Miami Vice (Wiley-Blackwell Series in Film and Television)

Miami Vice

Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television Series Editors: Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker

Experienced media studies teachers know that real breakthroughs in the classroom are often triggered by texts that an austere notion of the canon would disqualify. Unlike other short book series, Wiley-Blackwell Studies in Film and Television works from a broad field of prospective film and television programs, selected less for their adherence to definitions of “art” than for their resonance with audiences. From Top Hat to Hairspray, from early sitcoms to contemporary forensic dramas, the series encompasses a range of film and television material that reflects diverse genres, forms, styles and periods. The texts explored here are known and recognized worldwide for their ability to generate discussion and debate about evolving media industries as well as, crucially, representations and conceptualizations of gender, class, citizenship, race, consumerism, and capitalism, and other facets of identity and experience. This series is designed to communicate these themes clearly and effectively to media studies students at all levels while also introducing groundbreaking scholarship of the very highest caliber. These are the films and shows we really want to watch, the new “teachable canon” of alternative classics that range from silent film to CSI.

MIAMI VICE JAMES LYONS

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2010 © 2010 James Lyons Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of James Lyons to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lyons, James. Miami vice / James Lyons. p. cm. – (Wiley-Blackwell studies in film and television) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-7811-2 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-7810-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Miami vice (Television program) I. Title. PN1992.77.M525L96 2010 741.45¢72–dc22 2009033120 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 10.5/13pt Minion by SPi Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Singapore 001

2010

Contents

Acknowledgments

vi

Introduction

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1. I Want My MTV Cops: Miami Vice as Television Commodity

7

2. Guns, Glitter, and Glamor: Styling the Show

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3. Losing the Plot? Storytelling in Miami Vice

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4. Risky Business: The Cultural Politics of Vice

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Afterword

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Broadcast Date Notes

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Notes

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Bibliography

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Index

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank colleagues in the Department of English, University of Exeter, the Institute of Film Studies, University of Nottingham, and at the Screen Studies Conference in Glasgow for offering receptive audiences and providing generous feedback on many of the ideas for this book. Thanks in particular to Steve Neale, Helen Hanson, Dan North, and Paul Grainge for vital observations and encouragement at different points. I am grateful to the University of Exeter and to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the period of leave required to complete this book. I am indebted to my editors, Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker, for supporting my initial proposal for the book, and for their numerous perceptive comments on my work. My thanks also to Jayne Fargnoli and Margot Morse at Wiley-Blackwell for their enthusiasm, expertise, and patience. This book has been completed in eventful personal circumstances, and it would not have been possible without the support of my family. A special acknowledgment of gratitude goes to Pam and Melvyn Goldstein, and to Jocelyn Avigad for making the trip out west on numerous occasions, and for cheerfully allowing themselves to be exhausted by Rebecca and, latterly, Austin. My parents, Trevor and Elizabeth Lyons, have also been wonderfully doting grandparents. Above all, I would like to express love and thanks to my wife Karen.

Introduction

The Premise New York cop Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) travels to Miami to track down Esteban Calderone (Miguel Piñero), the Colombian drug lord responsible for the death of his brother Rafael. Calderone is already under investigation by the Miami-Dade police department’s organized crime bureau vice unit (aka Miami Vice). The lead investigator is James “Sonny” Crockett (Don Johnson), who loses his partner Eddie Rivera (Jimmy Smits) in a car bomb. Tubbs, masquerading initially as his dead brother Rafael, is cajoled into working with Crockett by bureau Lieutenant Lou Rodriguez (Gregory Sierra). Rodriguez is subsequently shot dead and replaced by Lieutenant Martin Castillo (Edward James Olmos). In contrast to the sharp-suited Tubbs, Crockett adopts an unshaven, fashionably disheveled appearance, part of his disguise as drug runner Sonny Burnett. A former college football star and a Vietnam vet, Crockett is recently separated from his wife and child and lives undercover on his boat, The St Vitus Dance, together with his pet alligator, Elvis. The other key members of the vice bureau are detective pairings Gina Calabrese (Saundra Santiago) and Trudy Joplin (Olivia Brown), and Stan Switek (Michael Talbott) and Larry Zito (John Diehl), who work principally to support investigations led by Crockett and Tubbs. Early episodes also

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include Lester Kosko (Julio Oscar Mechoso) as a surveillance and electronics expert. The major recurring characters are Izzy Moreno (Martin Ferraro) and Neville “Noogie” Lamont (Charlie Barnett) as small-time crooks/conmen/informers. Taking advantage of a law that allows bureau officers to appropriate seized criminal possessions, Crockett and Tubbs (the latter undercover as Rico Cooper) furnish themselves with the fast car and designer attire necessary to mix in wealthy crime circles.“Burnett” and “Cooper,” aided by knowledge gleaned from informants, move through the criminal underworld, working to inveigle traffickers of vice (drugs, arms, prostitution) into incriminating themselves, thus effecting seizures and arrests. Gina and Trudy also undertake undercover work, most typically as prostitutes, gaining the trust of victims and felons.

Miami Vice debuted on US television in September 1984, supported by a trailer boasting that “the cop show has just graduated to the 1980s.” Trailers are by design exercises in hubris, but, at least on this occasion, the show lived up to the hype; few shows have updated so radically the look and sound of broadcast television in the way that Miami Vice did in its first season on NBC. Additionally, few shows have been identified more closely with the spirit of the decade; Miami Vice is an iconic product of the 1980s, as much a part of the cultural fabric of the period as the Rubik’s cube, Pac-Man, E.T., or Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Miami Vice caught the popular imagination to become a cultural phenomenon, making stars out of lead actors Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, and exerting a considerable influence on men’s fashion and apparel, as the “Miami Vice look” stretched from couture to mainstream trends in fabrics, cuts, and colors, to the sales of Ray-Ban sunglasses and the sporting of “designer stubble.” The show also impacted upon popular music, with recordbreaking best-selling TV soundtrack albums, and with songs featured on the show invariably storming to the top of the charts. Such was the show’s allure that a guest spot in an episode became a coveted way for the rich and famous to showcase their own fashionable status.

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Moreover, thrust into the spotlight, the city of Miami felt the consequences of its identity for the staging of both high glitz and gun battles, and the televised image of the American south in the guise of a chic cosmopolitan city eclipsed the more familiar rural clichés perpetuated by the likes of The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–85). Miami Vice’s emblematic status continues to be evoked in pop culture, lovingly lampooned in more recent shows such as Friends, Will and Grace, and The Simpsons, not to mention meticulously reimagined in the popular videogame Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002), which takes players back to the ultra-violent, neon-lit streets of Miami circa 1985, guided by Lance Vance, voiced by none other than Philip Michael Thomas. In contrast, its standing as a landmark TV show has been rather neglected. To date, academic work on Miami Vice has tended to locate it within the long history of the police procedural genre, as a formative work in the career of Michael Mann, or, reflecting critical trends at the time of its original transmission, in relation to theories of postmodernism.1 The show has been sidelined in influential discussions of 1980s “quality television,” due in large part to its apparent lack of adherence to the “serious” and “literary” virtues of counterparts such as Hill Street Blues and St Elsewhere.2 Where it has been discussed in relation to major changes in industry production, it has played a relatively minor illustrative role, while nevertheless suggesting its potential to offer scope for a more thorough and extensive examination.3 Like the capricious 1980s fashions it showcased, Miami Vice has often been regarded as a show whose defining qualities are as fleeting as they are striking. This book offers a wide-ranging study that moves between textual, industrial, and socio-cultural analyses of Miami Vice’s essential features, in so doing setting out the basis for understanding it as a defining show of its era. The 1980s were a transitional decade for television, as the medium entered a new phase of cable, satellite, and digital broadcasting, and Miami Vice was at the forefront of strategies to adapt to the changing political economy of the entertainment industry. New eras open up fresh artistic challenges and possibilities, and Miami Vice bears close scrutiny for its spectacular response to the opportunities of its particular media moment.

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The first chapter sets out the context for Miami Vice’s production, examining the range of creative and commercial influences that shaped its identity as a premium television commodity. Horace Newcomb notes that “television-making [is] a complex process of cultural, industrial, economic, aesthetic, and individual concerns,” and the development of Miami Vice illuminates the dynamics of network production at a critical point, as broadcasters sought to adjust to the challenges of an increasingly competitive and fragmenting media marketplace.4 The chapter offers an analysis of the way in which Miami Vice presaged the move to thinking of programming as “content” – as cross-platform audio-visual commodities – which emerged as the industrial-aesthetic logic of this momentous period of reorganization for the broadcasting landscape. Chapters 2 and 3 look at how that logic is made manifest at the level of the show’s formal characteristics, examining in turn Miami Vice’s approach to style and narrative structure. As the chapters make clear, both are best understood through a careful consideration of the commercial imperatives that helped to shape their aesthetic organization. John Thornton Caldwell argues persuasively that distinctive changes in the role of style on network television in the 1980s were a result of shifts in “the industry’s mode of production, in programming practice, in the audience and its expectations,” and in Miami Vice’s case not all commentators were convinced that this represented a change for the better.5 Chapter 2 considers the controversy that surrounded Miami Vice’s “excessive” style, and counters such criticism by looking carefully at its strategies for visual expression, demonstrating their general adherence to the norms of television aesthetics, but also pointing out the ways in which the show’s innovations sought to test the limits of the medium’s compositional and chromatic capabilities. Rather than attribute this to “auteurist” extravagance, the chapter points to the commercial sense of such strategies in the context of competing audio-visual technologies. Chapter 3 turns its attention to Miami Vice’s narrative form. If critics have tended to fixate on the show’s style, they have often neglected to detail its approach to plot and story, and the chapter subjects these aspects of the show to their first sustained examination. This carefully

INTRODUCTION

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contextualized assessment of Miami Vice’s storytelling seeks to demonstrate how and why the show changed in ways that are rather at odds with common perceptions of it, as it sought to adapt to wildly fluctuating degrees of commercial and critical success, creative overhaul, and to the variable nature of its competition. Like chapter 2, this chapter offers a sense of the show’s formal evolution across its five seasons, seeking to remedy the tendency of existing work to generate a rather static portrayal of its storyworld. The final chapter considers Miami Vice’s relationship to a series of major preoccupations in 1980s American culture, positioning the show in terms of cultural ideologies. The show’s consistent fascination with performance and sensation and with games and their players comes together in the thrill of the “risk,” which serves as the apposite motif for an era that ushered in the prepotency of the “deal,” cut by traders stretching from Wall Street to Bogotá. Miami Vice as television commodity was wrought from the increasingly frenzied climate of high-stakes corporate takeovers, and the chapter looks at the ways in which the show can be seen to dramatically animate this “risk culture” of free market capitalism, uniting cops and criminals under its governing logic. No other fictional TV show of the era so evocatively captured the sensation and sensibility of this ethos of risk. Taken together, these chapters offer a detailed contextualization of Miami Vice, situating the show within an institutional history that extends and complicates existing perceptions of it. In particular, the book departs from work that searches for the stylistic and thematic continuities in the show to affirm it as a manifestation of Michael Mann’s “sensibility” and “vision.” Mann was executive producer on the show, and, as the following chapters indicate, had a major role in its construction. But whereas journalistic auteurism serves largely to isolate works from the complex and often conflicting commercial contexts that determine their production, this book seeks to make apparent their role in the process.6 Indeed, as Richard Maltby points out, “by the 1980s, authorship in Hollywood had become a commercially beneficial fiction,” a fact which extended to television production, where “heavyweight film directors now were self-consciously hyped.”7 Mann’s status as Miami Vice’s “auteur” needs to be understood as a

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consequence of, not removed from, the commercial impulses of 1980s broadcast television, while at the same time recognizing, as Maltby cautions, that “the multiple logics and intentions that continue to impinge on the process of production ensure that authorship remains an inadequate explanation.”8 In the pages that follow I seek to demonstrate the confluence of forces involved in creating this pivotal network show, fashioned from the forces reconfiguring the aesthetic, commercial, and ideological coordinates of broadcasting in this watershed decade for the medium; one that remade established certainties regarding the “business” of television in ways that are still being felt today.

Chapter 1

I Want My MTV Cops Miami Vice as Television Commodity

In September 1985 Miami Vice stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas made the cover of Time magazine, accompanied by the headline “Cool Cops, Hot Show.” Time typically reserves its cover for items it wants to suggest are of major significance within American culture, and this was the first time that the stars of a television show had appeared since August 1980, when the caption “Whodunit?” accompanied Dallas star Larry Hagman posed as the dastardly J. R. Ewing. The season-ending episode of Dallas in March 1980 had set up the mystery of “Who Shot J.R.?,” a question that gripped over 300 million viewers worldwide, and spawned T-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, and a summer of frenzied media speculation. While Miami Vice hadn’t produced a superlative cliff-hanger to rival Dallas, its appearance on Time’s cover nevertheless implied that it too had attained the status of a cultural phenomenon, and warranted the magazine’s showcase treatment. The accompanying article made this clear, claiming that the show was transforming the look and sound of television, and reportedly demonstrating to “TV executives that there are alternatives to the cookie-cutter blandness of most network fare.”1 The article began by noting what it saw as Miami Vice’s arresting visual style, innovative use of rock music, and beautiful on-location shooting, but pointed also to the stunning success of its soundtrack album, the influence of the show’s stars on trends in men’s fashion, and its impact on the profile of the city of Miami. All in all, Time concluded, “a year after its debut on NBC, Miami Vice, TV’s hottest and hippest new cop show, is reaching a high sizzle.”

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This was, no doubt, the kind of coverage NBC had only dreamed about when it commissioned Anthony Yerkovich to write a pilot script for the show. The result of discussions between NBC and Universal-TV executives about a new cop show, Yerkovich’s initial premise, as outlined in the script “Gold Coast,” was a combination of the derivative and the innovative; in part a clear example of what Todd Gitlin terms the “recombinant” logic of network television, which seeks to rework “elements from proven successes.”2 The central pairing of streetwise, plainclothes detectives Crockett and Tubbs, patrolling the city in a flamboyant car, owed much to Starsky and Hutch (1975–9), a show on which Yerkovich had served as a writer. Less recognized was the modeling of Crockett and Tubbs on Hill Street Blues (1981–7) police officers Bobby Hill and Andy Renko. Gunned down at the end of the pilot episode, but revived after audience testing revealed their popularity, Hill and Renko, a pairing of “the earnest responsible black and the self-doubting, wisecracking southern racist farmboy” represented a key example of what would become one of 1980s Hollywood’s most successful screen relationships, namely that between black and white “buddies.”3 By no means new (one could cite The Defiant Ones (1958), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Bill Cosby’s breakthrough comedy series I Spy (1965–8) as notable forerunners), the “biracial buddy” relationship was at the heart of some of the decade’s top box-office hits, including Stir Crazy (1980), Beverly Hills Cop (1984), Lethal Weapon (1987), and Die Hard (1988), not to mention many of their various high-grossing sequels. 48 Hrs. (1983), starring Nick Nolte as hard-drinking, chain-smoking, southern cop Jack Cates, and Eddie Murphy as smooth-talking, expensively suited New Yorker Reggie Hammond, was another influence on Miami Vice. Nolte was by all accounts the studio executives’ ideal for the casting of Sonny Crockett.4 Where Miami Vice differed from many, if not most, of its biracial buddy counterparts was in the complete lack of racial tension between buddies. Only briefly in the pilot episode, when Crockett asks Tubbs if he is “down here working on your tan” does the show replicate the racist wisecracking of 48 Hrs., and this facet of Crockett was quickly written out of his characterization. Moreover, the only other time

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when Tubbs’s identity as a black man is addressed in the dialogue is in the season four episode “Indian Wars,” as Tubbs tells a Native American that his people “do not have a monopoly on suffering”; a point made while undercover as a college professor, which rather ambiguously serves to make his comment part of his performance. In eschewing almost entirely the issue of black racial identity (Trudy Joplin’s identity as a black woman also passes entirely without comment), Miami Vice undoubtedly perpetuates what Ed Guerrero cites as the propensity of the buddy formula to erase “a black collective consciousness and sense of politics.”5 However, at the same time the show repeatedly represents Tubbs (and less frequently Trudy) as an appealing romantic figure, engaging in a series of relationships that challenge Jacquie Jones’s observation that the buddy formula tends to either deny or demonize black sexuality.6 What is far less equivocal is the emphasis on the ethos of male camaraderie offered by the main buddy pairing, and this is something this book looks at in more detail in chapter 4. Yerkovich’s pilot script for Miami Vice also established Sonny Crockett’s identity as an American Vietnam war veteran. Through Crockett, Miami Vice participated, like its network TV counterparts Magnum P.I. (1980–8), The A-Team (1983–6) and Airwolf (1984–7), in what Harry W. Haines describes as the “ideological rehabilitation” of the veteran in 1980s popular culture, overturning earlier portrayals of them as complicit in wartime atrocities or returning home traumatized and psychotic.7 As was apparent with Magnum P.I.’s Thomas Magnum (Tom Selleck), Crockett’s status as a veteran was employed to give his handsome playboy persona an edge of soldier steel, thus reconciling differently desirable aspects of masculinity. Yet in many ways the show’s more complex relationship to Vietnam was rendered by a character not in the pilot episode, namely Lieutenant Martin Castillo. As a former DEA agent operating during the war in the “Golden Triangle” (an opium-producing area overlapping Vietnam, Thailand, Burma (Myanmar), and Laos), Castillo was used to connect up the nation’s catastrophic military involvement with its 1980s narcotics epidemic; his wartime exploits included resisting the CIA’s sanctioning of heroin distribution to fund its activities in the region.8 As David Buxton notes, in what is also an obvious allusion to the

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decade’s AIDS outbreak, “caught in Vietnam, the vice is a virus from a less civilized country; untreated at the time, it has spread out of control in America itself.”9 Castillo’s backstory, and the narrative set-ups it established for the show, were elaborated in the only scripted episode of Miami Vice credited to Michael Mann (“Golden Triangle Part II”), reportedly based on his screenplay research trip to Burma in 1980.10 The introduction of Castillo augmented the show’s rather lightweight initial “veteran hero” premise with a more substantive working through of the legacy of Vietnam; in particular the covert maneuverings of the military-industrial complex. Returning to the figure of Crockett, it is clear that his initial characterization also owed a debt to Travis McGee, the detective hero of mystery writer John D. MacDonald, first seen in the 1964 novel The Deep Blue Goodbye. McGee, a former college football player and Korean war veteran, lived on a houseboat called The Busted Flush docked in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and drove a convertible, souped-up Rolls Royce. The similarities with Crockett’s biography and set-up are striking. MacDonald’s novels earned him a critical reputation as “the pre-eminent Florida novelist,” admired for a “remarkably close observation of the state: its grifters and operators and big-bucks crooks.”11 Miami crime writer Carl Hiaasen, in his introduction to a reprint of The Deep Blue Goodbye, notes that MacDonald was “the first modern novelist to nail Florida dead-center, to capture all its languid sleaze, racy sense of promise, and breath-grabbing beauty.”12 Fittingly, it is this sense of place that Yerkovich describes as essential to his original vision for Miami Vice. Interviewed by The New York Times in the summer before the show’s debut, Yerkovich stated that he “wanted to explore the changes in a city that used to be a middle-class vacation land. Today Miami is like an American Casablanca, and it’s never really been seen on television.”13 Yerkovich’s pilot script for the show sought to make that simile clear; Sonny Crockett’s opening line, “Five thousand street corners in Greater Miami and gumbo here gotta pick ours,” is a spin on Rick Blaine’s (Humphrey Bogart’s) memorable line “Of all the gin joints …” in the 1943 film Casablanca. While immediately endowing Crockett with Blaine’s weary cynicism, Yerkovich’s script also carefully

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side-stepped NBC’s 1983 ill-fated TV series of Casablanca starring Starsky and Hutch’s David Soul and aligned itself rather more with Brian De Palma’s big-screen version of another classic studio picture, namely Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932). Released in 1983, De Palma’s exceedingly loose remake, starring Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer, relocated from depression-era Chicago to present-day Miami, with title character Tony “Scarface” Camonte (Paul Muni) renamed Tony Montana, no longer Italian-American, but instead a refugee from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. De Palma’s movie had not been well received in Miami from the moment the details of Oliver Stone’s script had become known. Representatives of the city’s Cuban community did not welcome the decision to reimagine “Scarface” as a Mariel boatlift refugee turned homicidal cocaine kingpin. The Mariel boatlift, which occurred between April and October 1980, and with the consent of Castro, saw around 125,000 Cubans flee the island for Florida, where many already had relatives in exile. While America’s acceptance of the refugees was widely understood as a humanitarian gesture on the part of the federal government, and an indication of improving US–Cuban relations, the American press quickly began to circulate stories that Castro had used the boatlift as an opportunity to empty Cuban jails and mental hospitals of their inmates. While more sober reporting indicated that less than two percent of exiles could be regarded as hardened criminals, concerns that Scarface would deliver a big-screen re-enactment of Cuban stereotyping led to public protests during the shooting of scenes in Miami, and the eventual abandonment of plans to film the entire movie on location in the city. The notion of a sudden influx of foreign, non-white felons represented an incendiary addition to a situation which was escalating racial tensions in the city. Miami had already been rocked in May 1980 by the “Liberty City riots,” the nation’s first major race riot since the 1960s. The riots, ignited by the acquittal of five white police officers accused of beating a black motorist to death, resulted in a number of fatalities, over 1,000 arrests and $200 million worth of damage, also had their roots in the sense of injustice felt by the city’s relatively small black community, many of whom saw themselves as

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being increasingly squeezed out by the larger and expanding LatinAmerican population.14 The riots and the Mariel boatlift brought Miami to the attention of the world’s press, and represented a spectacular rupture of the city’s prevailing image as sunny tourist resort and favored retirement locale. As T. D. Allman notes, “long-term demographic, economic, and political trends collided in an explosive fashion with several contemporary and unanticipated social upheavals. One result was that the city’s allimportant image took a brutal beating. The once ‘Magic City’ became better known nationally and internationally as ‘Paradise Lost.’”15 The latter phrase is a reference to a Time magazine profile of the city from November 1981, titled “Trouble in Paradise,” and which asserted that “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.”16 FBI statistics suggested that Miami had become the most crime-ridden city in the nation, and it was frequently cited by the press as the murder capital of the US. Critics pointed out that this state of affairs was not aided by the state’s liberal gun laws, which allowed for the legal carrying of concealed handguns. Much of the high-profile crime was related to the drug trade, and included a number of grisly machine-gun murders between warring drug gangs.17 Miami began the decade identified as the main port of entry for cocaine to the US, with “more than 80% of all cocaine seized worldwide [being] confiscated in Florida.”18 A DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) official related that so much drug money had been seized that “we’ve had difficulty transporting it for storage. We’re talking about literally billions in small bills.”19 What money wasn’t confiscated appeared to be finding its way into the banking system at a staggering rate. Observers noted that banks in Miami were the only ones in the country to show a currency surplus, somewhere in the region of $3.9 billion in 1980, a state of affairs that prompted a government enquiry. As one investigating Senator conceded, “not only are millions of Americans addicted to drugs, many banks are addicted to drug money.”20 Allman notes that “as late as 1977, there had been no foreign banks in Miami. By the early eighties, more than 130 banks in Greater Miami

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were engaged in international operations, and more than 250 multinational corporations had opened offices.”21 He points out that the south Florida region was handling “about 40 percent of all US trade with Central America,” and “[d]irectly and indirectly, this influx of foreign money was pumping more than $35 billion a year into the area’s economy.”22 Some voiced concerns that a significant proportion of that money was derived from illegal narcotics, and that laundered bills had found their way into the $3 billion construction boom that transformed downtown Miami in the early 1980s.23 As The New York Times stated in 1985, “the building boom has led to a Cinderella-like change in the Miami skyline, from an old stucco and brick face to gleaming new high-rise buildings standing shoulder to shoulder along the blue-green waters of Biscayne Bay.”24 The image of a subtropical city jittery on a cocktail of cocaine, currency, and construction lent itself readily to crime fiction, and De Palma’s Scarface provided Anthony Yerkovich with the prototype for Miami Vice’s vision of high-rolling drug lords reveling in the trappings of the 1980s consumer boom. Yerkovich stayed to oversee that vision as one of Miami Vice’s coexecutive producers for the first seven episodes before departing. NBC, forewarned of his intention to leave, expressed concern to Universal-TV, who approached Michael Mann with the invitation to come on board as an executive producer.25 Mann agreed, and remained for the duration of the show’s production (five seasons and 111 episodes in total). Like Yerkovich, Mann had served as a writer on Starsky and Hutch, and had also scripted episodes for the TV show Police Story (1973–7), and created the ABC detective drama Vega$ (1978–81) for Aaron Spelling. Michelle Brustin, former Vice President of Drama Series at NBC, points out that it was Mann’s track record in television, rather than as a director of feature films, that helped reassure nervous network executives concerned about the “overproduction” of the show’s pilot.26 Mann in fact came to Miami Vice having recently faced critical derision and box-office failure with his film The Keep (1983). Adapted by Mann from the novel by F. Paul Wilson, The Keep pits Nazi soldiers against a 500-year-old monster in a Romanian fortress. While the basic premise bears little relation to Mann’s previous work,

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the noir-style chiaroscuro lighting and synthesized scoring by Tangerine Dream both feature in Mann’s preceding film, the wellreceived Thief (1981), which depicts the attempt of professional safecracker Frank (James Caan) to pull off one last major heist before going straight. With its neon-lit dark city streets, waterfront settings, use of slow-motion photography, and tight, terse dialogue, Thief ’s tale of a man living a double life (Frank is a car salesman by day, thief by night) prefigures both the style and the tales of duplicitous living developed subsequently in Miami Vice. As Frank says to his girlfriend Jessie, seemingly oblivious to the provenance of his expensive accoutrements, “what do you think I do? … I wear $800 dollar suits.” The existential strain of Frank’s double life – the more he tries to extricate himself from his predicament, the deeper he gets – would also be repeated in the professional success and personal failings of the Vice detectives. While Frank is very much a loner, he is shown visiting Okla (Willie Nelson), a mentor/father figure from his time in prison. In so doing, Thief reprises the theme of male camaraderie in prison first seen in Mann’s Emmy-award-winning TV movie The Jericho Mile (1979), as the isolated Larry “Rain” Murphy (Peter Strauss) befriends fellow prisoner R. C. Stiles (Richard Lawson) to create a cross-racial friendship that undercuts the delicate balance of race-based prison cliques. The Jericho Mile also stars the Puerto Rican playwright and poet Miguel Piñero (as Rubio), who had been nominated for a Tony Award in 1975 for his play Short Eyes, written while Piñero was incarcerated for robbery in Sing Sing prison.27 Piñero would go on to play Esteban Calderone in the pilot of Miami Vice, thus starring as the show’s prototypical villain, and acting as the catalyst for Tubbs’s arrival in Miami, and in essence the entire premise of the show. Piñero also wrote the Miami Vice installment “Smuggler’s Blues,” which is, for a number of commentators, the quintessential series episode, reflected arguably in the fact that its plotline forms the basis for Mann’s script for the 2006 Miami Vice motion picture. The film accelerates the pace of Piñero’s tale of drug trafficking in line with what David Bordwell terms the “intensified continuity” of contemporary Hollywood filmmaking, but also the instantaneous flows of data that characterize trading in the globalized digital era.28

