![]() And many of them did, including creator Anthony Yerkovich, who made Michael Mann the show’s executive producer just a few episodes into the first season. While they had the behind-the-scenes talent to challenge television’s preconceived notions of what a cop drama could be, the more acclaim the show received the more offers its producers and writers were being made to move on. Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip: Like so many other series before and after it, *Miami Vice’*s success was, creatively, a double-edged sword. But of all the show’s non-Crockett members, it’s the goofy (in a get-stuff-done kind of way) duo of Switek and Zito who-at least in the early seasons-offer up *Miami Vice’*s most reliable bits of levity. like spending most of their time working undercover as prostitutes. Which isn’t to say that other members of the Vice squad don’t get their own time to shine: Tubbs’ love-hate relationship with Miami led to a number of New York City-centric storylines (including the Season 2 opener, “The Prodigal Son,” which has Crockett and Tubbs following a Colombian cartel to New York) Castillo’s past gig as a DEA agent working in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle meant a couple of one-off episodes delving into his backstory (with mixed results) and as the team’s female members, both Gina and Trudy (more so the latter) dealt with issues that their male counterparts never had to face. Really, who can blame audiences for being entranced by a college-football-star-turned-undercover-detective who drives a Ferrari, lives on a boat, owns a pet alligator, and marries a rock star? Whether that was always the point doesn’t really matter, as it didn’t take long for viewers (or the show’s producers) to realize that Don Johnson was the series’ breakout star-and its storylines were driven accordingly. For those who want to consume it at an even more leisurely pace, there’s not a lot of "To Be Continued" within the world of Miami Vice, so skipping an episode here or there (more on that later) or watching it in spurts won’t leave you confused about what’s going on in any given episode.īest Character to Follow: As much as it has all the trappings of a buddy cop and/or an ensemble cop show, Miami Vice is all about Sonny Crockett. Up that total to three episodes on the weekends, and you’re down to about six weeks. Make it a two-episode-per-night thing seven nights a week and you’re looking at roughly two months of Miami Vice in your future. Even the most committed of viewers are going to need to dedicate some serious time to the show. ![]() Time Requirements: With more than a 100 hours of viewing to be had, watching all of Miami Vice is not going to happen in a weekend. A marriage of storytelling and style, the show aimed to make everything look "cool." Often referred to as a cop show for the MTV generation, Miami Vice didn’t look like anything else that was on network television at the time. ![]() And that’s specifically because Miami Vice invented it back in 1984. Now, going back to that whole "groundbreaking" thing: If the above summary doesn’t sound like a particularly fresh approach to a cop drama, that’s because it’s not. Crockett, too, is searching for the same man, who in the pilot plants a car bomb that kills Crockett’s friend and partner, Eddie Rivera (played by a fresh-faced Jimmy Smits, in his first-ever role). Eschewing the Hollywood standard of shooting on sound stages, partly as way to keep everything under the producers’ control, Miami Vice was filmed on location in South Florida, at a time when Miami and Miami Beach looked more like Scarface than what the Kardashians who now "take" the city seem to see.Īiding Crockett in his police work is Detective Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), a former NYPD detective who makes his way down to Miami (also undercover, though unbeknownst to anyone) to find a criminal known as Calderone, a Colombian cartel leader who recently murdered Tubbs’ brother, a fellow NYPD detective. But the series, which was created by Hill Street Blues writer/producer Anthony Yerkovich and executive produced by future four-time Oscar nominee Michael Mann, is anything but laughable. In the case of the small-screen police procedural, it's necessary to go all the way back to Miami Vice.įor those who did not watch the gritty cop drama during its original run, the show has become a punch line used when joking about the overindulgence of the 1980s. And while there are a handful of contemporary TV series that are deserving of that descriptor- House of Cards, for what it has done for streaming entertainment, would be one example-in order to discover the most truly groundbreaking television, it’s often essential to head back into the past. The term "groundbreaking," in reference to television series, has been so overused (and frequently misused) over the decades that it has largely lost its meaning.
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