010s.

Matt Zoller Seitz on the 40th anniversary of the pilot. Great and very informative read.

https://www.vulture.com/article/why-was-the-miami-vice-pilot-so-good.html

It really is amazing, as claimed in that piece, that the production of Vice literally changed the color scheme of Miami. I definitely remember a preponderance of tan in the early '80s, but it's possible that pastels had persisted in suburban areas of South Florida and so it didn't seem, in real time, like such an abrupt switchover when Miami reclaimed its pastels.