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The Miami Vice motion picture saw Mann and Yerkovich (the latter as Executive Producer) combine professionally for the first time since the show. Indeed, Yerkovich’s departure from Miami Vice was followed by a well-publicized spat about the creative origins of the show, which played out in the pages of Rolling Stone in 1985. In a cover article on the show by Emily Benedek for the March 1985 edition, the author suggested that the idea for Miami Vice had been “floating around NBC for a while” before Yerkovich was employed to write “a rough draft teleplay.” In addition, Benedek stated elsewhere in the piece that Michael Mann’s “mark is apparent in every frame of every episode. Mann’s style involves an aggressive use of visual images, camera angles and sound.”29 Benedek’s piece prompted a terse response from Robert A. Harris, President of Universal-TV, who stated that “the idea that became ‘Miami Vice’ was not ‘floating around at NBC for a while’ but was generated by the show’s creator, Tony Yerkovich.” Harris’s letter was joined by others written by John Sturnow, Executive Story Consultant on the show, who opined that “Tony [Yerkovich] established the characters, narrative style, and format of the show in his pilot script,” and by Steven Bochco, co-creator of Hill Street Blues, who stated that “no one is more intimate with Tony Yerkovich’s writing gifts than we at Hill Street Blues are, and you may rest assured that Miami Vice was his creation, his script, and reflected his sensibilities.”30 Rolling Stone published an apology, explaining that the description of “Mr. Yerkovich’s role was based on information provided by Miami Vice executive producer Michael Mann.” While this spat may seem rather trivial, the fact that such senior figures waded in points to the obvious fact that, as Richard Blum and Richard Lindheim point out, “television credits are very important for financial and professional reasons.”31 But what is also apparent in these exchanges are the traces of a major shift then occurring in network television. As John Thornton Caldwell points out, in the 1980s American television “moved from a framework that approached broadcasting primarily as a form of word-based rhetoric and transmission … to a visually based mythology, framework, and aesthetic based on an extreme consciousness of style.”32 In the mid-1980s no dramatic show seemed to embody these changes as emphatically as Miami Vice, and the pages of Rolling Stone

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played the rather unusual role of publicly illustrating the transition from a creative emphasis on “writing gifts” to visual and aural style. Mann’s subsequent helming of the feature film, a medium where the director is typically afforded most artistic attribution, serves in retrospect to reinforce the perception of his auteurist signature on the show. With that notion of the transforming nature of network television in mind, it is worth returning again to the Time September 1985 cover article on Miami Vice. Timed to coincide with the start of the series’ second season on NBC, the catalyst for the magazine’s interest was its remarkable ratings in the summer reruns. The strong showing for Miami Vice, and also for network companions The Cosby Show and Family Ties, meant that NBC won the battle for summer ratings. All three fared much better than reruns of CBS’s top-rated serials such as Dallas and Falcon Crest, which were dropped in favor of movies. Unlike The Cosby Show and Family Ties, Miami Vice went into reruns on the back of unspectacular viewing figures, but the show’s seasonable parade of sun-kissed locations, tropical cool, and chic summer fashions, not to mention the weakened competition, aided a remarkable upsurge in the show’s fortunes, and helped it enter the top ten of the all-important Nielsen ratings for the first time. Until the 1980s the summer had been typically a fallow period for network television, regarded as something of a hiatus in the competition for viewers that characterized the rest of the year. The opportunity to all but “shut down for summer” was a luxury afforded the so-called “Big Three” networks due to their long-standing stranglehold on the television industry. For several decades ABC, CBS, and NBC formed what Michele Hilmes terms “Classic Network System,” functioning as “a closed oligopoly” that thrived “by restricting competition and avoiding risk.”33 This stable structure made network television a profitable business for broadcasters, advertisers, and the Hollywood studios then producing the overwhelming majority of the shows that filled the schedules. But in the mid-1980s, the “Big Three” networks confronted for the first time in decades a threat of competition that forced them to rethink their traditional complacency toward summer scheduling. As CBS president of entertainment Bud Grant conceded at the time, “We’re in a 52-week business now.”34

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By the mid-1980s the concerted growth of cable TV, VCRs, and independent stations meant that networks faced round-the-year rivalry for the attention of the audience, which was no longer largely dependent on them for their viewing fare; so much so that by the early 1990s the “Big Three’s” share of the prime-time audience had slipped to 61 percent, down from a dominant 92 percent in 1977.35 While both cable and video had been around since the mid-1970s, it was only in the mid-1980s that they became significant entities in the broadcasting sector. The key to this was a change in the regulatory climate that allowed the potential of these technological developments to be realized. Many broadcast historians point to the appointment of Mark Fowler as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 1981 as a pivotal moment in this transformation. As the government agency charged with regulating the broadcasting and telecommunications industries, the FCC had a major role in shaping the development of the sector. As Alisa Perren points out, Fowler’s appointment moved the FCC away from its traditional “ ‘public interest’ mandate” and toward an emphasis on freeing the sector from government regulation. The aim was to stimulate a competitive environment in which “the market – not the government – should determine the ‘winners’ and ‘losers.’”36 This focus on “winners” and “losers,” competition, and “the marketplace” makes clear Fowler’s adherence to the free-market economics of the Republican administration, and as Perren notes, he “frequently emphasized his allegiance to the man who appointed him, President Ronald Reagan.”37 The boom in cable TV and independent stations was greatly aided by this new competitive climate, in which the buying and selling of TV stations occurred with unprecedented scale and sanction. Beyond the purview of the FCC, another legal ruling had a momentous role in shaping home entertainment. In January 1984, the year of Miami Vice’s debut, MCA/Universal (which would produce the show for NBC) saw the final failure of the lawsuit they first filed in 1976 against Sony Corporation of America, manufacturers of the VCR. MCA/Universal was the biggest independent producer of television shows in the US, and the lawsuit was an attempt to make the home taping of their and all others’ shows illegal. This landmark ruling

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which, as Frederick Wasser points out, was “one of those rare instances when the government or the court did not take the opportunity to extend copyright protection in the current era of new technologies,” effectively gave a green light to the practice that would redefine the viewer’s relationship with television, namely time shifting.38 Being able to watch what they wanted when they wanted, while whizzing past commercials, was as liberating for viewers as it was potentially ruinous for TV companies that depended on advertising revenue for their livelihood. By the mid-1980s the VCR was firmly established as a mass medium, with 11–12 million sales per year till the end of the decade, by which time nearly 70 percent of television households had a machine.39 VCR penetration was also driven by movie rentals and tape purchases, which, as Wasser notes, “transformed the VCR from being an extension of the TV to being an alternative to the movie theater.”40 With cable TV also operating as a competitor to the networks’ own film broadcasts, and with the added attraction of being able to offer more recent, and, crucially, uncensored and uninterrupted (on paycable) screenings, the “Big Three” were operating in a broadcasting landscape unlike anything that had been seen previously. Adding to their woes was the rapid take up of the RCD (remote control device) in the 1980s, so that by the end of the decade around 66 percent of television households had at their fingertips the capability for greater “flipping frequency” not only between channels, but also between devices (TV, VCR, cable box).41 As Eastman, Neal-Lunsford, and Riggs point out, many in the TV industry perceived the RCD as “a detriment to their carefully planned audience flow strategies, resulting in lower ratings and an increased failure rate for new programs.”42 One consequence of this was a concern within the industry on how to devise strategies to encourage viewers to keep their finger off the button. In the 1980s and early 1990s, this often revolved around ways of innovating in the transitions between programs. Later in the decade, the focus shifted to means for ensuring viewers flipped (or clicked) to the other stations, websites, and related media properties that the networks also owned. Arguably the most emphatic illustration of the momentous times befalling the networks was the fact that in 1985, the year that Miami

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Vice made its impact, the Big Three were sold after decades of stable ownership. In tune with the climate of mergers and acquisitions affecting corporate America, a consequence of the Reagan administration’s approach to business taxation and market deregulation, all three networks became part of large corporations with different business cultures and, inevitably, different visions of how their new acquisitions should operate.43 If that wasn’t enough, by 1985 advanced plans were already in place for the launch of Fox, a fourth network, which would commence in October 1986. After years of successful resistance to a new competitor by the “Big Three,” Fox took full advantage of recent sector deregulation, offering a major challenge to the established networks, and prospering through its core strategy of appealing to young and urban audiences. Crucially, the formation of Fox TV ushered in a “new era marked by network-studio integration,” as television and film companies were permitted to merge (and merge they did, in the next wave of “merger mania” in the mid-1990s), for the first time in their mutually supportive, but often rancorous, histories. Already required to adjust to the inroads made by cable TV, VCRs, and independent stations to their audience base, the success of Fox in capitalizing on demographic, regulatory, and technological trends would demonstrate to the networks, and their new owners, how to operate as a fully integrated media conglomerate in this new broadcasting epoch, which Michael Curtin has termed the “neonetwork era.”44 Miami Vice might usefully be thought of as a show wrought by these forces of realignment; conceived during the waning of the “Classic Network era,” but anticipating and responding to many of the shifts that would come to define the era of the “neo-networks.” Indeed, the show’s launch on September 16, 1984 in NBC’s “Sunday Night At The Movies” slot suggested much about how it was complexly related to this rapidly changing broadcasting landscape.45 On the one hand, the pilot episode was something of a throwback in that it was a big-budget, two-hour “television movie.” This was a format that the networks were then increasingly shying away from; escalating production costs and the diminishing proportion of pilots taken up as series had seen a marked decline in the format.46 On the other hand,

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the decision to use the format had been taken in part to gauge the market for TV videocassette releases, and the pilot was available not only in VHS and Betamax versions, but also as NTSC and PAL cassettes, so that it could be sold both domestically and in other global retail markets.47 Right from inception, therefore, Miami Vice was conceived with one eye on a fundamental shift in the media industries in the 1980s, which was to think of television programs and movies as “content” that could be “repurposed” in different formats. As Stephen Prince points out, until the 1980s “cinema was celluloid,” and television was broadcast.48 By the end of the decade, everything (in principle at least) was “software.”49 In many ways the most indicative demonstration of Miami Vice’s position within the rapidly innovating sector for audio-visual entertainment in the 1980s, and the interlocking logics of “software” and “hardware” that drove much of its development, lies in the story of the show’s enduring nickname, “MTV cops.” The oft-repeated tale of Miami Vice’s genesis involves the late Brandon Tartikoff, then President of NBC’s entertainment division, scribbling “MTV cops” on a napkin. It is from this beginning that the discussions between NBC and Universal-TV purportedly commenced. While Tartikoff went on record to describe this as “apocryphal,” he did assert that the show “had its genesis in a vague idea I had about getting an MTV sensibility into a cop show.”50 As Tartikoff admitted freely, at that time he had become “obsessed” with MTV.51 From the debut of its inaugural clip, Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” on August 1,1981, MTV would become a major driver for the expansion of basic cable subscription, particularly when it became available in New York and Los Angeles at the beginning of 1983.52 By the end of 1983, it could reach more than 17 million households nationwide.53 While this was a drop in the ocean compared to network television, what was crucial was not raw numbers but who was watching. As Andrew Goodwin points out: [MTV’s] budgets were underwritten by an expectation that an all-music service would deliver those younger consumers (12–34 year olds), who were difficult to reach through television. MTV was to be “environment” that would narrowcast the right kind of music and thus target an elusive socioeconomic group.54

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Although it remained unstated, Tartikoff ’s “obsession” with MTV was clearly attributable to the basic cable network’s remarkable capacity to attract younger viewers to television, and consequently to the advertisers, whose revenue had been driving MTV’s profits through the roof. While the coveted youth demographic was not a new discovery for NBC – Elana Levine has explored the network’s failed attempts to court younger viewers in the 1970s through depictions of sexuality – music television took advantage of recent technological advances to appeal to that audience in ways previously not possible.55 The most important of these were key developments in stereophonic sound transmission and receiving equipment. MTV was available to cable subscribers in stereophonic sound via a special hookup to stereo phonographs provided by their local cable company. Indeed, anyone who viewed the cable network’s opening-night transmission would have noticed that stereo sound was central to MTV’s promotional strategies from the outset, reiterated time and again in its own advertising clips and in the patter of the VJs. Robert Pittman, Vice President of programming at MTV, remarked at the time of the networks’ launch that we’re now seeing the TV become a component of the stereo system. It’s ridiculous to think that you have two forms of entertainment – your stereo and your TV – which have nothing to do with one another. What we’re doing is marrying those two forms so that they can work together in unison. We’re the first channel on cable to pioneer this.56

While MTV may have been the first to offer stereo sound to US cable customers, the development of the technology for broadcasting network shows on television was also well underway. Japan had had a stereo TV service since 1978, using a system known as multiplex television, with stations broadcasting shows in two sound channels. Japanese broadcasters estimated in June 1984 that 20 to 25 percent of television sets then being sold had the ability to receive multiplex programs, with about 12 percent of the programming, or about fourteen or fifteen hours per station per week, making use of the multiplex technology, primarily for music and sports shows.57 In Europe only West Germany’s second network (ZDF) had offered stereo programs

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(mainly pop-music-based) since 1982.58 In March 1984 the US Federal Communications Commission authorized Multichannel television sound, better known as MTS, as the US standard for stereo television transmission. Unlike the Japanese system, MTS used three channels, which meant that not only could it transmit shows in stereo, but it could use the extra channel to broadcast in Spanish for the substantial US Latino market. There was at that time an increased sense of purpose for the TV industry to focus its energies on pushing through the necessary authorization for stereo broadcasting, so as to match the range of videodisk and videocassette players being sold that offered stereophonic sound (when played though a home stereo system), which were starting to pick up sales in 1982 and 1983. The US network that led the charge for stereo TV broadcasts in MTS was NBC, starting with the July 26, 1984 edition of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, even if at that point only New York had stereo broadcast transmitting equipment. The previous month, the network announced that its new cop show, Miami Vice, would be the first prime-time series to be delivered regularly in stereo, with Brandon Tartikoff telling Broadcast Week that because “music plays such a strong part in the action, stereo would be a way to showcase the new cop show.”59 The two-hour pilot and the first twelve episodes were recorded in four-track stereo, though most TV markets did not yet have either the transmission equipment or the stereo TV sets to receive the stereo broadcast. As an interim solution, NBC depended upon FM radio stations to “simulcast” the show in stereo sound, so that viewers could listen to it through their hi-fi systems. Michael Mann explained that even if few viewers would hear the first series in stereo “a show goes into syndication after three years on the air … by that time stereo broadcasting will be a reality, and because all the negatives to Miami Vice are in stereo, they will be far more valuable if the show goes into syndication.”60 NBC’s position as the early pace-setter in stereo programming could also be attributable to the activities of its parent company at the time of Miami Vice’s inception, namely RCA. RCA had long been a leading manufacturer of television sets and, along with competitor

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Zenith, had then the largest share of the US consumer market. As The New York Times pointed out, “NBC wants stereo for the same reason it was the first to ‘go color’ some 20 years ago: to drum up trade for its corporate sibling.”61 Like many consumer electronic innovations before and after, stereo television sets entered the marketplace as high-end products, relying upon the demographic described by Everett Rogers, pioneer of diffusion of innovations theory, as “innovators” and “early adopters” – willing to pay the higher price for being the first to own new technologies, and absolutely crucial to manufacturers if their products are to get off the ground.62 Miami Vice, described by Jane Feuer as a key example of “yuppie television,” should be understood therefore as central to NBC’s attempts to encourage upscale viewers to purchase stereo TV sets, with the hope that the consequent diffusion to the majority of the audience would follow.63 Reflecting their higher prices, and the limited number of programs broadcast in MTS, initial sale figures for stereo TV sets were predictably small, with an estimated one and a half million sales in 1985. The year 1986 represented a breakthrough with the consumer electronics publication Twice declaring that the “biggest technology winner in 1986 was color TV with built-in stereo audio decoder.”64 At that time, 19and 25-inch sets retailed for between $500 and $1,200, while at the top end of the market Mitsubishi’s new 37-inch stereo television cost $3,200. Viewers desiring even larger screens could purchase 40–50-inch stereo projection sets from NEC, Pioneer, and RCA for $2,000–$3,000. NBC continued to show the way forward as the most aggressive scheduler of MTS broadcasts, offering twenty-one shows in its 1985–6 schedule, including The Tonight Show, The Cosby Show, and Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories. Writing about MTS broadcasting for Time magazine in April 1986, Richard Zoglin began by highlighting the show he felt best illustrated the appeal of stereo TV, which was Miami Vice. He provided this example of a viewer of the show, which was rather in keeping with the age and career profile characteristics of the coveted “early adopter”: Don Morris, 31, a newspaper graphics editor in Stockton, Calif., hooked up his new television set last November and settled into a chair to watch

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Miami Vice. During a tense scene set in the Everglades, Morris heard what sounded like an intruder in the house. He turned around quickly, only to discover that the rustling noise was coming from a speaker behind him. That marked the beginning of Morris’ conversion to stereo TV. “Television elsewhere,” he says, “seems one-dimensional and hollow.”65

An article on MTS broadcasting in the August 1986 edition of Money magazine also began with a description of watching Miami Vice in stereo, and was similarly emphatic in its depiction of the auditory impact of hearing “Don Johnson open fire from the careering car at screen right.” The article sought to convey a sense of the thrill as “the shot barks in your right speaker, the ricochet twangs in the left. Meanwhile, the background throb of the show’s trademark synthesizer and guitar music resounds from wall to wall.”66 The appeal in both of these magazines was to the home theater enthusiast and audiophile, for whom “sound every bit as full, rich and distinct as that from FM radio stereo or a top-quality audio cassette deck” is understood to be a major selling point, and for which Miami Vice served as the hardware’s “killer application.”67 As Barbara Klinger points out, the marketing of home theater equipment is “defined by particularly attentive viewing sensibilities and heightened sensory experiences,” crucial in persuading consumers to part with the substantial sums often required for its purchase.68 Beginning in the mid-1980s, when the equipment was “expensive and largely reserved for the rich,” home theater has, argues Klinger, “helped to redefine and revivify the media industries associated with it.”69 Miami Vice, perhaps better described as MTS, rather than MTV, cops, had a landmark role to play in this narrative of commercial rejuvenation, so much so that David Marc and Robert J. Thompson contend that it “almost singlehandedly created the consumer market for stereo television.”70 In our present media moment Miami Vice has fully realized its potential as “software” and as an entertainment “franchise.” The 2003 merger of NBC and Universal Studios bequeathed the new entity, NBC Universal (owned by the conglomerate General Electric), with the back catalogue of Universal’s television productions. This enabled NBC to own all the programs that it was not at liberty to produce in

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an earlier era. Under the Prime Time Access Rule (PTAR), first issued by the FCC in 1970, the US government had sought to address the fact that the networks were dominating production of the shows that aired in prime-time.71 The ruling stipulated that the first hour of the daily prime-time schedule be dedicated to airing independently produced shows, with the intention of increasing diversity; in particular by stimulating local and regional programming. In practice, as Michele Hilmes points out, “major film studios and Hollywood-based independent producers moved in to fill the void.”72 One of the largest and most prolific of these producers was Universal-TV, then owned by MCA, responsible in the mid-1980s for shows such as Airwolf, Magnum P.I., Knight Rider, Murder She Wrote, and Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, as well as Miami Vice. Like other independent producers, Universal-TV owned the shows it produced, but sold the “license fee” for exclusive airing to a network. As Blum and Lindheim note, negotiations over license fees became particularly fraught in the mid-1980s, as production costs escalated.73 Indeed, Miami Vice was the subject of tense and well-publicized negotiations between NBC and Universal-TV as this exceptionally expensive show became ever more costly.74 All of this is happily forgotten, of course, in the current era of corporate conglomeration and media convergence. In July 2006 NBC television screened the two-hour pilot of Miami Vice in Highdefinition (HD) to hype the theatrical release of Universal Studios’ Miami Vice movie, while seeking also to boost sales of the Miami Vice TV series DVD boxed sets, launched by Universal Home Entertainment in February 2005. If director Michael Mann emphasized the opportunity presented by the movie to “explore some of the things we couldn’t in television,” and strove to point out the difference between it and the original show, it is clear that from the perspective of NBC Universal, the movie was timed for optimal cross-platform franchise exploitation.75 Indeed, this had already begun with the release in 2004 of Miami Vice the X-Box/PC/Playstation2 game, meticulously recreating the look of the 1980s show, and basing game play on one of the television episodes. This was followed in 2006 by Miami Vice the PSP game, this time basing game play on the new movie. Additionally, there was

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Miami Vice the mobile phone game, produced by British game publisher Player X, also based on the movie. In February 2008 NBC announced that it was to stream full episodes of “vintage” TV shows on its NBC.com website, including The A-Team, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Emergency, Miami Vice, and Night Hour. Many of these shows, including Miami Vice, could also be watched at Hulu.com, which had been founded in March 2007 by NBC Universal in partnership with Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Hulu’s declared mission was to “help people find and enjoy the world’s premium video content when, where and how they want it.” Hulu’s website stated that it drew from “more than 90 content providers, including Fox, NBC Universal, MGM, Sony Pictures Television, Warner Bros,” a list consisting of some of the biggest entertainment companies in the world.76 Explaining NBC’s strategy in a keynote speech at the National Association for Television Program Executives’ trade show in February 2008, chairman Jeff Zucker stated that NBC “needed to be everywhere.”77 As Henry Jenkins notes, “in the world of media convergence, every important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple media platforms.”78 Developments in digital technologies and media delivery systems have led a number of television scholars to rethink how we define and describe the object of study. As Lynn Spigel suggests in the introduction to Television after TV, “Television – once the most familiar of everyday objects – is now transforming at such rapid speeds that we no longer know what ‘TV’ is at all.”79 Henry Jenkins describes “transmedia storytelling” as “a new aesthetic that has emerged in response to media convergence,” encouraging consumers to “[chase] down bits of the story across media channels,” an approach familiar to fans of shows such as Lost and Heroes.80 On the other hand, it is important to bear in mind the fact that television texts are, and always have been, fluid and adaptable to change. As Toby Miller notes with reference to the cult TV show The Avengers: The life of any internationally popular TV series is a passage across space and time, a life remade over and over again by discourses, institutions,

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practices of production, distribution and reception, and the shifts in tempo and context that characterize cultural commodities.81

One consequence of this fact is the difficulty of settling once and for all on a particular notion of what a television text might actually mean. If texts are fluid and contingent, then so must be their interpretations. This does not imply that we simply concede that texts can mean absolutely anything, but rather, as Barbara Klinger points out, “historical and intertextual environments shape meanings that circulate during the time of reception.”82 NBC.com’s present framing of Miami Vice’s identity as “vintage TV” encourages viewers to appreciate its outrageous fashions and 1980s soundtrack through the lens of nostalgia. But the site also makes reference to Michael Mann, stating that he is “now recognized as the contemporary master of neo-noir.” Knowledge of Mann’s career as director of films such as Manhunter (1986), Heat (1995), and Collateral (2004) offers viewers another perspective on the show, inviting them to consider it as an early formative work of a recognized cinematic “master.” Neither of these interpretative frames was available at the time of the show’s initial broadcast, yet both work powerfully to shape understandings of it in our present moment. As Miami Vice and its other “vintage” counterparts find immortality in what Caldwell describes as the “endless ‘ancillary afterlife’ ” of the digital era, it is easy to lose sight of the contexts that shaped the initial production and reception of these shows.83 For example, Miami Vice’s extensive use of freeze frames and slow-motion shots, particularly in “non violent scenes that would not customarily incorporate slow motion,” are two of the most striking features of its visual style, but may be perceived by viewers today as simply dated and overblown.84 Yet an understanding of the show’s origins at the moment when broadcasting sought to adapt to the challenges wrought by a new wave of competing audio-visual technologies offers a more informed perspective. Miami Vice went on air just as the domestic VCR had achieved substantial levels of market penetration, particularly in the upscale demographic the show was designed to attract. It is no coincidence that two of the VCR’s most innovative functions – its capacity

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to offer freeze frame and slow-motion playback – are also two of Miami Vice’s most arresting stylistic techniques. Miami Vice was arguably one of the first shows to offer its viewers a knowing awareness of its own status as “entertainment software” to be paused, rewound, and replayed.

