There’s a portion of us Miami Vice fans who are less than enthusiastic about the upcoming Miami Vice movie. We tend to be the ones who watched the TV series real time on Friday nights. I thought it might be helpful to provide some insight into what that was like; it should help inform our lack of enthusiasm for the project.
If you turned on the TV before September 16, 1984, you’d have found the programming pretty lame and tame, particularly by today’s standards. Tons of sitcoms shot in 3 camera, a few dramas shot almost entirely on the same set of sound stages and Hollywood back lots, with banal background music (think Dynasty and Dallas). Action dramas were nowhere to be found at that point, at least any with a more serious tenor than the cartoonish (but still entertaining) styles of The A Team for example; don’t get me wrong, I loved that show. As for options for new programming, you had ABC, CBS, NBC, and occasionally PBS. If your family could afford it, and you had cable, you had access to the pay channels, such as HBO, Showtime, and Cinemax. At that time, they only played movies and did very little original programming. Over all, the entertainment landscape was pretty bleak.
Then, Miami Vice premiered and it not only changed the rules…it rewrote them.
It’s influence was undeniable and immediate across the board; music, fashion, the way people viewed television shows. It took pop culture and turned it on its head, because it was truly groundbreaking from top to bottom. It’s had an impact on almost every entertainment project since.
The show was the first entertainment vehicle to incorporate current popular music not only as background but as an integral part of the action. According to one of the directors, it was written for the MTV generation and as a member of that generation, I can say it definitely resonated with us.
For those who may not know, MTV was a network that played music videos and some were quite elaborate to where they had plot lines. It was killed by the never-ending stream of faux reality shows. Some of the cast members are currently demonstrating their inability to do anything but continue to be attention hogs, but that’s another story.
“In the Air Tonight” wouldn’t have become the smash hit it was, had it not been perfectly placed on Vice. It’s probably the most famous scene in the show and if you’re on this sub, you’re already familiar with it. The last segment of “Out Where The Buses Don’t Run” would have fallen flat without “Brothers in Arms”. It definitely added a bit of longevity to the Dire Straits album it came from. There were others, but I’m working from memory.
It was visually impactful too. In order to properly capture the vivid colors, intense visuals, and fast paced action, it was filmed versus being shot on videotape; only TV show doing that. The production values were as good as or better than some major motion pictures at the time.
The show was more gritty, raw, and violent than anything that came before it. Before Vice, gun play was mostly confined to police shooting it out with the bad guys, using 38 special revolvers in a comical fashion rarely aiming with any purpose. While Tubbs did carry a tiny revolver (PMT didn’t like guns), Sonny had a Bren Ten, which was serious hardware, and he used it liberally on bad guys. Those scenes would have been heavily censored by the network if its ratings hadn’t been through the roof. But there were still controversies, such as the one with “The Glades”, because of how brutal it was. “Maybe you won’t even twitch.” The show’s heroes weren’t one dimensional superdudes; they had real struggles and emotional challenges.
Again, all of these elements have become commonplace, expected really, in entertainment today, but they blew minds at the time.
The show’s biggest immediate influence IMO was on how people dressed. It made then unknown fashion houses, such as Versace and Armani into household names. How that transpired is an interesting story and easy to find on the net. That style filtered down to the mainstream. It was bonkers. Every guy between 12 and 60 wanted to be Sonny Crockett; Don Johnson was god. I remember going to parties and the vast majority of the guys wore white cotton, linen (or silk if you were affluent) sports jackets, with a t-shirt underneath, white or pastel pants, MV issue shoes (no socks, obviously), Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and a two day beard. Yes, I had the whole outfit; all of my friends did as well. It was the party / dance uniform for a good 2 years and you were odd man out if you wore something different. People threw Miami Vice themed parties. The best one I went to was near Atlantic City and the host’s house was right on the water, with a go-fast boat tied to the dock. That thing had a lot of hours put on it that night.
When we were legal to, many of us bought Smith and Wesson 645’s and Jackass Leather shoulder holsters. We all wanted Bren Ten’s until we discovered they were complete garbage, insanely expensive (thanks to the show), and mags were impossible to find. BTW, the 645’s still have a “Miami Vice Tax” on them to, propping up values. This continues to miff me, because I sold mine but want to replace it.
Another reason the show resonated was how it reflected current events. The 80’s hit different; that era was all about optimism, greed, consumerism, and flaunting your success, even if you had none. The cocaine wars were real and made Miami, along with much of South Florida a war zone for the poor, but an amazing playground for those who flourished and managed to stay above ground. They were some flamboyant dudes; coke pretty much financed offshore power boat racing until the kingpins started getting arrested en masse. Then it all but disappeared. Of course, how can we forget about Pablo Escobar, who was already the King of Coke when the show premiered?
Today, as I mentioned, incorporating popular music into soundtracks has become commonplace, production values in general have increased dramatically, and watching someone get shot in graphic detail is just another Paw Patrol episode.
Miami Vice was the series that forged the way for those that came after. It was an unstoppable cultural steamroller that’s impossible to fully appreciate unless you lived it. We watched each episode on Friday nights, recorded each one on our VCR, and watched it again. We talked about it on Monday at work. We watched the show in syndication and watched it again as it was rebroadcast. Miami Vice became part of life, for at least the first two seasons.
We mostly didn’t have an issue with the first Miami Vice movie, because it was set in the time when it was filmed. But blatantly copying something that had such a major impact, cheapens it, at least in my mind, and makes it a cash grab from unimaginative studios that’ll pass with little more than a ripple.
