In the mid-1980s, back when I was a single guy, I moved into an apartment on the beach in a small Florida town named Englewood. I spent a year living on the beach with no TV set. Instead I read 100 books, listened to a lot of music and swam nearly every day.
But after a year some friends of mine started telling me I really ought to go buy a TV set. There was this new TV show, they said, that was unlike anything they’d ever seen before. They couldn’t stop talking about it. Week after week they bugged me about it until finally I gave in and bought a TV set, just so I could watch this show they were all talking about.
Its name was Miami Vice. And like my friends, I quickly became addicted to it.
Premiering 35 years ago this September, Miami Vice ran for five seasons on NBC. It starred Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas as James “Sonny” Crockett and Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs, two South Florida cops whose duties involved wearing designer clothes, driving fast cars and going undercover to bust up drug cartels and gun-running operations, all to the beat of the hippest music the ‘80s could provide. They were backed up by a multicultural squad of two male goofballs who provided some comic relief and two female detectives whose usual assignment involved dressing up as prostitutes.
My favorite character, though, was their boss, Lt. Castillo, played with stone-faced super-cool by Edward James Olmos. He wore all black, and he was so terse he seemed to do all his acting with his eyes. His baleful glares were so convincing that a Chicago Tribune reporter found it remarkable that the actor could, in fact, laugh and smile. (He had once been a stand-up comic!)
Compared to long-running shows like Law & Order (20 seasons) or Murder, She Wrote (12 seasons), Miami Vice wasn’t on the air but for a minute. But it changed the landscape of all the television crime shows that followed it (and no, I don’t just mean Cop Rock). Its greatest impact, though, was that it changed the physical landscape of South Florida.
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There’s a legend that Miami Vice started with a two-word concept written on a napkin by NBC programming wunderkind Brandon Tartikoff: “MTV cops.” The truth, as usual, is more complicated.
The idea actually sprang from the fertile mind of Anthony Yerkovich, who spent three years as a writer and producer on the popular police procedural show Hill Street Blues. His imagination had been fired by reading a story in the Wall Street Journal that mentioned one startling fact: One-third of all unreported income in the United States moved through South Florida.
Yerkovich’s first impression: “That must be a misprint.” He did the math and came to an astounding conclusion: “That means one-half of 1 percent of the nation’s population is responsible for 20 percent of the under-the-table money. That is fascinating. Statistically, that’s a 40-to-1 disparity. Any area that generates 40 times more unreported cash than the rest of the country is worth writing about.”
Meanwhile, he discovered, forfeiture laws allow police agencies to confiscate property that had been used in crimes—such as expensive cars, clothes and boats—and then reuse them in stopping other crimes.
What if, he thought, the forfeiture laws allowed the cops in Miami to go undercover and use the Ferraris and Lamborghinis that the upper echelon drug dealers drove, the Armani jackets and Ferragamo shoes they wore, the Donzi speedboats they piloted while bringing in cocaine?
The two-hour pilot didn’t look like anything that had ever been on TV before. Prior cop shows had a muddy color palette befitting their grim and gritty subject matter, and a backdrop on one show looked much like the backdrop on another. They were interchangeable. Not Miami Vice. This new show was all bright colors and gleaming surfaces, reflecting the dictum of executive producer Michael Mann: “No earth tones.”
In the first five minutes of the show Crockett’s partner, played by a painfully young Jimmy Smits, gets blown up by a car bomb. Crockett winds up working with a New York cop—Tubbs—to track down the ruthless Colombian drug kingpin who killed both Smits and Tubbs’ brother. Toward the end of the episode, there is an extended sequence where the two are driving a Ferrari through the twilight to meet with their target. As they cruise along the neon-lit asphalt without talking, the soundtrack plays Phil Collins’ haunting “In the Air Tonight.” It seemed like a music video had somehow wandered into a drama about guns and drugs—“MTV Cops” indeed.
This new show was all bright colors and gleaming surfaces, reflecting the dictum of executive producer Michael Mann: “No earth tones.”