Chapter 2

Guns, Glitter, and Glamor Styling the Show

If there was one thing observers of Miami Vice could agree on, it was that it was a stylish show. TV critics, cultural commentators, and even the odd literary scholar felt compelled to remark on the striking visual and aural characteristics of the show, and all seemed to concur that style was its defining feature. When Miami Vice picked up Emmy awards in its first season for cinematography, film sound editing, and art direction, it was evident that the industry also recognized the technical accomplishment of the show’s production. But whereas the Emmy awards committee was clear in their acknowledgment of virtuosity, others were notably wary about whether the show’s undoubted style was to be commended. While some lauded the “new visual sophistication” the show seemingly brought to television, many pointed to executive producer Michael Mann’s statement that the key characteristic of Miami Vice was “no earth tones” as evidence of the show’s fundamental vacuousness. Bruce Paltrow, executive producer of the “quality” hospital drama St. Elsewhere (which topped TV Guide’s all-time best drama list in 1993), rather summed up this sentiment when he stated that “Miami Vice is a cop show – very well done and stylish … it’s hip and glib, but not very deep.”1 Reflecting upon the critical response to Miami Vice in the weeks after its debut, Robert J. Thompson concluded that “the show became instantly notorious as a vehicle for ‘style’ rather than content.”2 For a number of academic commentators, Miami Vice offered clear evidence of the “postmodern” turn in American media culture. Pointing to what they saw as the show’s obsession with sound, image,

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and spectacle, many lamented the fact that this emphasis on surface style left “no depth or multiplicity of meanings for critical inquiry to discover and explicate.”3 Todd Gitlin pointed to the “blankness” of the show, seeing in it evidence of the “waning of affect” described by Fredric Jameson as a key characteristic of postmodern art. Without seeking to make meaningful connections to feelings and events in the “real world,” style signified nothing except stylishness itself, an arrangement of people and objects for a detached and emotionless gaze.4 For theorists of a more upbeat persuasion, the show’s apparent emphasis on surface style could be seen as liberatory. Cathy Schwichtenberg argued for the “surface pleasures which style provides” and “a politics of refusal in not forcing things to mean.”5 R. L Rutsky saw in other critics’ anxieties over Miami Vice’s substitution of style for “some ‘real’ value” a fear of succumbing to the pleasures of style, a “vice” that the show dramatized through every superfluous flourish.6 What all were agreed on, however, was that style had little to do with the exigencies of traditional storytelling. Even scholars who did seek to retain the notion that Miami Vice could mean something meaningful tended to do so without recourse to the expressive capacities of style. David Buxton offered an extensive reading of the show that sought to connect recurring plots and themes to social and economic contexts in 1980s America, preserving a sense that the show could be linked to ideology (for instance to notions of justice, masculinity, or morality), but did so without considering how these might be rendered through visual and aural elements.7 Douglas Kellner sought similarly to retain the notion that the show was meaningful, arguing that Miami Vice’s representation of postmodern image culture could be read ideologically, providing us with “many insights into the fragmentation, reconstruction, and fragility of identity in contemporary culture.”8 Yet Kellner was happy simply to state, rather than prove, that the show’s “images [were] detached from the narrative and seem to take on a life of their own,” thus freeing himself up to concentrate primarily on characterization, plot, and theme. Both Kellner and Buxton had many valuable things to say about the show, and I will return to their ideas in chapter 4. However, both were much too quick to dispense with the notion that one might want to contest

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criticism of the show’s “blank” surface style head on; to see whether it actually stands up to closer scrutiny. This chapter draws on a range of examples from across all five seasons of the show in order to take issue with the pervasive assertion that “style” in Miami Vice was, for good or bad, largely superfluous to the strategies of storytelling. The chapter seeks to show how style had in actual fact a substantial role in communicating meaning to the viewer. It also considers how the show’s style, defined as specific cinematic techniques used in patterned ways, changed over time. This is something that has rarely been commented on in relation to Miami Vice; most critics paint a static portrait, capturing it at one moment in time, while the show continued to evolve stylistically across its lifespan. Such evolution, which can be attributed to changes in personnel, fashion, and creative direction, should also be understood as an attempt to refresh the show in the face of competition for audiences, particularly in a television landscape in which the flaunting of style, once the exception, was becoming the norm.

“Style: it’s the key to the whole show.”9 Michael Mann’s insistence that style is the key to Miami Vice might be countered with the assertion that “style,” as shorthand for the visual and aural characteristics of television, is intrinsic to all types of programming, irrespective of whether we as viewers consciously notice it or not. But fashioning the stylishness of style, constructed for our viewing pleasure, needs to be understood as an aesthetic approach emerging out of particular commercial circumstances. Viewers of police shows in the early 1980s may have typically had stylistic expectations of the genre set by shows like Kojak, Starsky and Hutch, ChiPs, and Columbo, which, while offering memorable cops, props (and even, believe it or not, plots), adhered to what Caldwell describes as the “zero-degree style” that prevailed throughout the preceding decade.10 Caldwell sees the basis for this stylistic conservatism, which largely eschewed conspicuous approaches to lighting, camera work, and art direction, in the turn toward “social relevance” in prime-time programming in the early 1970s.

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He notes that influential shows such as All in the Family, Maude, and The Jeffersons placed an emphasis on “quality” acting and writing, underlined by the absence of stylistic flourishes which may have detracted from their theatrically derived seriousness. For those with less lofty ambitions the “zero-degree style” offered clear financial advantages, most obviously for the major independent production companies then generating significant proportions of the networks’ schedules under the Prime-Time-Access Rule (PTAR). Quick, efficient, and inexpensively shot programming represented a low-risk activity benefiting from economies of scale, and one which had “little to gain from drawing attention to the televisual apparatus or to televisual stylishness.”11 Arguably the most significant challenge to this state of affairs came in the shape of Hill Street Blues, which began airing on the NBC network in January 1981. Citing as key aesthetic influence the gritty black and white documentary The Police Tapes (1977), creators Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll were able to innovate style in a way that seemingly enhanced, rather than detracted from, the show’s dramatic substance. The use of hand-held cameras, the regular absence of conventional establishing shots and cuts, and employment of overlapping dialogue helped give the show a spontaneous, cinéma-vérité look and sound. Epitomized by the entreaty of Robert Butler, director of the pilot episode of the show, to “make it look messy,” Hill Street Blues made extensive and consistent use of style to offer distinctive difference within the prime-time schedule.12 Lavished with critical praise and six Emmy awards in its first season, Hill Street Blues offered televisual sophistication to rival the movies, which cable television and VCRs were increasingly supplying in unexpurgated form, and to the upscale demographic who comprised the target market for “quality” programming. Yet if its look echoed Serpico and appealed to those who remembered that film, this was wedded, as Thompson notes, to a story format that was then making serious inroads into the schedule, namely the primetime soap opera.13 Conceived during the hysteria of Dallas’s “Who Shot J.R.?” saga, Hill Street Blues introduced complex seriality into the traditionally episodic cop-show format, which, as Christine Geraghty points out, brought with it a “greater concern with the domestic and emotional life of characters” than was typical for the genre.14

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Seriality was but one of the pleasures on offer in prime-time soaps such as Dallas and Dynasty, with the visual delights of glamor, wealth, and flamboyance being another obvious attraction. “Style” in this sense, as Caldwell notes, was not primarily a matter of artful composition or kinetic camera movement so much as ostentatious displays of couture fashion. Dynasty, in particular, with costume designer Nolan Miller creating Linda Evans’s iconic shoulder-padded look, and concocting a fresh selection of sumptuous outfits for its female stars in every episode, served as a parade for contemporary cuts, colors, and fabrics. “Super soaps,” supplemented in the schedules by syndicated opulent lifestyle shows such as Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous (1984–95), made 1980s television a vehicle for “high-society fantasies of wealth and power.”15 While many critics were inclined to perceive in Hill Street Blues’s soap-derived seriality evidence of the show’s novelistic qualities, the decision of Miami Vice’s creators to take their cue instead from the prime-time soap’s spectacle of wealth pulled the show in a different direction. Like its super soap rivals, Miami Vice was extremely expensive to produce, at over $1.3 million per episode in its opening season, notably at a point when it had no star-sized salaries to amortize. The show’s extensive location shooting around Miami meant it racked up numerous expenses not encountered when confined to a studio lot, while furnishing the show with its look and sound also came at a price. Costume designers took buying trips to European fashion shows to stay abreast of trends, and had an unusually large budget for wardrobe purchases (unusual for TV, unheard of for a so-called “cop show”), used to dress Crockett and Tubbs in the latest Versace, Cerruti, and Hugo Boss suits. Up to $50,000 per episode was spent acquiring the rights to original music.16 In fact, it is plausible to surmise that NBC, which tried and failed to match CBS’s Dallas and ABC’s Dynasty with Bare Essence, its own “super soap,” which flopped in 1983, redirected the funds for high-gloss television into Miami Vice, which was sufficiently well suited and booted to debut head-to-head with Falcon Crest (CBS) in the Friday 10 p.m. timeslot. Contemporary commentators by and large failed to recognize such links between Miami Vice and the super soaps then dominating the

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prime-time ratings. Instead, the show was frequently discussed in relation to Hill Street Blues and Starsky and Hutch. Yet when it came to an assessment of the show’s style, these shows arguably sent commentators rather wide of the mark. Hill Street Blues was as much of a departure as Miami Vice from the “zero-degree” style that characterized Starsky and Hutch and its 1970s cop-show counterparts, yet both shows served to make Miami Vice’s approach to style seem outrageous. With short memories, and even shorter deadlines, many commentators looked back only as far as “zero-degree style” to see in Miami Vice a style revelation. But, as Caldwell points out, “zero degree” was itself a reaction to a preceding period of notable stylistic experimentation on American television, characterized by shows such as Mod Squad, The Twilight Zone, The Monkees, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in, and (the albeit British) The Avengers. Emerging out of a period of relative asceticism, Miami Vice’s affinity with an earlier era of televisual style was somewhat overlooked.17 In addition, the comparison with Hill Street Blues was used to stress Miami Vice’s failings as a work of “quality.” Typical in this respect was Michael Pollan’s statement that “Hill Street Blues created for itself a distinctive visual identity. Yet it has remained a writer’s show, its texture clearly in the service of its writers’ vision.” In contrast, Pollan argued that the fact that Miami Vice, “so sophisticated visually[,] is risible from a literary standpoint is evidently of no concern to its audience.”18 That Hill Street Blues had introduced new sophistication to the cop show format was without question, but was this necessarily the most appropriate counterpart for comparison? Things may have seemed rather different had Pollan chosen to compare Miami Vice with Hunter, The Dukes of Hazzard, The A-Team, or a whole range of other action-oriented shows then flourishing on American television. As Don Johnson pointed out astutely, “Miami Vice has never been a cop show. I mean, people don’t buy us as cops and, I don’t blame them.”19 The question of whether people “bought” Crockett and Tubbs as action heroes was a somewhat different matter. It is perhaps no coincidence that all the deficiencies cited by critics in relation to Miami Vice were also key attributes of the action-adventure genre, foremost of which was an emphasis on style and spectacle at

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the expense of “literary sophistication.” As Paul Rutherford points out, the infamous declaration by Newton Minow, newly appointed as chief of the FCC in 1961, that television had become a “vast wasteland” was largely “directed against the sudden dominance of a new style of drama called action-adventure in the primetime offerings of all three networks.” Rutherford notes that: Action-adventure shows have never represented what critics consider the best in television drama. Epithets such as “mindless,” “unrealistic,” “demeaning,” “intolerant,” or “immoral” have often been thrown at this brand of entertainment. These shows have been the source of much of the violence, sometimes sex as well, which has distressed a large number of viewers. Action-adventure cannot claim the same sort of defenders who have lauded soap operas and sitcoms as sources of worthwhile entertainment. Perhaps that is because these shows are obviously escapist, their moral tales trite, so lacking in the redeeming qualities of tolerance or female empowerment or studied ambiguity which appeal to critics … The appeal of action-adventure is rooted in excess, particularly visual excess whether fights and killings, explosions and crashes, chases, horrifying images, or awesome displays.20

With their surprise at Miami Vice’s visual excess it is almost as if many critics of the show, reaching for theories of the postmodern, or the comforts of literary sophistication, had never whiled away their free time watching action-adventure shows on television. The action-adventure genre was, of course, one of cinema’s most commercially successful products of the 1980s, making major stars of actors such as Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Eddie Murphy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone. Relatively light on dialogue for translation to non-English speaking markets, the action-adventure film was, as Stephen Prince points out, particularly well calibrated for Hollywood’s increasingly global audience in the 1980s, which was providing more income than the domestic box-office, and stimulated by burgeoning ancillary markets for cassette sales and rentals, cable and satellite broadcasting.21 In addition, high production values, which offered stupendous special effects and spectacle, also gave these films a competitive edge over lower-budget homegrown fare in many international markets. Bill Osgerby, Anna Gough-Yates,

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and Marianne Wells point out that the action-adventure TV series had also in fact been geared to international sales from the start, with examples such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–60) produced in the UK by ITC “in conjunction with the American company, Sapphire Films, and purchased in America by the CBS network.”22 Miami Vice was therefore following a well-trodden commercial path in the sense that it sought to offer globally appealing and spectacular television entertainment. In an interview Michael Mann gave to The New York Times in January 1985, under the headline “Miami Vice: Action TV with some new twists,” the producer stated that “we make a movie for a little over $1 million but we do it once a week, 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.”23 Mann’s comments spoke to what Jane Feuer terms a defining feature of 1980s “Yuppie television,” namely to promote “TV as cinema” to upscale viewers.24 As Caldwell points out, “high production value programming, and Hollywood stylishness can all be seen as tactics by which the networks and their primetime producers tried to protect market share in the face of an increasingly competitive market.”25 Yet it is important to distinguish between network television’s promotional strategies and the programs themselves, which still needed to adhere to the formatting and scheduling requirements of television. For instance, Miami Vice was still structured around the three commercial breaks that would punctuate its hour on the air, and with the onus of ensuring its audience came back after the commercials. Indeed, what is striking about Miami Vice is the way that it offered an innovative approach to style adapted specifically for the demands of television. Although much has been made of the fact that Michael Mann sought out for the show directors and writers who had not worked in episodic television, the template for Miami Vice’s style was established in the pilot episode by experienced television personnel who had worked on episodic action-adventure shows as well as “quality” serial drama. Director Thomas Carter had, like Anthony Yerkovich, worked on Hill Street Blues, and had also overseen episodes of Bruce Paltrow’s St. Elsewhere and The White Shadow as well as Remington Steele and

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Bret Maverick. Editor David Rosenbloom was yet another Hill Street Blues alumnus. Cinematographer Robert E. Collins had been Emmy nominated for his work on the pilot episode of Airwolf, and had also worked on Hart to Hart and Kojak. Visual consultant Mel Bourne, although best known for his collaborations with Woody Allen, had also worked on Kojak and the 1950s cop show Decoy. In large respects, therefore, this was a show originated by industry veterans. The one notable exception to this was Jan Hammer, the Czechoslovakian composer responsible for the show’s striking incidental music. Hammer had not previously worked on television, but his music for the 1983 teen movie A Night in Heaven showed that he could create the voguish synthesized scoring that had recently found its way into TV shows such as Knight Rider and Airwolf.26 (Like those shows, Miami Vice hit the airwaves during the unprecedented consumer boom in electronic keyboards, prompted by the release of the landmark Yamaha DX7 in 1983.27) Each episode of the show contained up to twenty minutes of synthesized music composed by Hammer, scored while watching a video rough cut sent to his farmhouse in upstate New York.28 Hammer used a Fairlight CMI synthesizer, in combination with a Memory Moog and Yamaha DX7, to create a diverse range of musical styles “from rock to reggae to jazz,” customized to fit the requirements of particular episodes.29 Hammer stated in interview that “[there] was very little thematic repetition. Every week the thing had its own concept and design.”30 Although post-production scoring was the industry norm for filmed shows, Hammer’s work practices and autonomy, and the extent to which the show eschewed generic or duplicated musical compositions, was highly unusual, and offered the show a distinctive aural style. Hammer’s original compositions worked in tandem with the (on average) three “source songs” used in every episode, which attracted attention to the show. The use of original pop and rock songs was at that point a highly unusual practice (Jeremy Butler notes its use in WKRP in Cincinnati (1978–82) as groundbreaking), requiring expensive royalties to be paid for the use of copyrighted music.31 Cinema, in contrast, frequently employed rock and pop tracks, the royalties for which often paled in comparison with the revenues generated by

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accompanying soundtrack albums. Miami Vice aspired to the production values of a “weekly movie,” and this had clear implications for its use of music. As Michael Mann pointed out to Rolling Stone with reference to the show’s use of rock and pop: “We’re only contemporary. And if we’re different from the rest of TV, it’s because the rest of TV isn’t even contemporary.”32 Mann’s comment was also made with reference to the show’s frequent comparison with MTV. While for some commentators, the notion of Miami Vice as “MTV cops” captured their sense of the show’s banality (Andrew Goodwin noted a tendency in the 1980s to blame MTV “for all manner of cultural phenomena”33), for others it provided the most obvious template for the show’s “music video” sequences. Mann, perhaps predictably, sought to play down the notion that the show was aping the music channel, stating that “if the whole video approach – stylized film along to song – is considered a movement, which it is, then you could say we’re first cousins.”34 He was certainly right to point to the fact that MTV had not originated this idea; 1960s cinema, with instances such as A Hard Day’s Night (1964), The Graduate (1967), Head (1968), and Easy Rider (1969), provided key precursors in the use of “stylized film along to song” with specific reference to pop and rock. But what had intrigued some observers, and disturbed others, was the notion that the show’s use of “source songs” was at the most tangentially connected to the progression of the story; the obvious point of comparison here was with a film such as Flashdance (1983), in which, as Justin Wyatt notes, “musical sequences serve as modular set pieces that fragment the narrative.”35 As Wyatt points out, this “modularity” worked in part to enable the “extraction of these images from the film for the film’s marketing and merchandising,” but the degree to which this represented a departure from the spectacle of performance that had long been part of the Hollywood musical was debatable.36 Moreover, as Richard Maltby reminds us, “the presentation of performance as autonomous spectacle is not confined to musicals, of course. Comedies have gag sequences, war movies have action sequences, thrillers have their final chase.”37 What was unusual about Miami Vice was the assumption that a TV cop show would have its musical sequences (the subsequent failure of

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Stephen Bochco’s short-lived Cop Rock (1990) might be thought of a limit case in the melding of music with cop action). Yet the extent to which these sequences are marked by the suspension of narrative development is questionable. Even the show’s prototypical music montage, the Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight” sequence from the pilot episode “Brother’s Keeper,” is far from the moveable, modular music-clip-style sequence which could be placed anywhere in the episode. On the contrary, it is anchored firmly in time and place. Prior to the beginning of the sequence we see Crockett confront Scotty, his ex-partner, whom he has just discovered is on the take, and has been busy lying to colleagues and his family. It is this discovery, and the way that it forces Crockett to retrospectively reevaluate a life of cop families and friendships that was built on deceit and drug money, that propels the music montage, as Crockett and Tubbs move with increased purpose toward their rendezvous with Calderon, the drug lord who facilitated the corruption of Scotty. Anthony Yerkovich, asked about the show’s use of music by The New York Times in January 1985, was keen to stress that the show’s music montages “are not gratuitous or extraneous to the story line but are designed to contribute to the dramatic narrative.”38 This example and others cited by this book indicate that, more often than not, this was indeed the case. Like many network shows, the pilot episode of Miami Vice began with a teaser (or “cold open”) designed to ensure the audience could be drawn quickly into events, and thus primed for the post-credit first scene. In it we see (as yet unintroduced) Ricardo Tubbs sit alone in a car in a dark city street, which the caption tells us is New York. While surveilling a limousine across the street, Tubbs is threatened by some knife-wielding hoodlums who are repelled by his sawn-off shotgun. Tubbs tails the limo to a nightclub, and follows the occupants inside. There, the limo’s high-rolling passenger (later revealed as Esteban Calderone, responsible for the death of Tubbs’s brother) enjoys champagne and female company, while Tubbs tips a waiter to spill a drink, and thus enable him to confront the high-roller in the restroom. The scheme seems to go to plan, but Tubbs loses his man in the murky depths of the club’s corridors and is forced to shoot one of his

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gun-toting henchmen. The high-roller escapes through a fire exit, and by the time Tubbs follows, he has vanished. Apart from chatter among the hoodlums, and the few words of warning that accompany Tubbs brandishing his shotgun, the fourand-a-half-minute teaser is without audible dialogue. Instead, we have skillful and efficient visual storytelling, relying on the basics of continuity editing and audience knowledge of setting, character types, and behavior to make events decipherable. The teaser necessarily leaves us with some key questions unanswered: who are these people?; why is one chasing the other?; just how did the other escape?; and why are we not in Miami?, but, propelled strongly by action, it is able to dispense with dialogue, and create a comprehensible and strongly plot-driven sequence. But this is not all the teaser is able to accomplish. We are introduced to two key location types that will feature in numerous episodes of the show; namely the dark streets of the city, and the neon-lit nightclub, moving to the beat of electronic pop music. We are also offered violence (an attempted mugging; a gunned-down assailant), insinuations of casual sex (the high-roller’s escorts; the neon “his” and “hers” restroom sign that suggests covert couplings), and conspicuous consumption (well-healed “yuppie” types swilling champagne), all of which will become familiar aspects of the show’s storyworld. We also have the meticulous attention to stylized framing, color, lighting, and composition that would come to characterize the show. As Tubbs exits the club to pursue the vanishing high-roller, his face is bathed in the club’s red neon light that spills from the door. This serves to emphasize danger, heat, and anger, as Tubbs visibly throbs with seething rage. Subsequently, we watch Tubbs run away from the camera and toward the back of the dark alley, until we see him in long shot with his back to us, looking left and right. He stops just far enough away for the hard key light to make his figure but an outline, edged with light, rendering him, if only for an instant, a flattened, faceless silhouette. This effect of chiaroscuro, a feature of many 1940s and 1950s crime melodramas (described by critics as films noirs), lends the scene a cinematic reference point that underlines the isolating torment of Tubbs’s predicament. In addition, the outline of the two sidewalks

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Tubbs in silhouette in “Brother’s Keeper.”

form symmetrical diagonals of kerbstone that stretch back to a central vanishing point, disappearing in the dark, and creating a vortex that threatens to suck Tubbs into the murky abyss. Such pictorial flourishes announce Miami Vice as decidedly stylish television, yet at no point does that style threaten to overwhelm what is a strongly action-oriented sequence; elements such as lighting, framing, and movement all work to support and enrich the meaning of the teaser, and hopefully keep us watching after the opening credits. Having established a mood of nighttime noir, the post-credit first scene introduces the third of the show’s iconic locales, the sun-kissed streets of Miami. It begins with the camera slithering up the figure of Sonny Crockett, as he leans against a wall, eyes focused on a young black man “body popping” on the street behind him. To the right of the frame we see the palm trees that fringe the beach trailing off into the distance. Crockett, in white linen suit, pastel blue T-shirt, and with shades on and cigarette in mouth, utters the aforementioned line

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“Five thousand street corners in Greater Miami and gumbo here gotta pick ours.” In addition to offering knowledgeable viewers an allusion to Casablanca, the line also serves to imbue Crockett with Rick Blaine/ Humphrey Bogart’s weary cynicism, and resonances of a star persona shaped through roles in films noirs such as The Big Sleep (1946), In a Lonely Place (1950), and (the Florida-set) Key Largo (1948). At the same time, Crockett’s languid physique, light-colored clothing, and mode of surveillance recall Jack Nicholson as J. J. Gittes in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1975). Widely recognized as a self-conscious descendent of a subset of 1940s and 1950s crime melodramas termed “Sunshine noir,” films such as Chinatown in part exchanged the dark nighttime streets for crimes no less shocking (often more so) for the fact that they were played out in brilliant sunshine.39 Taken together with the teaser, the opening of Miami Vice sets up a play of light and dark very much in keeping with “Sunshine noir,” one that would typify the show, and provide the basis for its distinctive light/pastel– dark/neon juxtaposition:

“Sunshine Noir” – Crockett in “Brother’s Keeper.”

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While highly unusual for television at that time, Miami Vice was by no means the first work to draw on the visual style of film noir, which was, as Steve Neale points out, “once an esoteric critical term,” but had by the mid-1980s achieved wider recognition, due in no small part to the phenomenon of “neo-noir,” evident in the style of films such as Chinatown, Point Blank (1967), The Long Goodbye (1973), and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), as well as Michael Mann’s own Thief (1981) and The Keep (1983).40 Jeremy Butler, in one of the few pieces of criticism to look in detail at Miami Vice’s approach to style, connects the show explicitly to 1940s and 1950s film noir, pointing to its rejection of standard “three point” lighting, unconventional “blocking” (positioning of figures in the frame), use of unusual camera positions (extreme low and high angle), and employment of strong blocks of black and white.41 Yet Butler focuses primarily on the disconcerting and distracting nature of such techniques, rarely indicating how they might be used to support and enhance the storytelling, which in large part they do, and often in striking and memorable ways. An instructive example can be found in the season two episode “Bushido.” The episode portrays a deadly game of “cat and mouse” between Lt. Castillo and CIA/KGB officers, who are in pursuit of Jack Gretsky (Dean Stockwell), a close friend of Castillo from his time in Vietnam. An early scene hints at the game-like nature of proceedings with Castillo’s killing of Gretsky, who is compelled to shoot his friend after he draws a gun. In so doing, Gretsky has positioned Castillo to protect his wife and child, who are also being chased. In the scene we see an expressive use of grid floor tiles to visually reinforce the importance of strategies and maneuvers, and the fact that Gretsky’s “move” has effectively placed Castillo as the main piece in the game. The grid of the floor, echoed on the walls, thus foreshadows events to come. A subsequent scene sees Castillo visit Gretsky’s wife, Laura (whose name just happens to be the title of Otto Preminger’s celebrated film noir from 1944). A striking low-angle shot shows Castillo posed like a chess piece on the checkered floor, while we also see the sheath of the oriental knife in Laura’s suitcase lid, hidden from Castillo’s view, making us question our notion of who may need protecting, and making Castillo’s move that much more risky.

Checkered tiles on the floor – the game begins in “Bushido.”

Castillo positioned as pawn as the events unfold.

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Making the right move – Castillo and Laura in peril.

The episode’s dénouement sees Castillo and Laura flee to a remote house in order to evade pursuing KGB agents, and their heightened peril is emphasized with a high-angled view of the pair in extreme long shot, positioning them as slender figures beside a cavernous expanse of checkered flooring. Shadows, windows and ceiling pattern echo the floor, and serve to reinforce the scale of the task confronting them. Thus, as the game has become more complex, the tiles have become progressively smaller and more numerous, reinforcing the sense that deciding how and where to move has become much more difficult. This is a striking approach to set design, shot selection, blocking, and composition that works in the service of storytelling, and is by no means a gratuitous exercise in style. What is also apparent here is the show’s very considered employment of television’s 1.33:1 (4:3) aspect ratio. Also known as the academy ratio, the 1.33:1 format was the standard aspect ratio for motion pictures until what John Belton describes as the “successful institutionalization”

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of widescreen formats such as CinemaScope and Todd-AO in the 1950s, so much so that “by the mid-1960s widescreen had become the norm.”42 Television did not see its own institutionalization of widescreen until the market penetration of widescreen TV sets in the 1990s. Until then films were either “panned and scanned” or, in the wake of Woody Allen’s stipulation for the release of Manhattan (1979) on video in 1985, “letterboxed” in order to retain their aspect ratio for television viewing, a compromise format which quickly became the choice for cinephiles.43 At the time of Miami Vice’s debut, therefore, recent films that could be advertised as uncensored and uninterrupted on cable TV or videocassette would still be subject to the impact of panning and scanning on original framing, shot composition, and editing choices, in the words of Belton playing “havoc with the work of directors, performers and cameramen.”44 As Stephen Spielberg commented on the 1981 television version of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), “it was a disaster. It looked worse than the super-8 movies I make myself.”45 Miami Vice offered by comparison a cinematically sophisticated approach to visual style constructed specifically for the 1.33:1 aspect ratio, and thus without compromise. In a period of increasing competition from cable and VCR formats, Miami Vice delivered a distinctively televisual experience of style that exploited the compositional qualities of the medium, geared to appeal to those who knew that their films didn’t look quite right on TV. Film noir was one of the academy ratio’s most distinctive looks, and offered the knowledgeable viewer the pleasure of cool generic allusion and even cooler graphical alignment. This stylized approach to composition in the academy ratio was most apparent in the first two seasons of the show, but also showed up in later seasons. Meticulous attention to set design, blocking, and framing resulted in striking shot sequences that employed the 1.33:1 ratio to dramatic effect. For example, in season one episode “Rites of Passage” we witness the interrogation of David Trainor (John Turturro), suspected of involvement in murdering the sister of Valerie (Pam Grier), Tubbs’s ex-girlfriend. The scene is shot from inside the adjacent viewing room, with the wall cast in dark shadow, which results in creating a frame within a frame.

