Revisiting 'Miami Vice' | Broad Street Review

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Enough is enough

But by the end of the five-season run of the series, both Crockett and Tubbs think otherwise. Thoroughly disillusioned, disgusted, and discouraged, they toss their badges into the dust at Castillo's feet and leave Miami, Tubbs for his native New York, Crockett for "parts south," knowing that the drugs will continue to roll in, the dealers and politicians and businessmen will continue to get rich, and the victims will continue to die.

More than just the visual style or the cool soundtrack, it's that sense of alienation, of existential heroism in the face of utter futility, that hit home back in 1984. In a way that few if any TV shows had ever done before, Miami Vice depicted a chaotic universe in which the only moral absolutes were those created and maintained by its inhabitants. Nothing new these days, after The Sopranos and The Wire and Breaking Bad, but a radically new and dangerous concept for television back in 1984. Michael Mann, Anthony Yerkovich, and the other creative minds behind Vice laid the groundwork for the David Chases and Vince Gilligans who followed.

Miami Vice took the TV policier in an entirely new direction, blending the clean, well-lighted places of 1980s Miami with the dark sensibilities of 1940s film noir, exposing a bleak undercurrent of corruption and violence. Even during Vice's network run, many critics were dazzled by its seductive veneer of conspicuous-consumption excess, the Ferraris and Versace clothes and Arquitectonica houses, and couldn’t see past it, thinking that the glitz and glamour was all there was. They were wrong.

In fairness, it was an easy mistake to make. It was hard not to be distracted by the look of Vice, because visually and stylistically, nothing quite like it had ever been seen before on network TV. Executive producer Michael Mann approached television from a cinematic perspective, not just in the obvious aspects of production design such as wardrobe, sets, and props, but at the deepest level of the cinematography, the lighting of scenes, framing of shots, and editing of sequences.

Stop! Look! Listen!

And of course, the music. The legendary "MTV cops" note from NBC network executive Brandon Tartikoff was partly a joke, partly a convenient shorthand, but there's no denying the importance of music to Miami Vice. Mann used music not to dictate but rather to both complement and counterpoint the narrative, in ways that sometimes suggested new interpretive depths in seemingly familiar songs.

Also often disregarded is Vice's original music, composed and performed by noted jazz musician Jan Hammer. Consistent with Mann's insistence on a feature-filmic approach, every week Hammer composed an original soundtrack for each episode from scratch — something unheard of in an age when TV shows were generally scored from a stock music library.

In another filmic technique previously anathema to television, Vice often featured lengthy sequences built solely on visuals and music, without any dialogue at all. A frequent criticism of television drama used to be that it was nothing more than "radio with pictures": You could follow the story perfectly well without ever looking at the screen. Thanks to Miami Vice, that's no longer true with most of TV's best shows today — perhaps one of Vice's most significant and yet overlooked innovations.

Especially if you're a fan of Breaking Bad, The Wire, True Detective, or pretty much any other prominent contemporary crime shows, you'll find it both enlightening and entertaining to revisit — or discover — Miami Vice.