Critics raved about it, and it began to build a hip, young audience that copied its fashion sense, even to the point of imitating Johnson’s three-day stubble. Johnson was the show’s break-out star. That became evident when the crew was shooting a scene on the water, far from shore, recalled Elayne Schmidt, who now produces Hallmark Channel romantic comedies, but started her career as an assistant to the producers.
The camera crew was on one boat, Schmidt said, and Johnson on the other. Suddenly, she said, a third boat appeared, one full of female fans who kept circling and calling Johnson’s name.
“Those girls drove by for an hour calling to Don,” Schmidt said. “We had to call the Florida Marine Patrol to shoo them away so we could continue shooting.”
The show’s growing popularity attracted a list of guest stars that is both impressive and somewhat bizarre. To name a few, we saw Pam Grier as Tubbs’ old flame; Willie Nelson as a Texas Ranger; Eartha Kitt as a Santeria priestess; Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy as a mercenary; Melanie Griffith as a madam; Bill Russell as a crooked judge; and James Brown as a superstar singer/UFO cult leader who might also be a government agent or maybe just a hallucination (it’s complicated).
It’s fun, too, to look back now and see how many future stars showed up: Bruce Willis as a smirking arms dealer; Ed O’Neill as an FBI agent; Wesley Snipes as a drug-dealing pimp; Stanley Tucci as a mobster; Viggo Mortensen as a rookie cop; Helena Bonham Carter as a pill-popping ER doctor; and Michael Richards as a loan shark who somehow manages to intimidate Bill Russell.
The writing on the show could be uneven. One episode, “The Cows of October,” revolved around a Cuban spy pursuing a canister of champion bull semen. A two-parter, “Mirror Image” and “Hostile Takeover,” gave Crockett a case of amnesia that left him thinking he really was the drug dealer he pretended to be because sure, that’s completely realistic, right? On the other hand, one called “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run,” starring Bruce McGill—aka “D-Day” from Animal House—as a deranged ex-cop was later ranked by TV Guide as one of the 100 best television episodes of all time.
But people weren’t watching Miami Vice for the plots. They were watching it for the attitude, the visuals, the music—the feeling it gave them.
Music was so crucial to the show that at one point, a song recorded by the Eagles’ Glenn Frey inspired Mann to commission a script based on it. Both the song and the episode were titled “Smuggler’s Blues,” and not only was Frey’s song featured on the soundtrack, but Frey himself made his acting debut playing a pilot who helps Crockett and Tubbs,.
Mann told the New York Times in 1985 that what set the show apart is that his crew treated each episode as if it were a movie, “so we try to do the same cinematics in terms of art direction, editing and use of music that I would put into a feature film.” He said they tried to create ”a universe, a consistent way of seeing Miami.”
The main thing Schmidt remembers now, she told me, is what a lot of hard work it was.
“It was crazy,” she said. “We worked seven days a week, 18 hours a day.” A lot of that was because Mann “was all about the look of the show….Every single piece (shot) Michael Mann had to have a say on it.”
“If the series didn’t reinvent TV,” critic Elvis Mitchell wrote in Rolling Stone, “then it at least gave the medium total reconstructive facial surgery.”
What was even more interesting is what Miami Vice did to Miami.
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Miami Vice cost a little more than the average TV show because every episode was filmed on location, the better to provide a proper tropical setting for the action. Finding locations provided to be pretty easy because any building the producers wanted to use was generally available.
At the time, Miami was anything but glamorous. The place was still reeling from the Mariel boatlift, a race riot, an influx of Haitian refugees, and the rise of the trigger-happy cocaine cowboys spraying each other with bullets while speeding down I-95. The murder rate was so high the medical examiner rented a refrigerator truck from Ryder to hold the overflow of corpses. Miami Beach held nothing but decaying hotels full of elderly people trying to eke out an existence on a fixed income and avoid the junkies out to mug them.
Just three years before the show’s premiere, Time magazine ran a cover story that declared Miami to be “Paradise Lost.” The story included this sentence: “An epidemic of violent crime, a plague of illicit drugs and a tidal wave of refugees have slammed into South Florida with the destructive power of a hurricane.”