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Flaunting the television aspect ratio in “Rites of Passage.”

The effect is to draw attention to the aspect ratio of television, while at the same time lending the scene a pictorial quality, as if we are viewing a bordered photo or painting. Implicit in this effect is the suggestion that the aspect ratio, rather than declaring television’s inferiority to cinematic widescreen, can, when in the hands of skilled stylists, instead align it with the “fine arts.” The use of a long lens also works to flatten the space in the room and helps to reduce a sense of depth, which makes it feel more cramped and intensifies the claustrophobia of the scene. The boldness of the shot lies in the flaunting of the aspect ratio, which not only refutes the superiority of cinematic widescreen, but has the audacity to make the “small screen” even smaller, confident in the knowledge that it will actually enhance the intensity of the scene. A similar point regarding the exploiting of television’s formal characteristics can be made in reference to the show’s use of color. Over the first two seasons Miami Vice became widely known for its use of

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pastel colors, which did much to shape its distinctive look. As a number of commentators have noted, the pastel shades were inspired by Miami’s subtropical setting with “corals, key limes, aquas, pinks – all native to the coastal city.”46 Exterior and interior locations, as well as costuming – most famously Don Johnson’s suits – were colorcoordinated in a range of pastel tones. This was clearly a distinctive color scheme, and the degree to which it was adhered to was most striking, with the production crew repainting parts of South Beach to maintain the strictures of the palette. Yet, as Jim Johnson, one of the show’s directors pointed out, “the lime greens, the pinks, and the blues not only represent the colors of South Florida but they transmit very well on television.”47 As Michael Mann relayed, “we didn’t pick pastels so people could say how smart things looked; pastels vibrate.”48 As Mann’s and Johnson’s comments imply, not all colors work so well on television. The analogue NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) signal used for US broadcasting in the 1980s relied upon requirements for color transmission established in the 1950s, and included FCC stipulations with regards to keeping to “broadcast safe colors.”49 This limited the range that could be used on television in order to avoid highly saturated colors that had a tendency to “bleed,” such as deep rich reds, which could be so arresting in paintings, photography, and in the cinema. (Indeed, it is worth looking at the use of bold reds in Brian De Palma’s Scarface, which employed many of the same locations and architectural features of Miami, to see the contrast with Miami Vice.) What was so striking about Miami Vice was the decision to turn television’s limitation into an advantage; to concentrate with unprecedented precision and magnitude on a focused section of the color spectrum that the medium could handle relatively well.50 Conversely, at times the show employed certain colors and hues specifically to exploit their tendency to become visually “unstable.” If theatrical motion pictures were inevitably “toned down” for television, then Miami Vice set out to offer a strikingly vivid contrast. As mentioned, seasons one and two set up a pastel color scheme that is adhered to meticulously (so much so that in season two episode “Phil the Shill” Izzy Moreno warns a party guest wearing brown shoes that everyone has to be “color cooperated” (sic)). A typical

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example from season two episode “Tale of the Goat” shows Crockett and Tubbs arriving at a suspect’s house coordinating not just with each other’s outfits but also with the car they drive, with shirts and vehicle all in the turquoise-to-cobalt range of the color spectrum. An earlier episode (“Give a Little, Take a Little”) shows the same car arriving to meet another suspect, this time perfectly color-coordinated with the turquoise shades of the house’s exterior paintwork. One of the most striking examples of the show’s use of pastel colors is in the season two opener “Prodigal Son,” in which Crockett and Tubbs venture to New York City. Filming on location in Manhattan, Don Johnson told The New York Times that “We’re going to make it look beautiful. We’re going to shoot New York like no one’s ever shot it before.”51 In part, that meant adorning the city’s inhabitants in pastel tones, most strikingly in one of the early scenes when Crockett and Tubbs walk by a street corner where all passers by are decked out in pinks, pale blues and yellow, creating darts of color on an otherwise drab grey block. A similar effect is achieved in a subsequent scene which populated a sidewalk café with pastel-wearing customers. By transporting the show’s subtropical color scheme to New York, Miami Vice was clearly abandoning the locational justification that accompanied its use in Miami. Here, pastel is used primarily for audience entertainment, used to acknowledge tacitly the fact that the show’s color scheme was having an impact out there in the “real world,” and in the Big Apple. (A twelve-page fashion spread on “The High Style of Miami Vice” carried by New York magazine in March 1985 includes the addresses of Manhattan boutiques where such pastel clothing could be purchased.52) As part of season two’s feature-length opener, such moments were also an opportunity for the producers to capitalize on the hype that was then accompanying the show, and accentuate many of its stylistic features. A similar point could be made about the episode’s most sustained use of dramatic color, which sees Crockett traverse the nighttime city streets, lit with a pale-blue glow. Accompanied by the Glen Frey song “You Belong to the City,” composed specially for the episode, Crockett wanders the streets of Manhattan as the song’s lyrics state “You belong to the night, / Livin’ in a river of darkness, / Beneath the neon lights.” Returning to the

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New York streets of the pilot episode, the sequence reprises the noir aesthetic, this time using the luminance of Crockett’s pastel-blue suit, an extreme long shot and a high angle to isolate him in the darkness. James Contner, director of photography on the episode and much of the second season, states that the appearance of such shots in Miami Vice was in part the result of recent developments in highspeed 35mm color negative stock, which was able to capture both rich blacks and neon colors in ways previously much more difficult.53 Caldwell notes that, as the 1980s progressed, the “quality of the film stocks allowed for a kind of visual sophistication impossible during the zero-degree telefilm years of the 1960s and 1970s,” and also points to comparable advances in lighting, lenses, and filters as instrumental in making possible a “new level of visual detail in front of the camera.”54 The result, he argues, was that “even relatively traditional-looking and visually restrained shows like Cagney and Lacey postured an identifiable visual stance.”55 In large part as a consequence of the impact of Miami Vice, many more shows on network television sought to create a “look” as part of their distinctive appeal. While some shows found their own styles, others pilfered them, and prompted by pastel-hued imitators Hollywood Beat and The Insiders, and the fact that the intensified focus on visual style required it to stay ahead of the game, Miami Vice adjusted its color scheme in season three, with a TV Guide advert timed to coincide with the premiere promising “New Look! New Season!” Titled “When Irish Eyes are Crying,” season three’s opening installment offered a statement of intent, both in terms of its subject matter, which addressed the troubles in Northern Ireland, and a color scheme which sought to visually reinforce the shift to what was widely perceived to be a more somber and serious tone. From the episode’s teaser, which depicts a slide show on the conflict in Northern Ireland by republican Sean Carroon (Liam Neeson), the striking use of emerald green is on show, adorning the room, and coloring Carroon’s attire, and that of Gina Santiago, watching enchanted in the audience in an emerald green jacket. Emerald green is of course associated with Ireland, so the use of it here has a symbolism in keeping with the episode’s theme and tone. Strategically, then, placing this episode at the head of the season enabled the show

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to announce its new look in a way that was allied to subject matter it could powerfully support. The colorful diffusion of the new mood is completed in a subsequent scene which introduces Crockett’s and Tubbs’s new look, which comprises an ultramarine jacket for the former and a silvery-blue shirt and tie for the latter, used to help signify that this season the detectives were entering into a deeper and murkier, but no less color-coordinated, world. If the pastels of seasons one and two allude to fun in the sun, then season three’s colors are about stepping off Miami Beach and into the deep blue sea. Nowhere is this watery symbolism used more evocatively than in season three episode “Knock Knock … Who’s There?”, which concerns the corruption of a federal agent. Desperate for money to pay her sick child’s hospital bills, and with a wheelchairbound ex-cop husband, DEA agent Linda Colby coordinates fake drug busts for the dealer Esteban Montoya (Ian McShane). A number of scenes depict Colby’s meetings with Montoya to set up the heists, which take place around the waterfront at night. Green filters are used to cast an eerie glow on proceedings, as Montoya’s boat glides up to the dock and deposits the caped figure on the side. Underlining his status as a figure of the underworld, the caped and urbane Montoya is styled as a variation on Bela Lugosi’s Count Dracula, stepping off the Demeter and offering his prey a seductive and diabolical pact. The green glow not only symbolizes the depths to which Colby has sunk, but also exploits the color’s association with the instability of fate (green being the color of gambling tables) as Colby undertakes her perilous game of risk. Other episodes in the season make striking use of green gels and filters to enhance nighttime sequences (“Lend Me an Ear,” “Kill Shot”), while others opt for crimson, magenta, and indigo color schemes (“Red Tape,” “Streetwise,” “Heroes of the Revolution”), supplemented on occasion by mustard yellows and cobalt blues. Perhaps not surprisingly, this striking shift in the look of the show was picked up on by commentators. A piece by Roger Simon for TV Guide in March 1987, entitled “What’s Black and Blue and Hurtin’ All Over? Miami Vice, Pal!”, took the show’s new color scheme to task. Simon complained that “when it premiered, it was hot, fast and colorful … [b]ut

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now, in its third season, the show seems to have descended into the cold, dark depths of someone’s troubled soul. The color scheme is literally black and blue. Everything is darker, colder, murkier.”56 When the Advertiser noted in July 1987 that season four of the show was reported to be “toss[ing] out the murky blues and purples in a bid to win back fans” and returning to “the pastels and hip pinks” that “made the show,” it was clear that color was much more than a superfluous decorative garnish; instead it underpinned the sensibility of the show in ways that were widely recognized and understood. Contrary to the Advertiser’s prediction, season four of the show did not see a wholesale return to the initial pastel schema. Instead it tends to alternate episodes emphasizing cobalt blues and those which opt for pastel shades, which reflect the season’s marked veering between comedic and somber episodes (a feature addressed in detail in chapter 3). What is lost is the rigorous adherence to a limited color range that had characterized earlier seasons. Indeed, the season opener, “Contempt of Court,” commences with scenes set inside a dark woodpaneled courthouse, something clearly noted by The New York Times when it pointed out that “a show once slavishly devoted to pastels has dipped into earth tones.”57 In many ways the most arresting shift in the use of color appears in the final season, and was signaled by the recruiting of Pam Marcotte as the show’s new art director. Marcotte, who had recently completed work on Robert Redford’s film The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), a story of corruption and racial injustice in New Mexico, transferred her eye for the tones, shapes and textures of the Latino-influenced American southwest to Miami Vice. While previous seasons were informed by the cool geometric patterns of Miami’s Art Deco, Streamline Moderne, and Modernist architecture, season five draws on the city’s equally striking range of early twentieth-century Mediterranean revival buildings to introduce rust and terracotta shades, at the same time embracing stucco surfaces and baroque decoration, arches and balconies. This newfound willingness to employ organic textures (wood and ceramics) offered the show yet another “look,” one that combined swathes of color with elaborately ornamental façades. For instance, the episode “The Lost Madonna”

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Renaissance perspective in “The Lost Madonna.”

features an art auction taking place in a circular atrium replete with classical details – balconies, columns, and a fountain – and terracotta walls, but retained one of the show’s signature colors (aquamarine) for the chairs and lectern. The mise-en-scene is thoroughly in keeping with the episode’s focus on the trafficking of a stolen Italian Renaissance art work. Indeed, the attention to the symmetry of composition and shot blocking, and to balance and proportion, seeks clearly to replicate the look of a Renaissance painting; right down to the inclusion of a window to generate a sense of perspective and depth. The scene, and the shot, is every bit as meticulously composed as any in previous seasons, and again seeks to use the aspect ratio and all the techniques of cinematographic composition to create a highly stylized image that works in support of the episode’s storyline. In one important way, however, the use of Mediterranean revival architecture did signal an interesting symbolic shift. While Art Deco

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and Streamline Moderne spoke to fantasies of tomorrow, in the sense that their sleek forms embodied utopian fantasies of technology and progress, Mediterranean revival spoke in contrast to fantasies of yesterday, drawing as it did on Byzantine, Moorish, and Classical influences. As Joanna Lombard and Beth Dunlop point out, the style flourished during the Miami boom years of the 1920s, and was fantasy architecture befitting a place that “was an invention, a tropical wonderland built on swamp and muck.”58 For a show that had grown to fame by being on the cutting edge, the decision to look “classical” was a telling volte-face. Speaking in interview before the transmission of season five, Michael Mann stated that “the aim is to do a series of classic Vices.”59 Mediterranean revival, which sought to recapture the splendor of antiquity, was a stylish way to signal the show’s backward glance to its own idealized forms, even if, as the next chapter suggests, the degree to which this was followed through at the level of story is debatable. The other major way in which season five represented a departure from the show’s signature style was in its use of music. With the departure of Jan Hammer scoring was provided by Tim Truman, who introduced a marked emphasis on guitar sounds (both rock and classical) into the synthesized incidental music, often employing Flamenco-influenced riffs to support the visual backdrops outlined above. Featured music also drew extensively on rock guitar, from heavy-metal performers such as Guns ’n’ Roses (“Leap of Faith”), Iron Maiden (“Line of Fire”), and Robert Plant (“Fruit of the Poison Tree”), to rock artists such as Joe Cocker (“Heart of the Night”), Iggy Pop (“Bad Timing”), and U2 (“Fruit of the Poison”), and also Progressive rock bands such The Alan Parsons Project (“World of Trouble”) and The Church (“Asian Cut”). While rock had always featured as part of the show’s array of music, the extent of its use in season five, together with the lack of pop and soul music so pronounced in earlier seasons, did much to alter the ambience of the show. This was in part recognition of shifts in musical taste. In season five episode “Line of Fire” Crockett and Tubbs are charged with looking after Keith Mullis (Justin Lezzard), brought to Miami as the FBI’s key witness in a drug case. Mullis, in his late teens/early twenties, is a self-styled “metal head,” excited to visit Miami’s “moshing scene” and

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“insane clubs.” After Mullis subjects Crockett and Tubbs to a blast of heavy guitar from his cassette player, Crockett opines that “this speed metal crap is just warmed over Hendrix riffs.” The detectives “babysit” Mullis in a suite in the (Spanish revival) Biltmore hotel in Coral Gables, where he treats them to the heavy metal sounds of Ministry’s “Stigmata” video on music television before absconding to a speed metal club called the Rusty Needle. Crockett, arriving in stonewashed denim jacket, and looking like the young man’s still hip but definitely aging father (an impression reinforced by referring to his charge as “junior”), retrieves Mullis after a bewildered look at the chaotic mass of moshing bodies. The episode’s most telling moment comes when it seeks to depict music television. When Mullis turned on the TV the audience is offered a sustained earful and eyeful of Ministry’s (real) music video, which employs a furious, rapidly cut montage of eyeballs, filmed in extreme close-up. In many ways, this is the “MTV cops” that the show never was; an almost impenetrable surface of rapidly cut and discordant images, largely devoid of narrative meaning. As the clip blasts away, Crockett, Tubbs, and Trudy quietly read newspapers in an adjacent room. At the end of “Line of Fire” we find out that Keith Mullis is in actual fact Joey Chandler (a name that suggests the creators of Friends may have once watched this episode), an undercover cop masquerading as the FBI witness in order to protect the real Mullis. Chandler appears later again in season five, in the episode “Leap of Faith,” which had been created as a potential “episode as pilot,” an economical piloting strategy that the networks had turned to in the mid-1980s.60 In “Leap of Faith” Joey is persuaded to join with other twentysomething cops (including Laura San Giacomo as Tania Louis) in Miami’s YCU (Young Criminal Unit), going undercover as students at Bradfield college. The episode’s plot sees the YCU investigate a professor suspected of being a designer drug pharmacologist responsible for the deaths of student guinea-pigs. As may be clear, this was a brazen, and entirely unsuccessful, attempt to imitate the success of the Stephen J. Cannell-produced Fox show 21 Jump Street (1987–91), starring Johnny Depp as Officer Tom Hanson, part of a squad of youthful cops who go undercover as high-school students to investigate teenage

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crime. As Alisa Perren notes in her study of Fox, 21 Jump Street was a major success for the new network, and proved particularly popular with the youthful demographic for whom Miami Vice had originally been conceived. As she states, 21 Jump Street “had early on attracted a strong following among teenage girls [and] had continued to expand its audience base … At the beginning of [1989] Variety estimated that, for every television set on, one out of every two women age 18–49 was watching 21 Jump Street. By the summer of ’89, the show was also number one with men ages 18–34.”61 Moreover, Perren notes that, on the back of the success of shows like 21 Jump Street, and others such as Married … with Children and Cops, Fox was “pushing the boundaries of style and content in ways that programs on ABC, CBS and NBC were not.” The network began to “establish a particular profile for itself with the press and public” as a broadcaster of programming that was “younger, riskier and – in the increasingly used term, ‘edgier’ – than what could be found on the Big Three.”62 In the face of the niche demographic success and edgier style of Fox, Miami Vice’s episode thus took an ill-fated “Leap of Faith” in more ways than one. What is rather telling about the episode is the approach it employs to television style, which is surprisingly “zerodegree” for Miami Vice; in many ways not so dissimilar from the look of many of Cannell’s hit shows (Hunter, The A-Team, The Rockford Files). However, while largely devoid of artful cinematic composition, low-key lighting, or meticulous color coordination, the episode does contain showcase moments of overt visual display, but in the form of computer-animated special effects. Near the end of the episode, as one of the college students comes under the influence of the lethal designer drug “Bliss,” the scene cuts to a subjective point-of-view shot of the student’s narcotic hallucination, rendered as pixilated confusion. If Miami Vice had been conceived as part of a wave of “new visual sophistication” and cinematic style, then “Leap of Faith” saw the show trying in vain to spin off to a demographic for whom the “cutting edge” of style was likely to be found not in art cinema, but increasingly in the realm of video game consoles and the home computer; how many youthful viewers watching 21 Jump Street cared about chiaroscuro lighting in the age of Nintendo?

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In his survey of style in 1980s television, Caldwell notes that the end of the decade saw the emergence of “recessionary aesthetics” as “the bottom line became a corporate obsession; mean and lean the central principle of network management.” By the early 1990s many of the period’s expensive and prestige shows had been cancelled: Dallas, Dynasty, Moonlighting, St Elsewhere, China Beach, Hill Street Blues, and Miami Vice had all gone, as “cheaper forms of programming were slotted to take the dramatic series’ place.”63 As has become increasingly clear with the benefit of hindsight, such events were in part a consequence of the complex recalibration of broadcasting to the realities of the “neo-network” era, and the rise of original drama on cable television (HBO’s The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, The Wire; FX’s Nip/Tuck, The Shield; ABC’s Mad Men) has ushered in a new phase of critically lauded televisuality. In Miami-set dramas such as Nip/Tuck and CSI: Miami one can certainly discern the lingering legacy of the emphasis upon style apparent in Miami Vice, nowhere more so than in the strict stipulation by Nip/Tuck creator Ryan Murphy that on that series “no pastels were allowed.”64

Chapter 3

Losing the Plot? Storytelling in Miami Vice

In May 1984, veteran Washington Post TV columnist John Carmody reviewed the NBC network’s newly announced roster of debuting shows, due to air in the fall. NBC was to introduce nine new series, which comprised three sitcoms (including The Cosby Show) and six one-hour dramas (including Hunter, Highway to Heaven, and Miami Vice). Carmody was concerned that NBC, in seeking to redress its perennial last-place finish in the prime-time ratings since 1976, had made a grave error, and pointed out that “despite the success this past season of ‘serials’ such as Dynasty and Dallas, none of the new NBC dramas will have a continuing storyline.”1 Based upon the tremendous popularity of prime-time soap operas such as Dynasty, Dallas, and Falcon Crest, but also the critical plaudits afforded so-called “quality” prime-time dramas such as Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere, thirtysomething, and L.A. Law, Jane Feuer notes that the “serial form was the aesthetically dominant narrative innovation of the decade.”2 As she points out, prior to the 1980s, the continuing storyline had been the almost exclusive preserve of the day-time soap opera; prime-time shows in various genres operated as episodic narratives, where (apart from occasional two-part episodes) storylines were resolved at the end of individual episodes, and no significant stories carried over to the next installment. In swimming against the tide in 1984, NBC was therefore seen to be forgoing the audience-pleasing features of the serial format. Whether it was Hill Street Blues’s injection of complex character-oriented seriality into the cop-show format, or the melodramatic excess of

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long-simmering and exploding family feuding in Dynasty, prime-time serials offered “on-going stories about compelling characters facing difficult obstacles.”3 It was in particular what Michael Z. Newman identifies as “a distinct mode of investment in character” that provided the richness of the format; what Christine Geraghty cites as “a greater concern with the domestic and emotional life of characters” made possible by the drama of ongoing storylines.4 For Geraghty, this also resulted in “a blurring of the boundaries between soap opera and other genres,” as cop shows became more melodramatic, and primetime soaps departed from their daytime siblings in “mov[ing] to stories which emphasize adventure and action,” a strategy which worked allegedly to attract more female viewers to the former, and male viewers to the latter.5 With offerings such as Hunter and Highway to Heaven, NBC was clearly staking its hopes on the appeal of novel new set-ups for strongly plot-driven episodic series. This turned out to be a savvy move as both proved popular with audiences and ran for numerous seasons. Writing prior to the debut of these new offerings, Carmody did not foresee Miami Vice’s emphasis on style, which would mark it out from its “zero-degree” network stable mates. As chapter 2 makes clear, for those observers commenting on the show during its network run, style became an overriding concern (with profiles of Johnson and Michael Thomas coming a distant second, at least initially). Plot, if it was discussed at all, most typically featured as an example of what the show was missing. Michael Pollan, writing in 1985, stated that the show sought to dispense with “logic, plausibility, the whole bland business of cause and effect.” Concurring, Todd Gitlin commented in the following year that the “throwaway plot is full of holes.” Stephanie Brush, looking back at the end of season five, remarked sardonically that “there was never so much as a single comprehensible plot to mar the series’ five-year run.”6 Jane Feuer, writing in Seeing Through the Eighties, concluded that Miami Vice was “often unreadable at the level of narrative or, worse, readable as a mainstream, sexist cop show whose premise was unbelievable.”7 While the so-called “quality” drama could be forgiven for downgrading plot for an emphasis on character development and complexity (commentators typically

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indulged Hill Street Blues’s tendency to leave plot strands unresolved), such allowances were evidently not to be made for the emphasis on style that characterized Miami Vice. Just how terrible was Miami Vice’s plotting? Commentators tended to be satisfied with asserting, rather than proving, that plot was unreadable, incomprehensible, or implausible. Incomprehensible to whom? Implausible as what? Such questions were never really answered. Was it not possible to follow the plot of Miami Vice in the way that one might follow the plot of Dragnet, Columbo, or Remington Steele? This chapter seeks to submit Miami Vice’s plotting to rather more careful scrutiny than has been typical of approaches to the show. In the first section, it draws on examples from episodes to see whether they can be seen to adhere to what Kristin Thompson calls the “principles and strategies of teleplay writing” as they pertain to episodic series.8 As Thompson points out, there is a substantial body of work which lays out the “aesthetic norms of commercial television,” but this is not one “generated within what one would call television studies proper.”9 Writers that have looked in detail at the subject have drawn productively on the range of teleplay manuals that, as Thompson points out, set out the range of techniques which “are normative within the industry.”10 This range of material provides a framework with which to assess the extent to which Miami Vice worked within those norms, or whether it truly did, as one commentator was moved to assert, go “to war with each week with the entire tradition of Western dramaturgy.”11 As this chapter indicates, the best place to start is with an actual script. The second objective of this chapter is to provide a detailed overview of the kinds of stories that those plots were employed to convey across the show’s five-season run. Again, we are served rather poorly by the existing range of work on the show, much of which was in any case written part way through its five seasons. Can we discern distinct shifts in the sorts of stories that the show plotted in particular seasons, and, if so, how might we seek to make sense of those shifts with reference to the commercial imperatives impinging upon network television drama? Why, for instance, did the show move to stretches of serialized story arcing at moments during seasons four and five?

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Perhaps most intriguing of all, while most accounts of the show have been content to describe it as one in which undercover cops infiltrated the drugs trade, a more thorough overview suggests that at points in its run this was not really the case. If this is so, then what else did it become?

