Miami Vice

Introduction: Vice Inc.

Introduction Vice Inc. 1 With its instantly recognizable rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tattat , rat-a-tat, DUM-dum-dum-dum of Jan Hammer’s Grammy Award–winning “Miami Vice Theme,” multiple Emmy and Golden Globe nominations and awards, high-profile cast, and groundbreaking visual style, Miami Vice helped to define 1980s popular culture. As Robert Arnett asks: “Is there a more iconic image of the mid-1980s than Don Johnson in Miami Vice?” (2006, 127). Perhaps the most concise summary of the show’s undeniable appeal can be found in David Thomson’s essential reference work, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: “Miami Vice is . . . full of ideas, often gorgeous, rarely dull, and hugely influential—not only Miami aped it; TV ads also picked up on Miami’s electric colors” (2004, 575). In this book I discuss Miami Vice’s aesthetic appeal as well as its engagement with issues of personal identity, crisis, and authenticity, and I explain how the show gives rise to issues of genre, auteurism, and media criticism. Miami Vice broke with conventions of the cop show drama in ways that transformed that durable genre into a distinctive form of noir television.1 As we will see, some of its episodes take the form of realist psychological narratives (“Back 2 Introduction in the World”), some are oneiric transformations of the ordinary into horror (“Shadow in the Dark”), and some are a mix of genres, imperfectly synthesized, perhaps, but with genuine inventiveness in their narratives of urban danger, undercover police work, political corruption, and ethical compromise. Its visual and musical appeal, cultural resonance, and topicality, foregrounding the economic, political, and cultural transformations of the eighties, made it absorbing entertainment in its own day; its exploration of social, moral, political, and philosophical issues also make it worth watching twenty-five years later. The show’s shock endings are staples of such successful contemporary series as The Sopranos, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and CSI: Miami. At its best, Miami Vice is that rarest of things, a text that opened up new ways to experience crime television itself. With Miami Vice, television crime drama and film noir coalesced against the dramatic background of Greater Miami to give rise to a TV milestone. With its unprecedented budget of $1.3 million per episode and Michael Mann (Manhunter, Heat, Collateral, Public Enemies) at the helm, Miami Vice brought feature film production values to prime-time television and became the most recognizable crime show of the decade. Skillfully foregrounding the challenges to Vice Division undercover detectives James “Sonny” Crockett (Don Johnson), Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), Gina Calabrese (Saundra Santiago), Trudy Joplin (Olivia Brown), Stan Switek (Michael Talbott), and Larry Zito (John Diehl), the show pioneered an uncompromising portrayal of the stresses and excesses of their lives and radically altered the profile of television crime drama. Miami Vice differed from the television crime dramas that prevailed in the 1970s and was a harbinger of things to come. As David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos, told Jim Lehrer in an interview in 2001, “I don’t think people cared about the visuals back in the 70s. The first show that I can recall—hour drama—that did care about the visual was Miami Vice—I think that made kind of a sea change.”2 3 Vice Inc. The ambiguous, conflicted aspects of the undercover detective ’s concealed identity and the permanent possibility of death as a consequence of exposure are indicative of a noir subtext found throughout the show’s five seasons. Enigmas of personal identity, encounters with femmes fatales, suspicions about compromised cops and corrupt politicians, and quests for authenticity and redemption—all themes typical of film noir—are among its central preoccupations, never far from the surface in its episodes. The inexplicable and ironic are often found in the details of plot and storyline, and happy endings and facile moral uplift are conspicuously absent. Typical of noir derivations from classic 1940s and 1950s sources, Miami Vice’s disillusionment is the complete opposite of the attitude found, for example, in Dragnet, the hugely popular police procedural of the 1950s and 1960s which, as R. Barton Palmer observes, David Chase, creator of The Sopranos: “I don’t think people cared about the visuals back in the 70s. The first show that I can recall—hour drama—that did care about the visual was Miami Vice—I think that made kind of...