Miami Vice Season 4 - The Season That Nearly Killed The Show | Retrowatch

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Season 4 of "Miami Vice" was not shaped by vision. It was shaped by panic.

By the time production began in the summer of 1987, the show that had reinvented American television was operating without a safety net. Ratings had collapsed from a Top 10 fixture to 26th place. The budget had been slashed. The writers' room had turned over almost entirely. Michael Mann was gone. Jan Hammer was rationed. And NBC's mandate was as simple as it was impossible: Fix it, without breaking it further.

What followed was "Miami Vice" at its most contradictory: Darker than Season 1, lighter than Season 3, more grounded than either, and stranger than all of them combined. Bull semen heists. Cryogenically frozen reggae legends floating across Biscayne Bay. An alien abduction storyline that predated "The X-Files" by seven years. And Sonny Crockett, framed, married, widowed, amnesiac, carrying a season that had quietly turned the ensemble into wallpaper.

But even here, in the lowest chapter of the show's run, the spark hadn't fully died. Julia Roberts. Chris Rock. Ben Stiller. Brian Dennehy as a televangelist. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa in one of the season's finest hours. And "Mirror Image", the season finale that used its high concept to ask the question the entire series had been circling since 1984. Who is Sonny Crockett, really?

Season 4 doesn't fail cleanly. It fails while trying everything at once. And that makes it the most fascinating chapter Miami Vice ever produced.

Plus: a breakdown of Season 4's five essential episodes, from "Death and the Lady" to the amnesia cliffhanger that carried into Season 5.

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This is "Miami Vice" adrift. And still, occasionally, magnificent.

• 00:00 - Intro
• 01:26 - The Beginning Of The End
• 05:17 - Rescuing "Miami Vice"
• 09:28 - Season 4: Identity Lost
• 13:51 - Top 5
• 19:29 - Outro