“You’ve been reading ahead.”12 The plotting of Miami Vice, like that of any prime-time series, was determined by the commercial imperatives of network television. Drama series are required to fill out a one-hour slot in the schedule, with sixteen to eighteen minutes of that hour devoted to the three commercial breaks that punctuate it at relatively regular intervals. As Thompson notes, plotting an episode around these commercial breaks results in it being divided into “large-scale parts, or acts,” a convention that has become so well established that even more recent shows on premium cable networks (such as HBO’s The Sopranos) that are not interrupted by commercials tend to divide up their plotting into acts, albeit with rather more flexibility.13 In part, this is because in addition to its clear commercial function, the one-hour drama’s fouract structure offers, as Newman notes, “a sense of proportion and symmetry, ensures steadily rising action, and organizes patterns of attention and expectation, with first acts opening casual chains that are carried across the second and third acts to be resolved (at least partially) in the fourth.”14 As Thompson points out, this four-act structure, reiterated time and again in teleplay manuals, has come to be one of the one-hour drama’s aesthetic norms.15 The first act introduces the events which will form the basis for the episode, the “inciting incident” which will propel the plot. The act ends with a surprise or “cliffhanger,” used to ensure that the audience returns after the ensuing commercial break. The second act sees, as Newman puts it, “characters respond to complications caused by this surprise.”16 The end of the second act will typically feature a dramatic twist which makes more difficult the characters’ move toward resolution, and ratchets up the tension. The third act sees characters seek to deal with

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the consequences of this twist, and develop revised plans for a resolution, with the act’s cliffhanger being provided by the anticipation of whether, and if so how, this attempted resolution will be achieved. The fourth and final act (in most instances) sees the issues of the story being resolved. As may be apparent, this structure is a variation on the three-act structure typical of Hollywood films (although Thompson argues that most films are actually divided into four acts), which is itself modeled on the arrangement first described by Aristotle in Politics and Poetics.17 One essential difference in television plotting is the importance of the act-ending cliffhangers, which seek to dissuade viewers from switching off or over to another show during the commercials. In addition, one other consequence of the commercial breaks is what Thompson calls “a more diffused, redundant exposition” than in film, which seeks to accommodate viewers who may be tuning in halfway through. This may involve a (more or less subtle) story recap by one of the characters.18 As Newman points out “recapping is a ubiquitous feature of television in all genres.”19 In addition to acts, a teleplay’s structure can also be broken down into plotlines and scenes (or “beats” in industry parlance). A show such as Hill Street Blues had typically numerous plotlines running at one time, some to be resolved in an individual episode, others to be carried over into subsequent installments. In contrast episodic dramas with smaller casts of regular characters usually comprise of a major and a minor plotline (or subplot). “Beats” are, as Newman states, “television’s most basic storytelling unit,” short segments of the story, each of which “tells us something new, something we want – need – to know, and amplifies our desire to know more.”20 Writers break stories down into “a moment by moment outline, or ‘beat-sheet,’” with each episode “having a total of between twenty and forty beats.”21 Working in beats enables the writers to map out the balance of major and minor plots, the duration and patterning of acts, and the proportion of screen time afforded different characters in specific episodes. An examination of the script for “The Savage” (retitled as “Duty and Honor”), which was broadcast in season three of Miami Vice, makes clear the extent to which the show adhered to the basic aesthetic

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norms of the episodic series. At fifty pages long, the script is just shy of the average for a 1980s hourly drama (each page equates to approximately one minute of screen time, with the average script being fiftyfour pages).22 The script includes the show’s mandatory teaser, followed by four acts, each of which ends with a “cliffhanger” or revelation. The teaser sets up the major plot, beginning with a flashback depicting Lieutenant Castillo investigating the murder of prostitutes in Vietnam in 1972, with the words “VC Whore” written in blood above a victim’s body. A Vietnamese police officer, Nguyen Van Trang, is also at the scene, investigating the murders. A dissolve brings us forward to Miami in 1986, with Castillo viewing the same words scrawled above the body of an American prostitute, thus setting up the basics of the “inciting incident” for the episode. Act one sees Castillo organize the investigation, with Crockett and Tubbs charged with visiting a Vietnam veterans’ hospital to interview likely suspects. The act also introduces two minor plotlines; the first is the arrival of Espinoza, a Honduran politician due to speak in Miami, with protection arranged by CIA officer Jack Coleman, while the second depicts Crockett’s romance with Dr. Sarita Montoya. The act sees the arrival of Nguyen Van Trang at the Miami crime scene, convinced that the Vietnamese killer had come to the city. The act also includes a montage, which covers Gina and Trudy searching the streets, Crockett and Tubbs interviewing veterans, and the killer searching out his next prey. The act ends with the killer striking again in Miami. Act two begins with Crockett and Tubbs investigating the new murder, and the revelation that spates of prostitute murders across the globe have been followed quickly by political assassinations, thus linking up with the minor plot involving Espinoza’s talk in Miami. Castillo orders the Vice team to step up the hunt for the killer, who has now been upgraded to a political assassin. Gina, patrolling the streets disguised as a prostitute, manages to attract the killer, but an attempted arrest fails as he escapes and drives off. Crockett sets off in pursuit, with the consequence that the fleeing killer crashes his car into a storefront, which then bursts into flames. The act ends with the spectacular explosion and the killer slipping away from the wreckage out of sight of Crockett and the rest of the police.

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Act three opens with sketches of the killer being distributed to Coleman to help with Espinoza’s protection. It also picks up on Crockett’s relationship with Dr Montoya, as she offers her opinions on the case, and he sees her called into action to aid a stabbing victim at the hospital’s ER. Crockett’s and Tubbs’s interviews at the vet hospital finally bear fruit, as they find out about an assassin called “the Savage,” who used to kill Viet Cong behind enemy lines, but who was castrated during an attack on a VC soldier posing as a prostitute. Castillo calls in “a marker” from an ex-CIA colleague for further information on the case. The distributed photos of “the Savage” have the desired effect, as a hotel clerk recognizes the striking resemblance to a guest, and tips off the police. However, by the time Crockett, Trang, and Castillo arrive, the clerk is dead and the killer is gone. The act ends with the revelation of Coleman’s involvement, as the killer sits down in an armchair in his employer’s hotel room. Act four commences with a heated exchange between Coleman and the killer, where it becomes clear that Coleman has hired the killer before for other assassinations, and chooses to regard the killing of prostitutes as simply the obligatory price of hiring his employee. Castillo and Trang find out from the hospitalized Vietnam vet that Coleman was the killer’s handler in Vietnam, and make straight for his hotel. Castillo and Trang confront Coleman, who admits coordinating the killings, stating that “our government figures Espinoza as a dangerous agitator.” Trang realizes that the killer will probably reprise his technique of killing VC in their sleep, and departs for Espinoza’s hotel, where he is sleeping soundly. As Crockett and Tubbs depart the office to join the rush to save Espinoza, Trudy informs them that Trang is not who he says he is, as the real Trang was killed in 1968. Meanwhile, Castillo and “Trang” save Espinoza and kill the assassin, but when Castillo gets wounded in the process, “Trang” slips away to kill Coleman. The act ends with Castillo recuperating at his house, and opening a letter sent from “Trang,” explaining how he is really a colonel in the North Vietnamese army, and is hunting “the Savage” down for killing innocent victims that the US government deemed targets. A viewing of the actual episode confirms the degree to which it adheres to the structure plotted out in the script. Where alterations

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are made, these are largely at the service of a tighter focus on the main plotline, rather than to facilitate a digression into surface pleasures or “autonomous” spectacle. For instance, the minor plot involving Crockett’s girlfriend, Dr Montoya, is removed from act three, and a scene in which Switek and Crockett trade insults is omitted from the second act. The ex-CIA operative tells Castillo that Coleman is the killer’s handler, thus making the scene returning to the hospital to hear this from the Vietnam vet unnecessary. The montage sequence in act one is moved to the end of the act, and extended to include seeing the killer strike again, thus placing it more at the service of plot progression. The biggest changes come in act three, which employs a more dynamic intercutting of scenes than in the script, as the police close in on the killer in his hotel, and ends with the killer seeing himself on TV rather than meeting with Coleman, and leaves us waiting for Crockett and Tubbs to storm the building, fearing that the clerk is about to get murdered. One key setting change at the end of the final act sees Castillo on a beach, rather than in his home, and having the letter from “Trang” delivered to him by Crockett and Tubbs. This change allows the show’s main stars to feature in the final scene, and also enables the episode to end by slowly tracking and zooming out to an extreme long shot of the three against the crashing waves, befitting the reflective mood as Castillo learns the truth about his “friend.” What is clear from the filmed episode is the extent to which it seeks to replicate, and in many ways strengthen, the script’s close observation of the mandate that each beat “tells us something new, something we want – need – to know.” Indeed, it omits the only “beat” that seems rather superfluous in that respect – namely Crockett and Dr Montoya’s second meeting.23 Dialogue that is removed is without question that which does not propel the plot forward, and any additional dialogue not in the script is used to sharpen up the lines of cause and effect. The explosion of the killer’s car at the end of act two provides a moment of action-adventure spectacle, but works to create a major cliffhanger for the break, since in the episode we do not see the killer escape, and are left wondering whether he has perished in the fireball (rather supporting Murray Smith’s observation that, contrary to conventional wisdom, in action sequences “the plot advances through

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spectacle”24). The subplot involving Espinoza gets tied to the main plot at the moment when it can work most effectively as a complicating surprise. The first scene in act three works in part to recap the events so far, so as to draw in viewers who may have missed something. Overall, what is clear is the degree to which everything works in the service of the “tight dramatic act structure” typical of the prime-time drama. “Duty and Honor” is an episode from season three, overseen by future Law and Order (1990–present) creator Dick Wolf (the script’s redraft was by Wolf and John Schulian), who had been brought in partly to oversee a shift to more serious storylines (something to which I will return later in the chapter). Yet even one of the most lighthearted episodes from season two, such as “Phil the Shill,” can be seen to adhere to the basic principles of the four-act teleplay structure. The episode has two main plotlines: the first which involves the exploits of Phil Mayhew, a conman game show host played by Phil Collins; and the second concerns Crockett’s and Tubbs’s attempts to bust drug dealer Tony Rivers. Act one sees Phil swindle Switek out of winning on his game show, while a tracking device placed on Rivers’s Mercedes gives away the dealer’s involvement in a homicide. Act two sees Crockett and Tubbs set up as coke buyers as Rivers looks to expand his business, but also sees the plots combine as Phil woos Sarah, Rivers’s girlfriend, who looks after drug supplies for wealthy customers. Act three sees Phil attempt to swindle Sarah’s customers out of their drug money, while Crockett and Tubbs continue to get closer to Rivers. The act ends with Sarah finding out about Phil’s plan, and taking him to Rivers’s boat for retribution. Act four sees Phil lucky to escape from Rivers, with the stipulation that he act as intermediary in the drug deal in order to protect Rivers’s position. Crockett and Tubbs intercept Phil, and enlist his cooperation with the promise of immunity in return for putting Rivers behind bars. The act ends with a gun fight at the arranged meeting place, with Rivers shot dead and Phil managing to make his escape. As is the case with “Duty and Honor,” each beat of the episode progresses the plot; even those beats which offer additional pleasures, such as the use of “source songs” or shots of beautiful beachfront homes with striking interiors, also include valuable new plot information.

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While “Phil the Shill” may not attain the heights of Aristotelian complexity, it does at least adhere to the fundamentals of teleplay structure, an assessment that holds true for the show as a whole. This is not to say that some episodes of Miami Vice do not do this more adeptly than others. As Richard Blum and Richard Lindheim point out, “within the normal production schedule (twenty-two episodes per season), there are bound to be several clinkers – episodes that started out well but were plagued by problems.”25 One of the advantages of the series format is that weaker episodes can be “put on the shelf and scheduled when they will do the least harm to the series as a whole,” an option not available to the serial, which operates with the demands for continuity made by multi-episode character and story arcs.26 If the series form is largely free of the need for multi-episode continuity that is the hallmark of the serial, it does however have its own strategy for ensuring consistency across installments, the “narrative problematic” that characterizes the form. Jeremy Butler notes that “because fundamentally the series is a repeatable form, there must be some narrative kernel that recurs every week … some dilemma with which it deals every episode.”27 Indeed, Butler uses Miami Vice as an example of how this works, stating that the show’s recurring problematic is: “Will Crockett and/or Tubbs surrender to the temptations (the ‘Vice’) they are immersed in and become villains? Individual episodes counterpose various antagonists against Crockett and Tubbs, but overriding these specific concerns is the more general issue of their moral character.”28 Each episode offers an opportunity for the show’s “narrative problematic” to be dramatized, but while the plot is resolved, the ongoing dilemma remains. With reference to Crockett and Tubbs surrendering to “the Vice,” each episode’s message would be therefore “not this time, but maybe next …” Addressing the notion of series repetition and consistency from the perspective of industry executives, Richard Blum and Richard Lindheim emphasize the importance of the “series concept,” pointing out the dangers of a script wandering too far from what people like about “the concept and the characters.” Arguing that “deviating from the concept is most dangerous during the early, formative stages of a series,” Blum and Lindheim point to the desirability of establishing

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viewer familiarity with key characters and set-ups.29 Although they do not use the term “narrative problematic,” their discussion makes clear the extent to which adherence to the series concept is an essential prerequisite for the dramatization of the ongoing dilemma. Armed with these two terms, it is possible to assess continuity and change in Miami Vice across its five seasons. Like many multi-season shows, Miami Vice underwent modifications to its creative team and series content over its duration. Indeed, Blum and Lindheim refer to such developments as techniques used to “inject freshness” in order “to increase the productive lifetime of a series.”30 Yet such strategies are not without their potential risks, chief of which is the prospect of alienating viewers by deviating from the concept and problematic that attracted them to the show. One of the questions we can ask of Miami Vice is the extent to which it may at some points abandon the “kernel” of the narrative which, ironically enough, many reviewers (if not necessarily viewers) seemingly failed to spot in the first place. The original written concept for Miami Vice was set out in a network sales pitch by Universal Studio executives, subsequently developed by Anthony Yerkovich into the pilot episode of the show. It goes as follows: An exciting new drama with the look of the 80’s … exploring the teeming world of vice amid the sunshine, wealth, and waters of South Florida … narcotics, gun running, smuggling, gambling, pornography … and the personal lives of two cops who live on the edge and undercover.31

It is this notion of cops living “on the edge and undercover” that is at the heart of the “series concept.” Indeed, season one of the show appears to adhere very closely to Butler’s description of its narrative problematic primarily through establishing and then maintaining this concept; the question of whether Crockett and/or Tubbs will surrender to the temptations of the “Vice” is one which is posed in relation to their work as undercover cops, as it is operating in the guise of drug dealers or smugglers that brings them close to the enticements (wealth, narcotics, power, beautiful women, and, more generally, a life of hedonism) that they must resist. Nineteen of the twenty-two episodes of season one involve Crockett and Tubbs working undercover.

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Those that do not are “The Return of Calderone,” the first half of a two-episode story that does see Crockett and Tubbs go undercover in the second installment; “The Home Invaders,” written by former police officer Chuck Adamson, and which is unusual in that it depicts Crockett engaged in extensive ratiocinative detective work to solve a case involving violent home invasions; and the season finale “Lombard,” which centers on Crockett’s and Tubbs’s efforts to keep alive recalcitrant criminal witness Al Lombard (Dennis Farina), needed to testify in court – in a sense inverting the narrative problematic to tell the story of a committed felon resisting the temptation to “go straight.” Overwhelmingly, season one holds fast to the “series concept” of cops undercover, and while some installments dramatize the show’s narrative problematic more extensively than others, the tight focus on key characters and set-ups serves to generate the balance of familiarity and difference crucial to the success of the episodic series. Fourteen of the episodes involve plots centered on drug dealing and smuggling, with nine of those fourteen focusing in one way or another on how drug crime impacts upon families. Three episodes center on prostitution and two on gambling and arms dealing. Two deal explicitly, although not in detail, with politics, in the sense that they address the activities of government agencies, even if their main plotlines involve drug smuggling and arms dealing. What is clear is that, most weeks, viewers could tune in to see Crockett and Tubbs working undercover to tackle “vice,” with 40 percent of episodes also dramatizing the impact of such crime on American families. The last chapter indicated that season two of Miami Vice is, at least in terms of visual and aural style, very much a case of continuity with the first season, but if we turn our attention to the sorts of stories that style is used to convey, we can see some striking differences. Perhaps surprisingly, only eight episodes involve Crockett and Tubbs in undercover work, and only seven focus on drug dealing and smuggling. Seven episodes also center on stories concerning the family, but only two also address the impact of drug activity. (One of these was in any case exceptional, in that it was “Sons and Lovers,” the season finale, and saw the death of Tubbs’s son and his lover, Angelina Calderone, daughter of slain drug lord Esteban Calderone.) No episodes focus on

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arms dealing or gambling, and only one addresses prostitution. One notable development is five episodes with politically inflected storylines, including “Back in the World,” which guest-stars Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy as a Vietnam war officer turned drug smuggler, and “Free Verse,” which centers on a Latin American poet preparing to address the US congress on atrocities committed in his country. The other key development is four episodes addressing sexual violence as a major storyline, including “Junk Love,” which centers on a dealer’s incestuous relationship with his addict daughter, “Bought and Paid For,” which sees the rape of Gina’s housemate by a wealthy playboy, and “Little Miss Dangerous,” in which Tubbs finds himself tied to a bed by a homicidal prostitute he is mistakenly protecting. Overall, season two sees a marked shift away from the “series concept” of undercover work, and the temptations that come with it, in other words, the show’s “narrative problematic.” Interestingly, the season can be argued to have diffused that problematic across its cast of episode-specific characters, so that most installments see a plotline involving an individual being tempted (and crucially succumbing) to vices such as drugs, bribery, dangerous sex, or theft. The result is that we rather less frequently witness Crockett and Tubbs in psychological peril, but enjoy other characters’ fall into the traps that they tend to avoid. Rather than devote more episodes to storylines involving other members of the vice unit struggling with temptation, the show stays overwhelmingly focused on its two leads, but sees them deal with a weekly roster of “fall guys.” Perhaps the most striking fact about the direction taken by Miami Vice in season two is the consequences it had for its critical and popular reception. In terms of Nielsen ratings, season two was a major success, with the show placing ninth in the list of top ten regularly scheduled shows, up from forty-fourth place in season one (although, as previously noted, the summer reruns of the premier season had done exceptionally well).32 It beat Falcon Crest consistently in its 10 p.m. Friday evening slot. On the other hand, the show was criticized repeatedly in the press for the caliber of its stories, with even the show’s stars being drawn into the discussion. Edward James Olmos confessed to the Washington Post that “I keep on fighting for the

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integrity of the program, to lift its content and override the style.”33 The same publication stated that Philip Michael Thomas “was looking for better scripts for [season three], a generally acknowledged wobble in the program last season.”34 Asked how he reacted to the “criticisms of Vice, specifically that the quality has gone down since the first season,” Don Johnson revealed all to Playboy when he replied that “the second season, we still got six or seven exceptional shows. And then we had four or five clunkers. Last season [season two], we didn’t get one script that didn’t have to be rewritten before we could shoot it.”35 What is more, the influential advocacy group Viewers for Quality Television (VQT) dropped Miami Vice from its list of favored shows “after a long debate over declining quality,” a move which was taken by many commentators as an affirmation of their own criticisms.36 There are, of course, problems with equating Nielsen ratings success with the opinions of most viewers. Henry Jenkins, citing Eileen Meehan’s work on audience measurement systems, points out that “despite the myth of popular choice that surrounds them, the Nielsen ratings reflect only a narrowly chosen segment of the television audience – a ‘commodity audience’ – which can be sold to advertisers and networks, but reflects neither mass taste nor the taste of an intellectual elite.”37 Indeed, the disparity between the show’s Nielsen rating and the actions of the VQT make that last point quite clear. On the other hand, there is also the distinct possibility that what was apparently attracting more viewers to the show had less to do with script “quality” and adherence to the “series concept” than might be expected. Both Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas had become major television celebrities, featuring high in the lists of TV’s “sexiest stars” and with significant media exposure. Season two was also heavy with cameos from pop and rock stars such as Eartha Kitt, The Power Station, Little Richard, Frankie Valli, Miles Davis, EL Debarge, Phil Collins, Ted Nugent, Little Coco, The Fat Boys, Leonard Cohen, Frank Zappa, and Monti Rock III. In addition, non-acting celebrities and famous figures such as Bianca Jagger, Lee Iacocca, Emo Phillips, G. Gordon Liddy, Patty D’Arbanville (Don Johnson’s ex-wife), and Iman all appeared. TV Guide printed a list of the pop songs that viewers could tune in to see and hear (in stereo broadcast) on the evening’s

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installment of the show. In other words, it is quite possible that such attractions, which both confirmed and constructed the show’s fashionable status, helped to entice viewers for whom concerns over script “quality” and fidelity to the show’s original premise were rather less important. The changes to the show that occurred in season three could be argued to reflect a response to both the ratings success and the critical mauling. NBC pushed Miami Vice forward one hour in the Fridaynight schedule, so that it could go head-to-head with the perennial ratings champion Dallas, in a bold and much-publicized example of “counterprogramming.”38 The idea was also to create a strong “lead-in” for L.A. Law (1986–94), which piloted in September 1986. At the same time, the show underwent some significant changes which suggested that the producers were seeking to respond to the negative critical response to season two. Indeed, Peter Schillachi, a notable champion of the show’s distinctive visual style, remarked worriedly in summer 1986 that “word is out that Miami Vice will become more of a ‘writer’s show,’ ” due to complaints over its “weak and inconsistent plots.”39 The departure of producer John Nicolella, (who had overseen the day-today production of the first two seasons of the show in Miami) and the appointment of Dick Wolf as co-producer could be interpreted as evidence of this move to become more of a “writer’s show.” Wolf had writing credit for ten of season three’s episodes, while fellow Hill Street alumnus Dennis Cooper also contributed episodes to the season. Blum and Lindheim point out that it is not usual to see changes to writers and producers in a show’s third season, as the creative team become jaded or “burnout becomes prevalent,” and the incomers provide a shift in direction.40 Certainly, the notion that the third season of Miami Vice was to see an increased emphasis upon more “serious storytelling” was also supported by the contributions of Chuck Adamson and Gustave Reininger.41 Adamson and Reininger (former cop and investment banker respectively) were the co-creators of Crime Story (1986–8), also executive produced by Michael Mann for Universal-TV. Crime Story, which debuted in September 1986 on NBC, was a hard-hitting police procedural set in the early 1960s, and starred Dennis Farina as Lt. Mike Torello. Crime Story was a serial

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narrative, and the entire first season (and season two) was given over to the on-going battle between Torello and rising mob boss Ray Luca (Anthony Denison). While Crime Story was as meticulous in its attention to visual style and soundtrack as Miami Vice, it also aspired to epic story scale with an ensemble cast, and an extensive serial narrative with multiple plotlines and character arcs. Mann’s and Reininger’s stated inspiration was Rainer Fassbinder’s mammoth film adaptation of Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, although it is not entirely clear that NBC executives assumed that the whiff of European art cinema would draw in additional upscale viewers. What is plain is that the network sought eventually to curtail the show’s serial format in response to declining audience figures. Nevertheless, the first season of Crime Story showed Adamson’s and Reininger’s capacity for complex, densely layered serial drama on a par with early Hill Street Blues, and to a degree that greater emphasis on “serious” storytelling crossed over to Miami Vice.42 The tone for season three of Miami Vice was set by the previously mentioned season opener, “When Irish Eyes Are Crying,” which sees Gina fall for Northern Irish political activist/IRA terrorist Sean Carroon (Liam Neeson), and Crockett and Tubbs uncover the activities of a renegade Scotland Yard police inspector. Co-written by Dick Wolf and John Leekley (writer on the popular civil war miniseries The Blue and the Gray (1982) ), the episode’s final act sees Gina forced to accept Sean’s “real” identity and put aside her feelings for him in order to stop his terrorist activities (which involves fatally shooting him), in so doing demonstrating how the installment works a politically sensitive topic into the familiar series dilemma of “falling for the villain.” The episode was followed by “Stone’s War,” which sees the return of G. Gordon Liddy, reprising his role as renegade Colonel Maynard, this time responsible for US military atrocities in Nicaragua. Crockett’s Vietnam buddy, the investigative reporter Ira Stone (Bob Balaban), has politically sensitive footage of Maynard’s troops, and seeks his protection in Miami while persuading a news agency to broadcast his material. After initially dismissing Stone’s story with “Ira, come on man, this is America,” Sonny learns the truth of sanctioned US involvement. The episode’s portrayal of illegal government activities and

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press collusion is forceful enough to have provoked a lengthy article in The New York Times, outlining the way that the show “broached the very real and controversial subject of Nicaragua,” and noting in particular the downbeat nature of the ending, which sees Sonny observe the story being spun and distorted on TV news.43 In accounting for the decision to open season three of Miami Vice with two episodes addressing sensitive current affairs topics, it is worth noting the nature of the competition. Season nine of Dallas began with “Return to Camelot,” which picked up on arguably the show’s most risible cliffhanger, as a befuddled Pam Ewing (Victoria Principal) walks in on husband Bobby (Patrick Duffy) in the shower. This effectively made the whole of season nine a figment of Pam’s slumbering imagination, since Bobby had been killed by a car at the end of season eight. The patent silliness of this storyline had been much discussed in the press over the summer hiatus, with TV Guide poking fun at a plot “that some think would insult the intelligence of anyone who had an IQ above room temperature.”44 It was perhaps with a view to picking up viewers turned off by Dallas that Miami Vice aired two of its most serious episodes: at the moment that Bobby Ewing steps out of the shower, viewers tuned to Miami Vice see a graphic photo-montage of the troubles in Northern Ireland, accompanied by John Lennon’s “Imagine.”45 Perhaps surprisingly given this gloomy opening, season three as a whole actually saw a concerted return to the “narrative problematic” established in the first year, with a notable increase in the number of episodes that depicted undercover work (fourteen) and a renewed emphasis on the subject of drug smuggling and dealing in eleven installments, with six also focusing on the impact of drugs on the family. The season also dispensed almost entirely with the non-acting celebrity cameos that saturated season two (Don King “in character” as a larger-than-life boxing impresario being one of the few exceptions). The six episodes that dealt with political topics, and the three that depicted sexual violence (“The Savage” deals with both), did however extend the willingness to address more “edgy” subject matter first seen in season two. “Shadow in the Dark,” in which Crockett risks his sanity to get into the mind of a serial killer preying on sleeping

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families, is particularly disturbing, and is clearly modeled on Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986), still playing in cinemas at the time of original transmission. Arguably the most significant episode with regard to the show’s “series concept” is the two-part story that deals with the death of Larry Zito (“Down for the Count”) and thus the departure of actor John Diehl. Diehl told The New York Times that “I really didn’t feel I could go any further, the way they were writing for the character,” with the irony being that the episodes that dealt with his death saw him in “every reel.”46 As he remarked, “all of a sudden, after all this time, I was really working.”47 However, while Diehl may have been “really working,” the expansive emotional register and developed backstory his character suddenly acquires is entirely at odds with the thinness of his established “goofball” side-kick persona. Indeed, the episodes actually include a commentary on our lack of character knowledge; at Zito’s funeral, Tubbs looks around at the gathered mourners, and asks Switek, “You recognize anybody?” Switek replies, “Larry’s family … he had six brothers and sisters … they were real close.” Later, when visiting Zito’s apartment to look for clues to his killers, Crockett spots the deceased detective’s fish tank, stating with surprise that “you see someone everyday for seven years. Turns out you know nothing about them,” a phrase which also speaks to the viewers’ experience. Despite the producers’ best efforts, the bold decision to counterprogram Miami Vice against Dallas was widely perceived as unsuccessful, with newspapers chronicling week-by-week its inability to match up to its CBS rival. TV Guide picked apart the season’s failings, concluding its thoughts on the show’s poor ratings with a reference to what it saw as a “suffocating sense of gloom.”48 A lengthy piece in the same publication timed to coincide with the beginning of season four invited readers to “sit in with the writers as they hatch bold new plans to restore the series’ original flash and strong ratings.”49 The piece offered an insight into a story conference at Michael Mann’s offices on the Universal lot in Los Angeles, where Mann, together with Dick Wolf, John Schulian, and Michael Duggan, planned the fourth season of the show. (As the article noted, by the time of publication, both