The Time cover story nearly killed Miami tourism because people were afraid to visit South Florida. Humorist Dave Barry wrote a story about this for the Miami Herald’s Sunday “Tropic,” magazine. To promote the story, the paper gave out bumper stickers that said: “Come Back to Miami—We Weren’t Shooting At YOU.”
Then, nine months prior to Vice’s debut, the over-the-top gangster flick Scarface depicted a Miami dominated by Al Pacino playing a coke-snorting Cuban who gunned down everyone in sight with his “little friend.”
Local officials were wary of the new drug-oriented TV show, to the point of skipping a preview showing. They feared it would be another Scarface. They were so wrong.
The Magic City suddenly had its mojo back. The number of TV commercials being shot in Miami doubled. Joan Didion showed up to research a book on the city. The Chicago Tribune devoted an entire travel section to the city…
Within a year after the pilot aired, the Miami Herald was touting the virtues of Vice: “The national perception of Miami has markedly changed, and though the triple stigmas of crime and drugs and refuges have not vanished, they have been overwhelmed by visions of fast Porsches and neon nightclubs and ripe young flesh on the beach.”
The Magic City suddenly had its mojo back. The number of TV commercials being shot in Miami doubled. Joan Didion showed up to research a book on the city. The Chicago Tribune devoted an entire travel section to the city, with the pun-ishing headline “Sun Over Miami.”
The spokesman for the city’s tourism council knew the reason. It was the attention that Vice’s directors and producers paid to the look of the show.
“In other shoot-em-ups,” he told the Herald, “the background is treated only in the most incidental way. Here, the background is treated as a co-star.”
Or as Dave Barry put it: “Miami Vice made Miami look cool.”
And then the show that changed the look of television changed the look of its home city, too.
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The show’s influence started with the opening credits, where Jan Hammer’s electronic rat-a-tat theme played over scenes of prancing flamingoes and muscular jai alai players.
One eye-catching shot showed a new condominium tower, the Atlantis, which had a hole in the middle of the building where there was a palm tree and a red spiral staircase. That fleeting glimpse of a distinctive building made its architectural firm, Arquitectonica, into a hot property.
The greater miracle is what it did with the buildings that didn’t look so unusual, at least at first.
Because of Mann’s attention to detail, each shot required a tremendous amount of “set dressing,” Schmidt, said. That was particularly true in South Beach.
“South Beach had a lot of hotels that were closed or just in disrepair,” she recalled. “I was shocked that (the owners) had let the properties get so run down.”
The production team often didn’t bother with permits—no one was around to object to them filming. They would swoop in and turn one of the decrepit places into a glitzy nightclub or an elegant ballroom. They would paint over the dark and dingy walls, turning them blue and yellow and aqua, freshening up the look and making architectural details suddenly pop out. Bikini-clad models filled the empty hotel swimming pools. Suddenly, everything looked colorful and attractive.
Activists from the Miami Design Preservation League had been lobbying for years for the Miami Beach to refurbish its historic Art Deco hotels. Miami Vice helped them achieve their goal.
“The show helped save South Beach by broadcasting the architectural charms of its long-neglected Deco hotels to millions around the globe at a time when city fathers wanted nothing more than to tear it all down for condos,” the Herald wrote 30 years later.
In a way, Miami Vice became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Remember all that unreported income Yerkovich read about? Seeing the version of Miami depicted on the show gave some investors ideas about where to spend all their ill-gotten gains.
The producers of Miami Vice had pulled off the Florida dream: They told a lie that came true.
Soon the phony nightclubs and swank hotels that the show’s designers created in all those the run-down buildings actually began popping up in real life, like a Potemkin village turned 3D. South Beach became a sought-after address, a place to find the beautiful people. The place has never gone back to its old look. Miami and Miami Beach have continued to enthrall visitors with their international appeal and glitz.
The producers of Miami Vice had pulled off the Florida dream: They told a lie that came true. To Schmidt, that’s the show’s lasting legacy. The terse dialogue, questionable plots and music-video scenarios have faded away, as have the famous fashions.
“Those pastel shirts aren’t going to last forever, but what happened to Miami Beach will,” she said. In fact, she noted, it’s become so popular that the pendulum has swung the other way. “Now,” she said, “you can’t afford to shoot there.”