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Wolf and Schulian had moved on.) It began by noting season three’s poor performance against Dallas, which it attributed to the fact that “the show had lost its way structurally,” and even included a quote from NBC Senior Vice President Warren Littlefield. Littlefield admitted that “there was an erratic quality to the storytelling … the best of Miami Vice often seemed to get left in the locker room,” selecting a metaphor that, perhaps unwittingly, implied the show’s somber tone had also subdued its cocksure male banter.50 There is in fact very little evidence to support the assertion that season three of the show is any more erratic or structurally astray than previous seasons. On the contrary, it is in many ways a return to the essential premise of perilous undercover work, prompted in part by criticism of the erratic quality of season two. It is arguable that the show was the victim of the perennial tendency to conflate ratings “failure” with creative malfunction, on this occasion as a consequence of a rather optimistic counterprogramming strategy on the part of NBC. The network decided to pitch the show against Dallas after commissioning a “wear-out-study,” which purported to show that “Dallas was No. 2 in waning audience interest behind the nowcanceled Love Boat.” As Al Ordover, NBC Vice President of broadcast research stated at the time, Dallas “was slipping, but that doesn’t make it a weak program … I think we’ll split the audience at 9 and improve ourselves at 10 o’clock.”51 Yet the study was undertaken prior to Dallas’s season eight cliffhanger, which was a gift to the tabloid press, and undoubtedly boosted curiosity in season nine, despite the predictable ridicule by TV critics. Moreover, CBS had conducted its own research into the potential impact of Miami Vice on Dallas’s ratings, and concluded that “only 10 percent of each show’s viewers watched the other show.”52 Thus the extent to which this was a ratings battle that Miami Vice was ever likely to win is debatable, but the hype generated by the match-up, together with the role that Miami Vice was to play in drawing viewers to L.A. Law, made it a worthwhile move. Moreover, it is important to note that, as Amanda Lotz points out, NBC was at that moment riding a remarkable wave of ratings success which would continue until 1991.53 Spearheaded by the popularity of shows such as The Cosby Show, Golden Girls

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(aka “Miami Nice”), Cheers, and A Different World, NBC went from its traditional last place to dominate primetime for the rest of the 1980s. Any notion of the “risk” represented by Miami Vice’s rescheduling needs therefore to be seen in the context of the growing strength of the network’s overall position. TV Guide’s account of the Miami Vice story conference suggests that producers’ “bold new plans” for season four involved deliberately distancing the show from the series concept, and, resultantly, the underlying narrative problematic. As Michael Mann stated, “we want to be more flamboyant this year all the way around … further out.”54 The piece depicted the producers bouncing around ideas for episodes, including one involving a corrupt TV evangelist (that would become “Amen … Send Money,” guest-starring Brian Dennehy), another involving cold-war espionage and a Superconductor (which sadly never came to fruition), and “one edging into sci-fi” (which would become “Missing Hours,” guest-starring James Brown). It ended by drolly juxtaposing Warren Littlefield’s chipper statement on behalf of the network that “we’re putting them [Miami Vice] right back up against Dallas again. We have real faith in Michael Mann’s talent and energy,” with Mann’s rather reckless-sounding declaration that “we’re going to infuse the show with more radical concepts. The shows will be a lot wilder.”55 An examination of season four suggests that Mann was true to his word, with a topicality that is more National Enquirer than Newsweek. Only nine episodes deal with undercover police work, and just five have storylines related to drugs. Only three episodes center on crimerelated crises to families. Also gone are the episodes that deal with overtly political topics. In their place are installments with off-thewall storylines including smuggled bull sperm (“Cows of October”), a cryogenically frozen reggae star (“The Big Thaw”), the aforementioned “Amen … Send Money,” and “Missing Hours,” which parodies recent stories on both Dallas and The Colbys by featuring an alien abduction that turns out to be a figment of Trudy’s episode-long dream. Also apparent is a tonal shift in the show; in several of these installments the show clearly appears to be sending itself up. “The Big Thaw” sees OCD headquarters disrupted by the installation of new

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air conditioning; “Cows of October” sets its tale of bull semen rustling to the music from The Magnificent Seven; while “Amen … Send Money” features Tubbs surprising Crockett (and viewers) with a previously undisclosed knowledge of electrical engineering, explaining that he learned it in “night school” and adding that “there’s life after Vice.” Tubbs’s speech sees the episode toying with the kind of selfreferential dialogue more typical of CBS competitor Moonlighting (1985–9). Season four also saw the show undertake arguably its most brazen ratings stunt to date, as Crockett meets, romances, and marries rock star Caitlin Davies (Sheena Easton) all in one episode (the appropriately titled “Like a Hurricane”). The installment was timed to coincide with the November “sweeps,” one of four periods in the year for which ratings for network-affiliated television stations are measured in order to set advertising rates for the following three months (the others being February, May, and July). As Hugh Beville points out, strong ratings in the “sweeps” enable stations to boost the rates they can demand from their local advertisers, which “invites hyping, the practice of scheduling the best movies and specials and promoting them heavily so that normal ratings numbers may be distorted.”56 Indeed, Beville notes that it is not unusual to see local news stations focus unduly on “sensational and lurid topics” during the “sweeps” in order to enhance viewing figures.57 As for episodic series, Blum and Lindheim point out that “episodes shot on location, with special promotable stunts or guest stars, are made especially for sweeps scheduling.”58 Miami Vice’s “Like a Hurricane” is clearly shaped and scheduled with the “sweeps” in mind, and with stunt and guest star firmly in place. While critics of the “sweeps” point to unrepresentative ratings spikes as a regrettable outcome of the system, “special” episodes can also have an unsettling impact on the shows they are intended to showcase. Crockett’s marriage to a (real) rock star is attuned to the commercial logic of network television, intended to draw viewers curious to see the “celebrity” marriage of one of TV’s biggest “heartthrobs,” but it somewhat complicates the premise that underpins the series concept, namely that Crockett is an undercover cop, a role

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which requires a low profile. The show’s solution is to have Caitlin publicly married to Crockett’s alter ego Sonny Burnett, with the complication being that Burnett’s identity as a drug dealer could be uncovered, as indeed it is by a muck-racking tabloid reporter in “A Rock and a Hard Place.” The other complication is that it gives Crockett instant (and legitimate) access to wealth and all its trappings, so long the lure of the undercover world of Vice. Indeed, “The Rising Son of Death” depicts Caitlin and the patently uncomfortable Sonny house hunting in the sort of affluent suburb that usually contains the homes of the show’s drug kingpins. What is clear is that the introduction of Caitlin disturbs the series concept; those familiar with, for instance, Ross’s relationship with Emily in Friends may recognize the strategy of bringing in an “outsider” as a romantic partner to a key cast member, with the threat that it brings to the group equilibrium, and the eventual pleasure of seeing the “outsider” removed and the equilibrium restored. In so doing, Caitlin’s arrival also brings with it a degree of story continuity across several installments, as we are invited to see how her marriage to Crockett will be played out (for the first time the show employs a “previously on Miami Vice” voice-over to recap events for viewers). The narrative arc of this doomed “glamor marriage” serves to move the show closer to its super soap rivals, and with a greater emphasis on the domestic arrangements of a lead character than ever before. Yet just as the show appears to have abandoned its narrative problematic, the end of the season brings it unexpectedly and dramatically back into play. The murder of Caitlin by Frank Hackman drives a grief-stricken Crockett back into undercover work, and leads to circumstances that see him caught in a bomb blast on a drug dealer’s yacht. Crockett survives, but suffers amnesia, leading him to believe that he is his criminal alter ego Sonny Burnett. Season four ends with the show’s first-ever concluding cliffhanger, as “Burnett” shoots Tubbs and leaves him for dead in an alley, and is poised to install himself as the head of a powerful drug empire. Although the storyline can be regarded as risible, when viewed from the perspective of the show’s narrative problematic it represents a novel way to indulge viewers’ desire to see Crockett finally “surrender to temptation” and “become

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a villain” in a way that can be reversed without compromising his moral integrity. From a commercial perspective, it was clear that the show was pulling out all the stops in an attempt to address falling ratings. As the last chapter noted, Michael Mann stated that his plan for season five was to “do a series of classic Vices,” based upon “the mythology of our best episodes.”59 However, there is little evidence to suggest that, in terms of storylines, this was anything more than an attempt to tempt back viewers who may have tired of the show. By episode two, “Redemption in Blood,” Crockett has regained his memory and returned to Vice headquarters, and the season as a whole is on balance even less interested in sustaining the show’s series concept than season four, with only eight episodes involving undercover work. As noted in the last chapter, one of those episodes, “The Lost Madonna,” requires the detectives to go undercover as dealers of art, rather than drugs, and only six episodes have storylines related to the smuggling of narcotics. One episode that features both narcotics and undercover work, “Leap of Faith,” is, as chapter two notes, a pilot episode for another show. Season five does largely refrain from infusing “the show with more radical concepts” seen the previous year, although in “World of Trouble” the tale of a stolen super-weapon does fulfill Michael Mann’s promise that it would not all be “grim and serious.” One of the most telling episodes is “Miracle Man,” which centers on the activities of a father seeking to atone for failing to prevent the death of his daughter, and donning a superhero costume to apprehend criminals. This plotline combines with another which sees Tubbs and Switek ordered to cooperate with the filming of Society’s Watchdog, an investigative TV show fronted by the egregious Eric Terry (Zach Grenier), which wants to film “a special show on what it’s really like to be a vice cop.” Terry outlines his artistic vision: “I see the whole show shot in shadows and half light … sort of a film noir thing,” suggesting a ludicrous attempt to ape Miami Vice’s signature look, before exclaiming excitedly that “the cameras will follow the three of us everywhere, recording our every move.” “Miracle Man” aired in June 1989, three months after the Fox network’s show Cops (1989–present) had made its prime-time debut

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on American TV. Cops, one of the very first of a wave of reality TV shows that would proliferate on network television in the decades to come, had immediately built a strong audience for its weekly installment of cameras following real police officers, and offering viewers the vicarious thrill of being on the spot as high-speed pursuits ensued, shots were fired, and arrests were made. Cheap to produce, Cops was, as Alisa Perren notes, an important show for Fox in establishing a strong audience base, and was able to draw audiences from other networks, being “both stylistically distinctive and attractive to a completely different (e.g., younger male) demographic” which Fox had initially struggled to entice.60 While “Miracle Man” may have poked fun at the brash and unsavory world of reality TV, and amateur law enforcement to boot, the success of Cops was thus another nail in the coffin of Miami Vice, as Fox demonstrated how to attract more of its core demographic to crime action in prime-time for a fraction of the price. If Miami Vice began life somewhat in the shadow of Hill Street Blues’s literary sophistication, then it ended looking positively Shakespearian when compared with Cops’s chaotic assortment of taser-subdued subjects. In between, it demonstrated marked variations in its observance of the “narrative kernel” and “series concept” that ostensibly defined it. Across its lifespan Miami Vice was a show about cops undercover only about 50 percent of the time, while a notable fifty-one of its 111 episodes (46 percent) contained no vicerelated crimes (illegal drugs, gambling, arms, prostitution) at all. Moreover, that lifespan contained significant seasonal fluctuations, as the show’s producers sought to adapt to commercial and critical success, failure, and competition, and the transformation of its lead actors into high-profile stars. At the same time, the show was remarkably consistent in its adherence to a tight cluster of key characters, with only the death of Larry Zito changing the composition of the lineup, and with limited consequence for the storylines. Perhaps most surprisingly, the show was most successful commercially in season two, when analysis suggests that it was in actual fact engaged with undercover work and vice-related crime in fewer than half the episodes, and where a glut of celebrity cameo appearances marked it out

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as rather atypical of the show as a whole. That the show was most successful when it was, in hindsight, least like itself is rather revealing, and points to the difficulty of engineering, sustaining, and appraising success on the basis of plot and storyline alone.

Chapter 4

Risky Business The Cultural Politics of Vice

In September 1985 Miami Vice stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas attended a State Dinner at the Reagan White House. About to appear on the cover of Time magazine, and clearly exulting in the hype then surrounding the show, the stars arrived in exuberant mood, with Johnson telling waiting reporters that the Reagans “like me” and that Miami Vice was “very big here in the White House.” Thomas went one further, asking the President and First Lady “would you guys like to be on the show?” The President (a former head of the Screen Actors Guild) predictably declined, quipping that “I can’t do it; I’ve got a run of the play contract.”1 Reagan’s “run” would extend till 1989, the year that Miami Vice ended production, and there is a strong temptation to align the rise and fall of one of the era’s most emblematic TV shows with one of the decade’s most iconic public figures: the show first began transmission in 1984, the year of Reagan’s landslide second-term election. In 1985 both the President and the show were on a roll, and the cozy commingling of the spheres of entertainment and politics could only reinforce the already healthy ratings of both. In any event Reagan was, as many commentators have observed, his own prime-time TV show; remarkable for his capacity to parlay his personal charm to the American voters through an adept use of mass media, in particular though his Oval Office appearances. Reagan made “strategic use of TV in pledging to cut taxes, inflation, and wasteful social programs,” in the process embarking upon a far-reaching conservative economic

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and social agenda that fundamentally reshaped the nation.2 As William H. Chafe points out, the ideological assumption of “Reaganomics” was that, “with the shackles of government bureaucracy removed … the American spirit of individualism, competition, and personal pride” would be restored, a message beamed into the nation’s living rooms by the avuncular figure of the President, who was often photographed on his ranch dressed in cowboy hat and jeans.3 Without doubt Miami Vice was shaped by the political tendencies of the Reagan administration. As an exceedingly expensive television commodity emerging out of an era of increasing broadcasting competition and sector deregulation, Miami Vice was aimed at upscale audiences and sold to global television markets with the aid of aggressive US government lobbying.4 Yet to say that the appearance of the stars at the White House was evidence that the show delivered a straightforwardly “pro-Republican” message is akin to saying that the invitation to fellow guest Glenn Brenner, a sportscaster, was proof of his “Reaganite” football commentaries. As Jane Feuer notes with reference to Dynasty, another emblematic network drama of the era, while “symptomatic” of the “Reaganite cultural formation,” such shows were complex and contradictory, no less so than those of any other era. Stephen Prince points out that, in relation to 1980s Hollywood films, the decade’s fiction could be seen to “respond to a number of coexisting, sometimes oppositional value systems, rather than carry[ing] a single message.”5 Additionally, in her landmark study of Dutch viewers of Dallas, Ien Ang cautions against looking for “essentialist explanations” for the popularity of US TV shows, particularly when considering their appeal to worldwide audiences, who are positioned quite differently in relation to American culture.6 Even if one could say that Miami Vice clearly espoused a Reaganite view of family values, this wouldn’t necessarily explain why it was so popular with, say, Sardinians. On the other hand, the possible pleasures for overseas audiences in watching a show where the US government fails to halt the flow of foreign commodity imports needs to be understood in the context of the show’s own identity as a commodity benefiting from a deregulated global media economy for American television exports.

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While several critics of Miami Vice posited that the show couldn’t be meaningful in any conventional sense, characterized as it was by a postmodern blankness that was all surface and no depth, I have sought to illustrate the ways in which the show’s approach to both can be usefully understood in relation to established aesthetic norms and salient commercial strategies. In addition, other writers have found sufficient textual cues in Miami Vice from which to generate assessments of how it might be positioned in relation to cultural values. Many sought to express how the show could be seen to resolve “in fiction” what in the “real world” were major contradictions that existed between cultural ideologies. For example, David Buxton argues that the show “condensed” the “two major pillars of Reaganite free market ideology,” which he describes as “law and order” and “conspicuous consumption.”7 As he points out, many critics of Reagan maintained that it was “precisely the perverse social effects of [economic liberalism] which exacerbate[d] an already serious crime problem” in the United States, as the nation overall witnessed a redistribution of wealth “away from the poor and toward the rich.”8 Miami Vice, on the other hand, can be seen to maintain a largely conservative view of crime and poverty that is “explained in harshly moral, rather than ‘sociological’ terms,” something that is apparent in Michael Mann’s own assessment of the show.9 Mann suggests that Miami Vice jettisons the idea that environment causes problems and if you change the environment, people change. Those are old ideas, 60’s perceptions, modified by 70’s touchy-feely stuff. We did something different … there’s none of the 70’s feeling of “He’s really a nice guy but I’ll kill him anyway because I’m compelled to for a set of sociological reasons.”10

In place of the supposedly “outdated” notion that difficult circumstances can provoke otherwise law-abiding people to act criminally, the show instead makes crime a consequence of moral weakness or depravity on the part of the individual.11 Time and again, the show depicts individuals ostensibly succumbing to their own base motives, most often to furnish themselves illegally with the trappings of an upscale lifestyle. Yet if Mann’s history of popular criminology could

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be contested on the grounds that it is rather one-dimensional (no one could have accused Dirty Harry Callahan (Clint Eastwood) of a 1970s “touchy-feely” approach to criminal justice), it does serve the purpose of distinguishing the show from its predecessor Hill Street Blues, while also playing down its links to other “cop action” stories of the 1980s. Neil King, in a wide-ranging survey of police-centered action films from the period, points to the frequent employment of a moral framework to structure “fantasies of sin, guilt, and revenge,” as cop heroes defeat criminals time and again “with bloody violence.”12 But whereas King notes the fact that such films often see “blue collar” cops punish wealthy antagonists in the form of “the greedy, corrupt, brutal, whitemale upper class,” Miami Vice can be said to demonstrate a rather different attitude toward upscale criminality, consistent with the recurring “narrative problematic” of the show as discussed in chapter 3, namely “will Crockett and/or Tubbs surrender to the temptations (the ‘Vice’) they are immersed in and become villains?” In order for that problematic to operate, the trappings of “vice” need to be depicted as sufficiently tempting, which has led several commentators to cite the show’s stance on criminal “conspicuous consumption” as highly ambiguous. As Douglas Kellner notes: iconic images of high-rise buildings, luxury houses, fast and expensive cars and women, and, of course, the pricey and ambiguous commodities of drugs and prostitution produce images of affluence and high-level consumption which positions viewers to envy the wealth and power of the villains while identifying as well with the lifestyles, personality traits, and behavior of the heroes.13

Along similar lines, Buxton points to “the appealingly aesthetic portrayal of an inherently viceful world” and “the corresponding valorization of its two protagonists as ‘style heroes’ leads to a central ambiguity which the series is never able to overcome.”14 Indeed, debates over the interpretability of this ambiguity are not confined to the academy; a 1986 New York Times/CBS News poll singled out Miami Vice from its network peers as a show that “encourage[d] illegal drug use,” which prompted an emphatic rebuttal from Betty Hudson, NBC’s Vice President of corporate and media relations, who

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delivered the network’s official exegesis when she stated that, “If anything, [the show] is about the ultimate devastation that results from both the use of and trafficking in drugs. There has never been a story line in Miami Vice that dealt with the drug world where the user or dealer did not wind up in a negative circumstance.”15 With reference to the same poll, Don Johnson was similarly defensive to the charge that, in glamorizing the lives of drug dealers, but “paint[ing] them as losers,” the show was giving a “double message,” stating that “I give the public enough credit to see beyond the surface – the clothes and cars. Miami Vice shows you that using drugs is a dead end … over time, people will get this message.”16 Both Hudson and Johnson argued that the show was really about the negative impact of drugs, and if viewers were not up to speed with this interpretation (didn’t they see that all drug dealers got their comeuppance?) then they were just plain wrong. As for the upwardly mobile viewers who allegedly arranged cocaine-fuelled viewings of the show, how could they be so wide of the mark? While it may be a little harsh to accuse Hudson and Johnson of disingenuousness, their references to the inevitable downfall of drug felons harks back to a long history in American screen entertainment of using the “moral ending” as an alibi, most obviously in the stipulations of the Hollywood Production Code of 1930, which ensured that “a strict moral accountancy was imposed on Hollywood’s plots, through which the guilty were punished.”17 On the other hand, Richard Maltby and Ruth Vasey point out that a film’s narrative progress to that punishment was characterized by “a particular kind of ambiguity and textual uncertainty … constructed to accommodate, rather than predetermine, [the audience’s] reaction.”18 Such ambiguity was often used to enable “sophisticated” viewers to surmise that there was a lot more guilty pleasure being had than appeared to be the case. Moreover, pleasure in “guilty pleasure” was, and remains, a key entitlement of the audience. As Maltby notes, the consumption of commercial entertainment is underpinned by the ideological assumption that “the viewer can reasonably demand to do what he or she likes with the movie he or she has paid to watch.”19 Although much advertising-sponsored television is ostensibly “free,” the same

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assumption applies, despite Hudson’s and Johnson’s protestations to the contrary. If we are free to skim a recently purchased Bible to find the juicy bits of sex and violence, then viewers of Miami Vice were certainly at liberty to not “see beyond” an appreciation of “the clothes and the cars,” and all the other accessories of an upwardly mobile drug lord’s life. Although to do so may evidence our own “moral weakness,” the principle that our money entitles us to indulge in our pleasures (vices) as we see fit is the abiding “message” of a consumerist economy, shaping our encounters with its goods. For Benjamin Scott King, Miami Vice’s ambiguous attitude toward luxurious criminal lifestyles was most noteworthy for the implications it could be said to have for the show’s depiction of masculinity. Focusing primarily on the figure of Sonny Crockett (although a number of his observations could also apply to Ricardo Tubbs), King argued that the show’s tendency to treat Crockett as a “clothes hanger” or “mannequin” for the designer fashion that was essential to his underworld “disguise” represented “one of the first instances where a man is defined by the way he looks (is seen) and not the way he looks (sees)” and atypically “the object of the gaze, the fetish, is primarily male.”20 King’s terminology made clear that he was drawing on psychoanalytic theories of spectatorship, derived primarily from two influential essays, Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) and Steve Neale’s “Masculinity as Spectacle” (1983).21 Mulvey’s article set out her seminal theory of “the male gaze,” which argued that mainstream film made women on screen the “passive” object of the look, not only by the male protagonist, who was “the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen,” but also the spectator, who, through the structuring gaze of the cinematic apparatus, was made to identify with the male protagonist.22 Key here was Mulvey’s contention that in mainstream film “the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like.”23 Taking Mulvey’s ideas as a starting point, Neale sought to consider in more detail how one would then theorize the “spectacle of male bodies” apparent, for example, in many Hollywood westerns. Neale argued that in many instances although we are offered the spectacle of male bodies, they are “bodies unmarked

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as objects of erotic display. There is no trace of an acknowledgement or recognition of those bodies as displayed solely for the gaze of the spectator.” On the contrary, cinematic narratives, and the cinematic apparatus, worked largely to “disavow any explicitly erotic look at the male body.” Not to do so, would, as Neale puts it, involve mainstream cinema having to “come to terms with the male homosexuality it so assiduously seeks either to denigrate or deny.” When the male body was “the object of an erotic look” (Neale uses the example of Rock Hudson in the films of Douglas Sirk), then “the look is usually marked as female.”24 King argued that Sonny Crockett was, like Rock Hudson, “feminized because he is placed and fetishized in a way heretofore ‘reserved’ (at least in popular culture) for females.” Indeed, King contended that a number of male critics had been unwilling to confront the fact that Crockett’s image “is rich with homoerotic implications,” choosing instead to hide behind the cloak of postmodern theory in order to dismiss that image as fundamentally vapid.25 However, there are some difficulties with taking a theory of spectatorship drawn from the gender politics of pre- and post-war US society that shaped classical Hollywood and applying it to popular culture in the 1980s. For instance, the 1980s saw the male body being positioned frequently as explicitly erotic for spectators who were assumed to be female, as anyone who saw “Miami Vice’s Don Johnson” on the cover of the June 1985 copy of US magazine beside the heading “Sexiest Man on TV” would have to concur. Johnson was one of a panoply of semiclad male bodies that adorned the covers of magazines aimed explicitly at women. Indeed, his appearance on the front of the December 1985 edition of the softcore pornographic magazine Playgirl, accompanied by the lascivious promise that between the covers the “star exposes his private life” for the readership, was joined by another heading treating readers to a “Centrefold Roundup: The Ten Most Memorable Men of 1985.” Despite the title, it is worth noting that editors of Playgirl conceded that their readership was fairly evenly split between heterosexual women and gay men.26 This fact could be used to support the claim that the “homoerotic implications” of the objectified male body were

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still subject to subterfuge. Yet, as Rosalind Gill points out, the 1980s saw “the mainstreaming of selected gay representational practices” which “served to cleave apart the automatic association of masculinity with heterosexuality, and the elision of masculinity with activity, by showing men not only as active sexual subjects, but also as objects of desire.”27 Moreover, while Mulvey contended that “man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like,” the rise of men’s “lifestyle” magazines during the decade (GQ was relaunched in 1983, FHM and Arena started publication in 1985 and 1986 respectively) saw heterosexual men given sanction to consume images of other men dressed (often semi-dressed) in designer fashion. This was, as Bethan Benwell observes, central to the promulgation of man as “avid consumer and unashamed narcissist.”28 Not for nothing did two early episodes of Miami Vice make reference to Crockett and Tubbs looking like they were “posing for” or “on the cover of ” GQ; the show was selfconsciously aware of its reciprocal relationship to this burgeoning masculinized consumer culture. Such eroticized images did not so much feminize their male subjects as illustrate for straight men how to strike a suitably masculine erotic pose for an (imagined) admiring female gaze, or simply to “look good” (and look better than other men) in a culture in which “the cultivation of body attractiveness” was becoming an increasingly important project for both women and men. The 1980s saw a boom in gym membership and aerobics exercise, and an intensified focus upon health, fitness, and nutrition (prominent magazine Men’s Health was founded in 1987), not to mention the emergence of male salons and the growth of men’s cologne and cosmetics. As Jennifer Craik points out, the growth of male beauty products and services in the 1980s “accompanied the re-working of attributes of masculinity and male sexuality” with many new products “structured around narcissism and the cult of youth.”29 One needs of course to be wary of claims that men’s consumerism in the 1980s represented a fundamental break with previous modes of masculinity. As Bill Osgerby points out, “a male personality predicated on narcissistic and leisure-oriented modes of consumption possesses a long and connected history.”30 Yet what may be distinctive about the period in question are not the practices themselves so much

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as the social and economic conditions that shaped their organization, and which promoted and legitimated “the consuming male” in ways previously unimagined. For instance, Frank Mort’s assessment of British menswear retailer Next, founded in 1984, outlines the way mid-market main-/high-street retailers of the era encouraged men to play with different images of masculinity; in the words of Next founder George Davies, Next man “was not exclusively defined by age or social position but by his lifestyle.”31 Benwell notes that such trends suggested that “where once clothes had been powerful and stable signifiers of social location, increasingly they were worn in more flexible and playful ways, such that men could ‘try on’ identities through their apparel.”32 Nowhere was this clearer than in the diffusion of Miami Vice-inspired fabrics, styles, cuts, and colors into mass-market men’s fashion retailing, as anyone who walked into Macy’s Miami Vice young men’s fashion section, or considered purchasing a pair of Kenneth Cole “Crockett and Tubbs” shoes, could attest. While it is no doubt true that male consumers have long aped the sartorial choices of screen idols (the deleterious impact of Clark Gable’s bare chest in It Happened One Night (1934) on the sales of men’s vests is a classic, if possibly apocryphal, example), what was arguably distinctive about Miami Vice was the way that its stars served as models not just for clothing, but for performative masculinity in this new social arena. Frank Mort discusses in detail the way that the 1980s represented an intensification of the “processes of selfenactment demanded by society,” and in Miami Vice’s extended drama of (to quote Gina in “Brother’s Keeper”) being “in costume and on the pavement” those processes were worked though with a sustained and wide-ranging focus.33 While criticism of the show’s dramatic conceit of “fashion police” as unrealistic tended to center on the implausible nature of the scenario, what that scenario involved was in essence much more widely conceivable; Crockett and Tubbs employed stylish clothing to project an appearance of success, achievement, and status, eliding their real origins and social standing, and taking full advantage of an environment in which “looking the part” and “standing out from the crowd” brought its own reward. Indeed, in the episode “Miami Squeeze” Crockett explains this quite explicitly to rookie

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cop Joey Chandler (Justin Lezzard), who is about to undertake his own undercover assignment. Crockett made clear that in order to make it as an undercover cop: You gotta lay it back. Cop an attitude. Get a little more cool. You’re trying to sell them on you. When you first walk in there, they don’t know you, they’re not going to trust you. The only way you’re gonna get over with them is to make them want to be you. You gotta hypnotize them. You gotta make them think that, if they were you, they’re gonna be a little more hip than what they are.

Crockett’s “method,” on display repeatedly in the show, was nothing less than the saleable enactment of the self, with success predicated not on experience, intelligence, or a sparkling résumé, but on the dynamics of homosocial seduction. Yet if much of what he said could also have served as a photographer’s instructions to a model for a GQ shoot, then it also suggested that narcissism, rather than being an essentially hollow or, as Christopher Lasch argues, “pathological” feature of contemporary American life, could be purposeful, and may indeed be vital to “getting the job done” in an environment where many of the old certainties had fallen away.34 It is no coincidence that the 1980s saw a surge in the sales of “self-help” manuals; as Anthony Giddens notes, “What to do? How to act? Who to be?” were the “focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity.”35 The self-helpful message of Miami Vice’s purposeful narcissism was that in order to get others to love you, you had first to love yourself. Selling “them on you” was an essential first step for transacting activities in an unstable world built on chance, trust, and risk. Indeed, if there is one fundamental characteristic of “late modernity” that Miami Vice dramatizes better than any other fictional television show of its era, it is the notion of living with risk. As Giddens asserts, “to live in the universe of late modernity is to live in an environment of chance and risk,” one in which “institutionally structured risk environments are much more prominent…[and] affect virtually everyone, regardless of whether or not they are ‘players’ within them.”36 Giddens’s term “late modernity,” chosen in preference to “postmodernity,” is

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used to emphasize the key continuities between the organization of contemporary social life and previous decades, even if recent developments (for instance technologies of communication and information processing) have altered the speed, scope, and scale with which many of its features are experienced. The rapid and monumental changes to the business structure of the entertainment industry in the 1980s, as outlined in chapter 1, was a clear instance of the sort of “manufactured risk” Giddens contends is pervasive in late modernity. The globalization of money markets, transformed dramatically both by deregulation and by advances in communications technology, unleashed a frenzy of trading and dealing, mergers and acquisitions, and drawing previously cautious financial institutions into highly speculative but potentially very lucrative investments.37 Underpinning such transformations is the ethos of risk: “playing the market” and “speculating to accumulate,” as Wall Street and its richly rewarded “yuppie” employees became icons of a fast-moving global investment economy, where fortunes were won and lost in seconds. Stretching well beyond the New York Stock Exchange, the notion that risk-taking was intrinsic to self-development pervaded 1980s popular culture; the well-known mantra from Susan Jeffers’s bestselling self-help guide from the period was “Feel the fear and do it anyway.” The implication was that maintaining a “balance between opportunity and risk” was essential to “the reflexive project of selfidentity.”38 This did not mean that late-modern society was inherently more risky than previous epochs; indeed, one of the features of late modernity was the growth of risk “management” and “assessment,” which sought to predict, regulate, and minimize risks of all kind, with the consequence that for many people some aspects of life had never been less risky. One paradox was the growth of activities that were predicated on late-modern society’s notion of risk-taking as an essential element of “self-actualization,” but which sought also an escape from its perceived “safety nets.” One could point to the growth of “extreme” sports in the 1980s as an example, and the savvy equipment companies that sought to cultivate a discourse of risk-taking and thrill-seeking to profit from its expanding popularity.

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More prosaically, psychologist Marvin Zuckerman pointed to “high rates of auto accidents, binge drinking, drug use and pathological gambling” as much more prevalent instances of “sensation-seeking” in the “protected cultures” of late modernity.39 Not coincidentally, these activities were all prominent and frequent features of Miami Vice’s storyworld. While it would be facile to conclude that in reality most individuals involved in such activities were “sensation-seeking” (poor people on the sharp end of the Reagan administration’s cuts on welfare were unlikely to turn to alcohol or drugs because life was too safe, and were even less likely to take up whitewater rafting), what Giddens terms “cultivated risk-taking” was nevertheless undertaken by many people to “create an edge which routine circumstances lack.”40 While style and narrative preoccupations in Miami Vice went through distinctive phases of evolution, what remained remarkably consistent across the duration of the show was the dramatic animation of risk as a governing logic uniting cops, criminals, and victims. Indeed, one way of viewing Crockett, Tubbs, and the supporting members of the vice team was as “players” in a high-stakes risk environment. While the specific nature of this environment – covert law enforcement – was one which very few people would have experience of, the underlying principles were not so unfamiliar. Rather than skills in detection, the cops operated overwhelmingly with a reliance on confidence, nerves, and the capacity to handle high-stress situations, to act speedily and decisively, to judge people quickly, to win their trust, and to be able to bluff and outwit them. If, as Giddens asserts, “most institutionalized risk environments … are contests,” then the vice squad were players required to perform under pressure.41 This was, in fact, made explicit in the show by the repeated use of the term “players” to describe the participants. In the pilot episode, as Crockett (a former college football player) struggles to come to terms with the death of his partner Eddie Rivera and the disintegration of his marriage, his (soon to be ex) wife Caroline counters his resigned excuse that such circumstances came with the job with the retort that “you’re all players, you get high on the action.” As Crockett himself remarks to Tubbs later the same episode, “This is Miami, where you can even tell the players without a program.” In the episode “Streetwise,”

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married cop Vic Romano (Bill Paxton) has to deal with the consequences of falling in love with a prostitute while undercover, and responds to Crockett’s request that he seek help with the retort that “I know when to be a cop and when to be a player and I don’t need anyone telling me how to walk the line.” A subsequent episode depicts Crockett reflecting on his poor choice of girlfriends, stating, “First a junkie, then a hooker; been in the business too long. I’m starting to fall for the players.” “Player” as a noun has several well-established (and often overlapping) connotations, and Miami Vice makes much of the slippage between them. As a term to describe an individual engaged in illegal activities, its use in the show is clear enough. Yet the role of the undercover cop is to successfully play (perform) a player (criminal), in order to become a player (an important participant) in major drug deals, and thus effect seizures and arrests. To make the deals, one has to operate successfully as a player, in the sense of being a person who can profitably compete in a market as a financial transactor and deal maker. (As Gordon Gecko says with reference to a persistent Bud Fox in Wall Street [1987], “This is the kid. Calls me fifty-nine days in a row. Wants to be a player.”) Implicit in much of this is the notion that the vice cops are playing a (dangerous) game, gambling with other people’s money, and their own lives. In addition, as Crockett notes, one of the risks/opportunities of being undercover is becoming repeatedly involved sexually with the players, and thus in effect becoming a “player,” a person who pursues a number of different sexual partners. For Gina and Trudy, often playing prostitutes, this sense of being players also brings with it the risk of falling for the players (as Gina does with crime lord Frank Mosca [Stanley Tucci] in “Blood and Roses”) or suffering sexual assault (Gina at the hands of Mosca, but also Lupe Ramirez [Burt Young] in “Give a Little, Take a Little”); Trudy, undercover as a call girl, is rescued from sexual torture by a deranged professor in “Asian Cut”). Against the backdrop of the 1980s AIDS epidemic, the other danger of playing with high-risk sexual conduct is contracting a fatal disease. Turning to Miami Vice’s criminal class, it was clear that they had absorbed the risk and reward ethos of competitive capitalism in its

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purest form. For instance, in the episode “The Golden Triangle,” Castillo comes face to face with General Lao Li (Keye Luke), an old adversary and one of the major opium producers in Thailand. Lao Li is elderly, and has come ostensibly to retire, like many of his American peers, in the Miami sunshine. In a tense meeting in Lao Li’s limousine, the General begins by outlining the basis for his retirement fund, stating that “I have made good in the commodities trade, made investments.” Castillo responds with disgust at the legitimacy Lao Li seeks to bestow on his operations, stating, “That’s what you call it? … Commodities?” Lao Li replies in turn that Castillo doesn’t “seem to understand the reality of commodities; in the global market opium is no different from tapioca, or tin ore from Malaysia. It is simply a product, for which there is a demand.” This is not the first occasion where the show implies that “good” and “bad” capitalism share a common language and logic; as, early as the pilot episode, drug smuggler Corky Fowler (Michael Santoro) remarks sardonically to Crockett that “Free enterprise dude, it’s the basis of western democracy.” Indeed, Miami Vice’s shadow economy of trafficked goods, supplies of drugs, firearms, and people is, like its “legitimate” counterpart, largely knowledge-based, where the circulation of information plays a vital role in instigating deals, and where tip-offs, rumors, and speculation hold a prominent place. Moreover, Crockett and Tubbs are able to operate in this market partly on the basis of “insider info” gleaned from informers (most frequently Izzy Moreno, who is in essence a parody of American entrepreneurialism; a conman chameleon who seeks to profit from a series of dubious fly-by-night business ventures). Both the detectives and the commodities they track crisscrossed national borders, as high-risk trading offers rich rewards for those who come out on top in a lethally competitive marketplace. The tension between the thrill and the threat of operating as players in this climate of risk is a constant thread in the show, shaping the fates of cops, criminals, and those frequently caught somewhere between the two. In “Heart of Darkness” undercover FBI agent Artie Lawson (Ed O’Neill) is thought to have “gone over,” and become the criminal he is meant merely to be impersonating. Near the end of the episode,

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after he is pulled from his cover, Crockett asks him, “What’s going to happen to your wife?” Artie responds: I don’t know: I don’t know if I can go back to my wife. That life. You know it’s like I’ve been riding an adrenalin high. All that money and all those women … After a while, all the things that went before … it got like … it was like … I don’t know.

In the final scene, as the vice team gather in a local bar (Devo’s “Going Under” and George Benson’s melancholy “This Masquerade” underscore the scenario), we find out that Artie has hanged himself, thus terminally sidestepping his dilemma. And, as Artie’s words suggest, it is the ultimately self-destructive addiction to sensation, rather than criminal affluence per se, that had been fuelling his “ride.” He was not the only one; in the episode “To Have and To Hold”, after Tubbs has come to terms with falling in love with a murderous mob widow who has been killed in front of him, he and Crockett chat while fishing off the end of The St Vitus Dance. Tubbs declares that he is “just tired of losing people,” adding, “I know what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna find me a straight woman, one that’s not connected with the business, doesn’t have a career either, somebody who’ll love me with all her heart.” Crockett’s reply is “Yeah … have barbies … white picket fence … a Winnebago … weenie roast.” A beat passes before they look at each other and reply in unison, “No”. The detectives’ construction of a stereotypically traditional domesticity is summarily dismissed, and they keep on fishing. An earlier episode, “Nobody Lives Forever,” had seen Crockett’s girlfriend Brenda (Kim Greist) suggest they play a game of imagining their future life together as “The Crocketts.” Crockett, after jokingly suggesting that “this could be very dangerous,” comes up with a picture of the Crocketts (with two kids and a dog) going on vacation, stating that they would “take the kids fishing, camping, Disney World, the usual stuff.” Brenda pushes further, asking (now with slight anxiety, as the “usual stuff” becomes increasingly fanciful) “Who are our friends?” with Crockett replying “How the hell do I know … I don’t like your game,” implying that he rather prefers his own. The abrupt end of their domestic bliss comes the next morning,

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as Crockett oversleeps at Brenda’s house, and Tubbs is left alone to be beaten up. Crockett hands back his house keys to Brenda, stating, “It’s been a wonderful fantasy.” The episode ends with Crockett asking Tubbs “Wanna go fishing?”, ironically evoking his earlier fantasy family vacation. Tubbs’s reply, “I’d rather be trolling,” puns on the ambiguity of the word “trolling,” which is another term for fishing, but also slang for cruising the streets, which in Tubbs’s case could refer to patrolling them as an undercover cop, but is a term most typically employed to refer to searching out casual sexual encounters. As Crockett and Tubbs walk off together, the decision to “keep on trolling” seems firmly set. It is worth noting that one of our first encounters with Tubbs in the show’s pilot episode depicts him in a bar, singing along to Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (with lyrics “I’m just an average man, / With an average life, / I work from nine to five, / Hey, hell, I pay the price, / All I want is to be left alone, / In my average home”), as the camera shoots him through the legs of a performing stripper, complete with handfuls of dollar bills. At that point the plot hasn’t revealed that Tubbs is playing a “player” in order to get close to Calderone, and so we are likely to view his pleasure as genuine, rather than, like that of the stripper, simulated in order to entice an audience. Only later is the essential ambiguity apparent. Indeed, the first season sets up Tubbs, as a cop new to the world of undercover work, as rather enchanted by its thrills. In “Evan” he enjoys champagne with a female companion in an upscale nightclub while seemingly off the job, while in “The Great McCarthy” and “Calderone’s Return Part 1” he (not Ricardo Cooper) pointedly leers at attractive women. In “Calderone’s Return Part 2,” Tubbs attends a masked ball with Angelina Calderone, daughter of his brother’s murderer, with whom he has become romantically involved, telling her that “I love masquerades.” Tubbs begins to change his mind several episodes later, when in “Little Miss Dangerous” he is handcuffed to a bed by Jackie (Fiona Apple), a homicidal dominatrix prostitute he has “gone out on a limb for.” He lies helplessly prone as she blows out her brains to Public Image Ltd’s track “Order of Death,” with vocalist John Lydon singing, “This is what you want, this is what you get.” When, at the end of season two, Tubbs has to deal

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with the murder of Angelina Calderone and the child he had fathered with her, his weariness with “losing people” irrevocably sets in. Crockett does, of course, eventually “settle down,” if only briefly, with pop singer Caitlin Davies (Sheena Easton) in season four of the show. While ostensibly a “civilian,” Caitlin is also a professional performer, familiar with a peripatetic lifestyle, extreme highs and lows, success and failure, not to mention drugs and affluence, so in some senses presents an appropriate match for Crockett (if, as previously noted, an implausibly high-profile mate for an undercover cop). Yet the strains quickly show. In “Love at First Sight” Crockett is assigned to track down a killer who uses a state-of-the-art video dating service to find his/her victims, which requires him to go undercover as an enticing date. The episode teaser begins with Crockett in a face-on close-up, announcing, “Hi, I’m Sonny, and I’m looking for a lady with a good sense of humor and a lot of style … I like partying and staying out late at night.” At that point we do not yet know he is performing, and so the effect of seeing the recently married Crockett fishing for dates is deliberately unsettling. The episode makes much of the thrilling yet risky nature of this relatively new mode of romantic encounter, with the dating service employee assuring Crockett of either sexual exhaustion or psychological fatigue with the remark “Don’t worry – in a week you’ll be a wreck.” Crockett, highly skilled in the art of selling “them on you,” is a successful lure, and attracts the attention of other users, which causes Caitlin much distress. After a domestic argument arising from Crockett’s inability to forget about the case while at home, he drives off from Caitlin’s mansion and into the night. The ensuing music montage depicts Crockett patrolling the sleazy neon-lit streets of the city, gliding past strip bars, adult book stores, sex shows, liquor stores, prostitutes, and drug dealers, as the Ward Brothers’ haunting track “Madness of It All” accompanies his journey, with the lyrics “we traveled first class in a metal box to see the sunshine or the madness of it all.” At one point a dissolve merges Sonny’s face with the neon sign offering “girls” and a hand passing over some dollar bills, visually suturing him into this economy of illicit desire and sensation-seeking. A cut to Caitlin sees her pick up the phone and dial a number, which we assume to be

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Crockett’s car phone. A cut back to Crockett sees him pick up the phone, but we find out that it is Crockett who is making a call, to Tubbs. A cut to Tubbs reveals him on the job, sitting in an office as a tape of a female video date plays in the background. While Caitlin’s fears are for Sonny’s physical safety outside of the domestic space, the techniques of visual storytelling emphasize the psychic draw of this dangerous nocturnal world, and Sonny’s place within it. The show explores this inference most explicitly in the episode “Miami Squeeze,” when Crockett goes to see a police psychiatrist in order to work through the trauma of Caitlin’s murder and the subsequent bout of amnesia that saw him forget his real identity and become temporarily his criminal alter ego. After predictably resisting the initial request to “open up,” Crockett eventually confesses that “the truth is, I’m a junkie myself. I’m hooked on the action: a junkie to the street.” Crockett’s addiction to sensation-seeking is paralleled with those of the individuals he is ostensibly out there to police; he needs them for his fix, and he is trapped in a perpetual cycle of criminal supply and demand. Thus, while the vice cops seek to stem the flow of risky and addictive commodities (drugs, prostitution, guns), the risk inherent in that undertaking can itself become a self-destructive compulsion. As Crockett remarks to Tubbs before embarking upon (yet another) high-speed car chase in “Down for the Count,” “We could crash and burn; I don’t give a damn about that either.” As the case of Artie Lawson in “Heart of Darkness” illustrates, an emphasis on the suicidal nature of excessively risky behavior is a recurring feature of the show, as time and again individuals fall prey to the repercussions of the sensations they seek and take their own lives. In “Killshot” star Jai alai player Tico Arriola (Fernando Allende) commits suicide on court by letting a ball flying at nearly 200 miles an hour hit him in the face. Tico had been blackmailed for apparently killing a prostitute in a coke-fuelled frenzy, which was in fact a set-up to extract information from his brother Frank, a U.S. customs officer. In “The Fix” a judge with heavy gambling debts to criminals persuades his son to throw a basketball game in order to protect him from harm. After refusing Crockett’s offer of help with the remark that his problems had stemmed from “always looking to make a deal” (thus

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implying that there was no difference between “dealing” with cops or criminals), the judge decides to take the law into his own hands. He reverses his decision to ask his son to throw the game, assuring him that all is well, and that “you know I’m a clutch player” (someone who succeeds in a pressure situation), before going off to kill crime boss Pagone (Michael Richards). Crockett arrives just in time to arrest the judge, who states, “I’m breaking even,” before shooting himself in the head. In “Payback” Crockett responds to Tubbs’s protestation that his excessively risky plan for the pursuit of a drug lord “is suicide” by simply replying, “Tell me another way?” Arguably the most striking rendering of this futile cycle of compulsion and addiction occurs at the end of the episode “Streetwise.” After cop Vic Romano embarks on a suicidal attempt to rescue his prostitute girlfriend Carla (Deborah Adair) and is fatally wounded in the chest, Crockett and Tubbs inform Carla that they will take her to a “halfway house,” where she will get “substantial assistance” to break from her own risky and self-destructive behavior. The next scene depicts Crockett, Tubbs, Gina, and Trudy in a bar, and is filmed in a series of tight close-ups of the bar counter top, so that only the characters’ hands and the items on top of the counter are in shot. The first shot shows Trudy settle herself at the bar, with what appears to be a second double-espresso (an empty coffee-stained shot glass rests on the counter). A cut refocuses us on Gina’s hands, one clasping a stirring straw, with her own double-espresso shot settled on the counter. She uses the straw to play with a small pile of white powder on the counter top, which is clearly spilled sugar, but is also plainly meant to resemble a line of cocaine. The scene progresses with a series of rapid cuts between shots of Crockett’s and Tubbs’s hands filling in paperwork on the counter top, as Gina says, “C’mon guys … put in an all-nighter last night, worked all day yesterday,” and tight close-ups of hands emphasize how supplies of two important commodities (sugar and coffee beans) help fuel the production of endless and largely futile reports on the distribution of others. The scene ends as Crockett and Tubbs cross to the car to file their reports, with Tubbs remarking that “If Carla can clean up, it’s gotta be worth something, right.” Crockett’s reply is “It’s gotta

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Gina lines up her “fix” in “Streetwise.”

be, ’cos that’s all there is.” A dissolve takes us to a shot of Crockett and Tubbs traversing the red light district and disappearing just as Carla exits a store front to again ply her trade on the street. The bleak conclusion is that in actual fact it’s gotta be worth nothing as the cycle continues, and the players all take up their respective places for another risky game. In the months leading up to the transmission of Miami Vice’s final episode, rumors circulated in the press that Crockett and Tubbs would be killed in a plane hijack drama, or in a terrorist bombing, after saving the lives of hundreds of airline passengers.42 While certainly spectacular, not to mention tragically topical (the Pan Am Flight 103 Lockerbie bombing had occurred in December 1988), such an ending would be entirely out of character with a show in which the leads rarely, if ever, save anything. In the event, “Freefall,” the precipitously titled feature-length finale, forgoes such noble self-sacrifice for the

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perilous vice of risk addiction. Crockett and Tubbs are requested to “go under, using your standard MO [modus operandi], a couple of drug dealers,” in order to rescue the brutal right-wing dictator of Costa Morada, General Bourbon (Ian McShane), from the clutches of the Colombian drug lords who realize that an impending communist revolution will upset their trade. The storyline, like a number across the show’s run, is overtly critical of US government agencies, as represented by a range of cynical and venal operatives, and Crockett and Tubbs initially reject the approach made to them to undertake the mission. Yet they change their mind in a meeting held in a saloon, a location which offers abundant opportunities to underline the fact that it is the chance to risk their lives as players in the game that outweighs any principled desire to right political wrongdoing. The scene opens with Tubbs walking past a large sign that reads “Macs club deuce,” a casino sign that introduces the idea of a gambling pair, but also hints at the fact that a deuce (two aces) is the worst possible throw of the dice. As Tubbs joins Crockett at the bar with the intent of persuading him to take the mission, the shot is composed to enable the “club deuce” sign to remain nestled, just slightly out of focus, between the pair. Tubbs tempts Crockett not with reference to duty or justice, but with the enticing prospect of hearing “Bourbon’s little book of players.” Crockett, intrigued by the prospect of gleaning information on “who’s who in the dope Social Register,” agrees, but not before stating that “You know we’re suckers Rico – in fact, its probably suicide,” while Lyle Lovett’s “Crying Shame” – a cowboy song whose lyrics tell a sorry tale of compulsively self-destructive behavior – plays its role as Greek chorus in the background. By the end of the episode, it transpires that US officials are concerned with protecting Bourbon not because of what he can tell them about the Colombian drug lords, but because he possesses sensitive information on the illegal activities of high-ranking US government agents. Crockett and Tubbs now find themselves in the position of trying to stop Bourbon leaving the US, as he is to be whisked away in a seaplane. As the pair rush to the Miami waterfront, the episode recreates meticulously the sequence from the end of the original pilot of the show, as Esteban Calderone escapes by seaplane from the very

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same spot on the asphalt. In the pilot episode, it is the frustration of Calderone’s getaway that compels Tubbs to stay in Miami, and thus in essence creates the premise for the show. Here, as Crockett and Tubbs succeed in shooting Bourbon’s plane out of the sky, the show comes full circle and signals its end. Impotent in the pilot episode to do anything more than stand and watch as Calderone makes his exit, the hail of machine-gun bullets that brings down Bourbon in a spectacular fireball is in contrast a moment of cathartic release, followed by a realization of utter pointlessness. Bourbon is destroyed along with the all the information he possesses on both the drugs cartel and corrupt US officials, as the risky thrill of “Macs club deuce” gives way to the bathos of deus ex machina, and the sudden resolution blows not just the episode, but the entire premise of the show out of the water. Honeymoon Suite’s “Bad Attitude” finishes playing in the background (“Yesterday’s heroes with no room to grow … two can play that game, no one likes to lose”), at which point Crockett and Tubbs promptly quit Miami Vice. Fittingly, “Freefall” ends with an arch tribute to Crockett and Tubbs as helplessly addicted architects of compulsive destruction. The episode finale is a music montage cut to the song “Tell Me,” by Terry Kath. Kath, a founding member of the band Chicago, had killed himself accidentally in 1978 at Don Johnson’s house (the band’s roadie, not the actor, but surely too neat a coincidence to be inadvertent) with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. Allegedly familiar with risky pursuits as a substance-abusing gun enthusiast, Kath is reported to have put the gun to his head, reassured onlookers with the words “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded,” before firing the fatal shot.43 It would be hard to think of a more perfect balladeer to score the show’s own exit. “Tell Me,” which appeared originally in the 1973 film Electra Glide in Blue (in which Kath, in a cameo role, shoots dead a cop in an ending reminiscent of Easy Rider), laments the passing of simpler, less tumultuous times. As Kath sings “God above, is there not anything that we might do to try and make this world of ours a better place for me and you?” the montage recaps some of the show’s finest moments of violent action. This culminates in the crescendo, where Kath and chorus sing repeatedly “God bless America today” as a series of the

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show’s most spectacular explosions occur (obliterating in turn a helicopter, fish tank, house, houseboat, and car), reminiscent briefly of nothing so much as the end of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970s countercultural film Zabriskie Point. As often in this most ideologically ambivalent of shows, it is hard to be sure whether the reference and the resonance are blank, or as Terry Kath might briefly have realized, sometimes really loaded.

Afterword

Several months before “Freefall” aired on NBC, Miami Vice offered another fitting finale, this time to its status as a show at the forefront of changes to network broadcasting. In the fall of 1988 Miami Vice became “the most prominent network series to go directly to cable [syndication]” when it began airing on the USA Network.1 Traditionally, rights to rerun shows had been sold to commercial TV stations, which enabled the producers to recoup the debts incurred in making the shows for broadcast. As noted in chapter 1, in the case of Miami Vice this deficit financing had led to a protracted dispute between Universal-TV and NBC over the license fee to be paid for the right to air new episodes of the show. In March 1986 Sidney Sheinberg, President of MCA Inc., threatened that “If NBC says to us they’re not going to pay a dime more for Miami Vice … then we’ll make Miami Vice in Los Angeles.”2 At that point the show reportedly cost approximately $1.25 million per episode, with NBC paying $950,000 for the right to air. The cause of the dispute was not the shortfall per se, but the diminishing likelihood of seeing the syndication jackpot that had made the model of deficit financing a justifiable risk. Universal-TV had originally agreed to finance the exceptionally expensive Miami Vice because its premium attributes would be worth more in the offnetwork syndication market. Indeed, Miami Vice was commissioned during the height of a syndication boom, as the growth of independent television stations (from 108 in 1980 to 249 in 1986) had been accompanied by a demand for rerun shows to fill the schedules.3 As Alisa Perren notes, “the surge in independent station numbers, combined with the expanding desire by these stations for higher-quality programming,

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enabled syndicators to charge premium prices for their programming.”4 As an example, in 1985 Magnum P.I. (also made by Universal-TV) was sold into syndication for around $1.8 million per episode.5 Yet by 1986, the market had peaked, with a decline in advertising revenues and financial difficulties for independent stations that couldn’t afford the inflated prices they had initially agreed for shows. By early 1987, Universal-TV was amortizing its expenses against the probability that it wouldn’t see the revenues for Magnum P.I. It also began “writing off an increased proportion of the cost of [Miami Vice] now against the revenues from the network rather than its later years” in anticipation of declining syndication profits.6 In February 1987 the company announced that it had “withdrawn its offering of Miami Vice” from the traditional off-network syndication market, due to the low prices being offered, and stated that it planned to reintroduce it under a (yet to be specified) “new marketing strategy.”7 This strategy became clear in November 1987, when cable station USA Network bought the syndication rights to ninety-two hours of the show. Kay Koplovitz, President and CEO of USA Network, stated that the show’s purchase was in line with the station’s strategy of “seeking out ‘the most powerful, high gloss, turn-on-the-heat program series in television.’”8 While the show’s purchase was a notable coup for the cable station, it represented a major fall in revenues for Universal-TV (industry estimates in February 1988 predicted profits of only around $10 million from the deal).9 Yet the most significant fact of the transaction was that USA Network’s parent companies were Paramount Communications and MCA Inc., meaning that in effect Universal-TV had (at least in part) sold Miami Vice to itself. While the FCC’s Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (Fin Syn) prevented the networks from owning prime-time programming, they didn’t prohibit MCA from transmitting shows it produced on its own cable station. The 1990s would see Fin Syn swept away, as the second realignment of the broadcasting sector bequeathed what Jennifer Holt calls “a high-powered cabal of entertainment empires, dominating film, television, publishing, cable systems, home video, music, merchandising and theme parks – all at the same time.”10 As for the sale of Miami Vice, what was perceived by many as a sign of financial freefall would come to be recognized as vertically integrated take-off.

Broadcast Date Notes

Season One (twenty-two episodes) September 16, 1984–May 10, 1985 Season Two (twenty-two episodes) September 27, 1985–May 9, 1986 Season Three (twenty-four episodes) September 26, 1986–May 8, 1987 Season Four (twenty-two episodes) September 25, 1987–May 6, 1988 Season Five (twenty-two episodes) November 4, 1988–January 25, 1990* * The show finale, “Freefall,” aired on May 21, 1989. NBC aired three additional season five episodes (“World of Trouble,” “Miracle Man,” and “Leap of Faith”) in June 1989. One further episode, “Too Much, Too Late,” which dealt with child sex abuse, was deemed too explicit for network broadcast, and was given its first outing on January 25, 1990 on the USA Network cable station.

Notes

Introduction 1

2 3

4

5 6

7 8

David Buxton, From the Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in Television Series (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); Douglas Snauffer, Crime Television (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers Inc., 2006); R. L. Rutsky, “Visible Sins, Vicarious Pleasures: Style and Vice in Miami Vice,” SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism vol. 17 (1988), pp. 77–82. Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996). John Thornton Caldwell, Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Jane Feuer, Seeing through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Horace Newcomb, “The Production Contexts of Television,” in Horace Newcomb, ed., Television: The Critical View, 6th edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 13. Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 5. This is not to say that such work cannot be excellent. See Nick James’s Heat (London: BFI, 2002) or Matt Zoller Seitz’s video essay “Zen Pulp, Pt 1” for the Museum of Moving Image (http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/ zen-pulp-pt-1-20090701) for examples of this broadly auteurist approach at its best. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 33; Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 10. Maltby, op. cit., p. 33.

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Chapter 1: I Want My MTV Cops: Miami Vice as Television Commodity 1

Richard Zoglin, “Cool Cops, Hot Show: With Flashy Visuals and a Rock Score, Miami Vice Sets a New TV Beat,” Time, September 16, 1985. 2 Todd Gitlin, Inside Prime Time (New York: Pantheon, 1983), pp. 76–80. 3 Ibid., pp. 296–7. 4 Michelle Brustin, quoted in Miami Vice, The E! True Hollywood Story, prod. Jeff Shore (E! Entertainment Television, 2001). 5 Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), p. 127. 6 Jacquie Jones, “The Construction of Black Sexuality,” in Manthia Diawara, ed., Black American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 247–56. 7 Harry W. Haines, “ ‘They Were Called and They Went’: The Political Rehabilitation of the Vietnam Veteran,” in Linda Dittmar and Gene Michaud, eds., From Hanoi to Hollywood (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 88. 8 This is based on real allegations, as outlined in history professor Alfred W. McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper and Row, 1972). 9 Buxton, op. cit., p. 157. 10 Details from Art Harris, “Of Vice and Mann: He’s the Flamingo Kid Behind the Flash and the Glitz on TV’s Hottest, Hippest Cop Show,” Washington Post, October 16, 1985. 11 Jonathan Yardley, “John D. MacDonald’s Lush Landscape of Crime,” Washington Post, November 11, 2003, page C01. 12 Carl Hiaasen, “Introduction,” The Deep Blue Goodbye (New York: Random House, 1995). 13 Stephen Farber, “TV Series to be Broadcast in Stereo,” The New York Times, July 9, 1984, section C, p. 18, col. 4. 14 “Fire and Fury in Miami,” Time, June 2, 1980. 15 Sheila L. Croucher, Imagining Miami (Richmond: University Press of Virginia, 1997), p. 41. 16 James Kelly, “Trouble in Paradise,” Time, November 21, 1981. 17 As recounted in lurid detail in the documentary film Cocaine Cowboys, dir. Billy Corben (Rakontur, 2006). 18 Michael Demarest, “Cocaine: Middle Class High,” Time, July 2, 1981. 19 Ibid.

NOTES TO PAGES 12–18

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A. O. Sulzberger, “Banks Help Drug Trade in Miami, Senators Told,” The New York Times, June 5, 1980, section D, p. 1. T. D. Allman, Miami: City of the Future (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987), p. 31. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., p. 30. John Nordheimer, “Miami’s Bayfront Park is Focus of New Design for Downtown,” The New York Times, May 22, 1985, section A, p. 18. Details from Margy Rochlin, “ ‘Vice’ is nice …” American Film, vol. 11, no. 10 (1986), p. 25. Brustin, op. cit. For more on the late playwright’s turbulent life see the award-winning biopic Piñero (2001), directed by Leon Ichaso (who directed a number of episodes of Miami Vice). David Bordwell, “Intensified Continuity: Visual Style in Contemporary American Film,” Film Quarterly vol. 55, no. 3 (spring 2002), pp. 16–28. Emily Benedek, “Inside Miami Vice,” Rolling Stone, March 28, 1985, pp. 58, 125. Letters, Rolling Stone, June 6, 1985, p. 6. Richard A. Blum and Richard D. Lindheim, Primetime: Network Television Programming (Boston: Focal Press, 1987), p. 20. Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 4. Michele Hilmes, “NBC and the Classic Network System,” in Michele Hilmes, ed., NBC: America’s Network (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), pp. 171–3. See also Jason Mittell, “The Classic Network System,” in Michele Hilmes and Jason Jacobs, eds., The Television History Book (London: BFI, 2005), pp. 44–9. Quoted in Richard Zoglin, “Trying to Beat the Summer Blahs,” Time, August 5, 1985. Carolyn A. Lin, “Network Prime-Time Programming Strategies in the 1980s,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 39 (1995), p. 482. Alisa Perren, “Deregulation, Integration and a New Era of Media Conglomerates: The Case of Fox, 1985–1995,” dissertation (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2004), p. 37. Ibid., p. 61. Frederick Wasser, Veni, Vidi, Video: The Hollywood Empire and the VCR (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 84. Stephen Prince, A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow, 1980–1989 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 94. Wasser, op. cit., p. 103.

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50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

NOTES TO PAGES 18–23

Douglas A. Ferguson, “Measurement of Mundane TV Behaviours: Remote Control Device Flipping Frequency,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media (winter 1994), p. 35. Susan Tyler Eastman, Jeffrey Neal-Lunsford, and Karen E. Riggs, “Coping with Grazing: Prime-Time Strategies for Accelerated Program Transitions,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 39 (1995), p. 92. See Michael Curtin, “On Edge: Culture Industries in the Neo-Network Era,” in Richard Ohmann, ed., Making and Selling Culture (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), pp. 181–203. Ibid., p. 181 Curtin defines the “neo-network” era as one in which networks continue to exist, but function as part of very large media conglomerates that distribute content across the panoply of outlets that they control. “Television Reviews,” Variety, September 19, 1984, p. 95. Lee Goldberg, “The Perils of TV Pilots,” American Film, July–August 1984, p. 63. Details from “Miami Vice,” Monthly Film Bulletin 52 (October 1985), p. 321. Prince, op. cit., p. xi. As Michael Curtin notes, “the emergence of ‘software’ as an industry buzzword conveys the recent shift in emphasis away from a few highly regulated channels of exhibition towards multiple circuits of distribution that transcend national borders.” Curtin, op. cit., p. 188. Brandon Tartikoff, The Last Great Ride (New York: Turtle Bay Books, 1992), p. 77. Ibid. Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 135. Jay Cocks, “Sing a Song of Seeing,” Time, December 26, 1983. Goodwin, op. cit., p. 38. Elana Levine, “Sex as a Weapon: Programming Sexuality in the 1970s,” in Hilmes, NBC: America’s Network, pp. 224–39. Pittman, quoted in Goodwin, op. cit., p. 133. Andrew Pollack, “Japan’s Stereo TV System,” The New York Times, June 16, 1984, p. 29. Ibid. John Carmody, “The TV Column,” Washington Post, June 1, 1984, p. B10. Stephen Farber, “TV Series to be Broadcast in Stereo,” The New York Times, July 9, 1984, Section C, p. 18. Hans Fantel, “Home Video: The Long Road to Stereo TV,” The New York Times, June 16, 1985.

NOTES TO PAGES 23–27

62

63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79

80 81 82

113

See Barbara Klinger’s discussion of home theater in Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema: New Technologies and the Home (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). For more on early adopters, see Vijay Mahajan, Eitan Muller, and Rajendra K. Srivastava, “Determination of Adopter Categories by Using Innovation Diffusion Models,” Journal of Marketing Research vol. 27, no. 1 (February 1990), pp. 37–50. It is no surprise that PBS, who typically broadcast to an upscale audience, was the other lead innovator in stereo television broadcasting, For more, see Fantel, op. cit. Bob Gerson, “1986: RCA, Zenith Top Color TV, But Industry Worries About Prices,” Twice, September 8, 1986. Richard Zoglin, “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” Time, April 21, 1986. William C. Banks, “Watching with both ears. Stereo TV – a true breakthrough – is in the air,” Money, 1 August 1986. Ibid. Klinger, Beyond the Multiplex, p. 20. Ibid., pp. 21–2. David Marc and Robert J. Thompson, Prime Time, Prime Movers: From I Love Lucy to LA Law: America’s Greatest TV Shows and the People Who Created Them (London: Little, Brown, 1992), p. 232. From 7:00 to 11:00 p.m. in the Eastern and Pacific time zones, and from 6:00 to 10:00 p.m. in the Central and Mountain time zones. Hilmes, The TV History Book, p. 63. Blum and Lindheim, op. cit. See, for example, “Universal May Pull ‘Vice’ outta Miami to Control Costs,” Variety, March 19, 1986, p. 44. Neil Smith, “Making Miami Vice Cool Again,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/ entertainment/5225028.stm. http://www.hulu.com/about. Alex Weprin, “NBC to Stream Classic TV Shows,” http://www.broadcastingcable. com/article/CA6533778.html. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 3. Lynn Spigel, “Introduction,” in Lynn Spigel and Jan Olsson, eds., Television after TV: Essays on a Medium in Transition (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 6. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 21. Toby Miller, The Avengers (London: BFI, 1997), p. 5. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 160.

114 83 84

NOTES TO PAGES 27–35

John Thornton Caldwell, “Convergence Television,” in Spigel and Olsson, op. cit., p. 47. Jeremy Butler, “Miami Vice: The Legacy of Film Noir,” Journal of Popular Film and Television vol. 13. no. 3 (1985), pp. 127–38.

Chapter 2: Guns, Glitter, and Glamor: Styling the Show 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

Zoglin, “Cool Cops, Hot Show.” Marc and Thompson, op. cit., p. 236. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 236. Todd Gitlin, Watching Television (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 157. Cathy Schwichtenberg, “Sensual Surfaces and Stylistic Excess: The Pleasure and Politics of Miami Vice,” Journal of Communication Inquiry vol. 10, no. 3 (1986), pp. 45–65. Rutsky, op. cit. Buxton, op. cit. Kellner, op. cit., p. 240. Michael Mann, The Advertiser, August 8, 1986. Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 45. Ibid., p. 59. Details on Hill Street Blues from Todd Gitlin, “Make It Look Messy,” in Inside Prime Time, pp. 273–324. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age, p. 63. Christine Geraghty, Women and Soap Opera: A Study of Prime Time Soaps (Oxford: Polity, 1991), p. 3. Anna McCarthy, “Studying Soap Opera,” in Glen Creeber, ed., The Television Genre Book (London: BFI Press, 2001), p. 49. Trish Janeshutz, The Making of Miami Vice (New York: Ballantine Books, 1986), p. 203. Caldwell, Televisuality, pp. 52–3. Michael Pollan, “The ‘Vice’ Look,” Channels of Communications (July/August 1985). Don Johnson, quoted in Katherine Baker, “Miami Vice Star Plans Animated Anti-Drugs Film,” The Associated Press, January 14, 1987. Paul Rutherford, “Action Adventure Shows,” in Horace Newcomb, ed., The Encyclopedia of Television, http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/A/htmlA/ actionadvent/actionadvent.htm.

NOTES TO PAGES 35–48

21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

115

Stephen Prince, “The Brave New Ancillary World,” in A New Pot of Gold, pp. 90–141. Bill Osgerby, Anna Gough-Yates, and Marianne Wells, Action TV: Toughguys, Smooth Operators and Foxy Chicks (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 18. Sally Bedell Smith, “ ‘Miami Vice’: Action TV with Some New Twists,” The New York Times, January 3, 1985, section C, p. 20. Jane Feuer, op. cit., p. 45 Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 4. The theme tune for Airwolf was composed by another Eastern European musician, this time the Hungarian émigré Sylvester Levay, who had also produced electronic music for Scarface and Flashdance. Laura Van Tuyl, “New Electronic Keyboards: They’re ‘Like – Wow!’”, The Christian Science Monitor, December 30, 1988. Benedek, op. cit., p. 58. Janeshutz, op. cit., p. 202. “To Miami and Beyond: Jan Hammer Retrospective, Part 2”, Film Score Monthly vol. 8, no. 5 (July 2003). Jeremy Butler, Television: Critical Methods and Approaches (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2002), p. 176. Mann, quoted in Benedek, op. cit., p. 58. Goodwin, op. cit., p. 186. Mann, quoted in Benedek, op. cit., p. 58. Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 17. Ibid. Maltby, op. cit., p. 378. Smith, op. cit. See J. Hoberman, “‘A Bright, Guilty World’: Daylight Ghosts and Sunshine Noir,” ArtForum (February 2007). Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 175. Butler, “Miami Vice: The Legacy of Film Noir,” pp. 127–38. John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 11, 210. Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 222. Quoted in Jay Cocks, “The Shape of Things to Come,” Time, August 30, 1982. Glenn Gillis, “Production Atmosphere for Miami Vice,” American Cinematographer (April 1986), p. 113. Ibid., p. 114.

116 48 49

50

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

NOTES TO PAGES 48–59

Harris, op. cit., p. B1. For more on NTSC and colour, see Pat Bailey, “NTSC: Yesterday, Today, Forever?”, Videomaker (May 2004), http://www.videomaker.com/article/ 10000/. Karen Lury notes in Interpreting Television (London: Arnold, 2005) that NTSC was notorious for its “poor and often variable transmission of colour and contrast” (p. 8). Janet Maslin, “Movies in New York: All the City’s Film Set,” The New York Times, July 11, 1985, section C, p. 17. Wendy Goodman, “The High Style of ‘Miami Vice,’” New York, March 25, 1985. In this case Kodak 5294, first released in 1983, and used also to produce the striking low-key illumination in Aliens (1986). Caldwell, Televisuality, p. 86. Ibid., p. 88 Roger Simon, “What’s Black and Blue and Hurtin’ All Over? Miami Vice, Pal!” TV Guide, March 21, 1987, p. 26. Brent Staples, “Paint in Black,” The New York Times, November 15, 1987, section 6, p. 22. Beth Dunlop and Joanna Lombard, Great Houses of Florida (New York: Rizzoli, 2008), p. 191. “Miami’s Brightest Star Fades,” Sunday Mail, July 16, 1989, p. 36. See Goldberg, op. cit., pp. 63–5. Perren, op. cit., p. 170. Ibid., p. 173. Caldwell, Televisuality, pp. 284–6. For Ryan Murphy’s thoughts on the contrast between Miami Vice and Nip/ Tuck, see Eric Deggans, “New Season of ‘Nip/Tuck’ Bares our Souls,” St. Petersburg Times, June 21, 2004, p. 1E.

Chapter 3: Losing the Plot? Storytelling in Miami Vice 1 2 3 4 5

John Carmody, “Now Here’s the News,” Washington Post, May 11, 1984, p. B10. Feuer, op. cit., p. 115. Michael Z. Newman, “From Beats to Arcs: Toward a Poetics of Television Narrative,” The Velvet Light Trap 58 (fall 2006), p. 17. Ibid., p. 16; Geraghty, op. cit., p. 3. Ibid., pp. 4, 168.

NOTES TO PAGES 59–71

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34

117

Stephanie Brush, “3 TV Shows that Captured a Decade,” The New York Times, June 4, 1989. Feuer, op. cit., p. 103. Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 36. Ibid. Ibid., p. 37. Pollan, op. cit., p. 27. Crockett in Phil the Shill, season two, episode eleven. Thompson, Storytelling, p. 50. Newman, op. cit., p. 21. Thompson, Storytelling, p. 36. Newman, op. cit., p. 16. Thompson notes how many screenplay manuals cite Aristotle to “justify their advice on issues of unity, motivation, and the fact that stories must have beginnings, middles, and ends” (Storytelling, p. 37). Ibid., p. 41. Newman, op. cit., p. 18. Ibid. Ibid. Details from Blum and Lindheim, op. cit., p. 90. Indeed, the first meeting between Crockett and his girlfriend (renamed Dr Theresa Lyons in the episode) appears to have been retained for the sole reason of enabling the next installment, entitled “Theresa,” to concentrate on the relationship without the need for an introductory scene. Murray Smith, “Theses on the Philosophy of Hollywood History,” in Steve Neale and Murray Smith, eds., Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (London: Routledge, 1998), p. 13. Blum and Lindheim, op. cit., p. 150. Ibid. Butler, Television, p. 25. Ibid. Blum and Lindheim, op. cit., p. 143. Ibid., pp. 152–3. Ibid., p. 80. Details on ratings from John Carmody’s “TV column,” Washington Post, April 23, 1986. Richard Harrington, “ ‘Vice and Virtuosity’: Edward James Olmos, Along the Cultural Divide,” Washington Post, December 20, 1985, p. C1. Michael E. Hill, “A Fight for Jenny,” Washington Post, October 5, 1986, p. Y11.

118 35 36

37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56

NOTES TO PAGES 71–78

David Sheff, “Don Johnson: Interview,” Playboy, January 1, 1987, p. 49. Simon, op. cit., p. 26. For more on VQT, see Sue Brower, “Fans as Tastemakers: Viewers for Quality Television,” in Lisa A. Lewis, ed., The Adoring Audience: Fan Culture and Popular Media (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 163–75. Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 29–30. “Counterprogramming” refers to the practice of competing for viewers by scheduling a show of a different program type, as opposed to “blunting,” which would mean scheduling a similar type of program, in this instance a soap opera. For more on this, see James T. Tiedge and Kenneth J. Ksobiech, “Counterprogramming Primetime Network Television,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media vol. 31, no. 1 (winter 1987), pp. 41–55. Peter P. Schillaci, “Miami Vice and Television’s New Visual Sophistication,” Sightlines (spring/summer 1986), p. 12. Blum and Lindheim, op. cit., p. 152. Ibid. For more on Crime Story see Rochlin, op. cit., pp. 22–5, 56, 57. John. J. O’Connor, “Real World Impinges on Miami Vice,” The New York Times, October 19, 1986, section 2, p. 31. Simon, op. cit., p. 26. The other reason for starting the season with this episode is that it sees Crockett’s Ferrari Daytona destroyed by a missile launcher, rather literally obliterating one of the show’s iconic elements, and used to signify that season three will offer a significant style overhaul. Leslie Bennetts, “ ‘Miami Vice’ Frees Actor by Killing Lieutenant Zito,” The New York Times, January 9, 1987, section C, p. 26. Ibid. Simon, op. cit., p. 28. Mark Christensen, “Miami Vice Breakout! The Show will be Wilder,” TV Guide, September 19, 1987, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Fred Rothenberg, “Bobby Ewing Returns in Start of Dallas–Miami Vice Match-Up,” Associated Press, September 25, 1986. Ibid. Amanda D. Lotz, “Must-See TV: NBC’s Dominant Decades,” in Hilmes, ed., op. cit., pp. 266–7. Christensen, op. cit., p. 9. Ibid. Hugh Malcolm Beville, Audience Ratings: Radio, Television, and Cable (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1988), p. 112.

NOTES TO PAGES 78–87

57 58 59 60

119

Ibid., p. 236. Blum and Lindheim, op. cit., p. 151. Michael Mann, quoted in “Miami’s Brightest Star Fades,” Sunday Mail, July 16, 1989. Perren, op. cit., p. 168.

Chapter 4: Risky Business: The Cultural Politics of Vice 1

2

3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Donnie Radcliffe and Jacqueline Trescott, “White House ‘Vice’ Squad: Up from Miami, Johnson & Thomas Enliven Reagan’s Dinner for the Danish Prime Minister,” Washington Post, September 11, 1985, p. F1. Michael Schaller, Robert D. Schulzinger, and Karen Anderson, Present Tense: The United States Since 1945 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004), p. 429. William H. Chafe, “The Reagan Years,” in The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 475. See, for instance, Colin Hoskins and Rolf Mirus, “Reasons for the US Dominance of the International Trade in Television Programmes,” Media, Culture and Society vol. 10 (1988), pp. 449–515; Chris Jordan, “Who Shot J.R.’s Ratings? The Rise and Fall of the 1980s Prime-Time Soap Opera,” Television and New Media vol. 8, no. 1 (February 2007), pp. 68–87. Prince, op. cit., p. xvi. Ien Ang, Watching Dallas (London: Methuen, 1985). Buxton, op. cit., p. 142. Chafe, op. cit., p. 482. Buxton, op. cit., p. 142. Mann, quoted in Peter J. Boyer, “TV Turns to the Hard-Boiled Male,” The New York Times, February 16, 1986, section 2, p. 1. Buxton, op. cit., p. 142. Neil King, Heroes in Hard Times: Cop Action Movies in the U.S. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), p. 3. Kellner, op. cit., p. 240. Buxton, op. cit., p. 143. Thomas Morgan, “NBC Rebuts Poll Results on Drugs,” The New York Times, September 3, 1986, section C, p. 25. Sheff, op. cit., p. 49. Maltby, op. cit., p. 42. Ibid., p. 43.

120 19 20 21

22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39

NOTES TO PAGES 87–94

Ibid. Benjamin Scott King, “Sonny’s Virtues: The Gender Negotiations of Miami Vice,” Screen vol. 31, no. 3 (autumn 1990), p. 283. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen vol. 16, no. 3 (autumn 1975), pp. 6–18; Steve Neale, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” in Screening the Male, ed. Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 9–20. Mulvey, op. cit., p. 6. Ibid., p. 7 Neale, op. cit., pp. 16–18. B. S. King, op. cit., p. 285. Michael Rowe, “Great Scott: After Years of Struggling with his Sexuality, Playgirl Centerfold Scott Merritt is Coming All the Way Out. To his Surprise, so is Playgirl,” The Advocate 895, August 19, 2003. Rosalind Gill, “Power and the Production of Subjects: A Genealogy of the New Man and the New Lad,” in Bethan Benwell, ed., Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), p. 46. Bethan Benwell, “Masculinity and Men’s Lifestyle Magazines,” in Benwell, ed., op. cit., p. 13. Jennifer Craik, The Face of Fashion (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 168. Bill Ogersby, “A Pedigree of the Consuming Male,” in Benwell, ed., op. cit., p. 60. Quoted in Frank Mort, Cultures of Consumption: Masculinities and Social Space in Late Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 122. Benwell, op. cit., p. 13. Ibid., p. 11. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979). Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), p. 70. Anthony Giddens, “Risk Society: The Context of British Politics,” in Jane Franklin, ed., The Politics of Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 23–34. Ibid. Conversely, the ruinous Savings and Loans crisis at the end of the 1980s would reveal the folly of such activity, with American taxpayers landed with billions of dollars of debt. Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity, p. 70. Marvin Zuckerman, “Are You a Risk Taker?” Psychology Today (November/ December 2000). See also Marvin Zuckerman, Behavioral Expressions and

NOTES TO PAGES 94–107

40 41 42 43

121

Biosocial Bases of Sensation Seeking (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Giddens, Modernity and Self-identity, p. 133. Ibid., p. 136. “Miami’s Brightest Star Fades.” Associated Press, January 24, 1978.

Afterword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

“USA Network’s ‘Miami’ Deal Signals Cable’s Growing Clout,” Variety, November 18, 1987, p. 38. Peter J. Boyer, “Production Cost Dispute Perils Hour TV Dramas,” The New York Times, March 6, 1986, p. 26. Ibid. Perren, op. cit., p. 89. Boyer, op. cit, p. 26. Ibid. “MCA Reintroducing ‘Miami Vice’ Under a New Marketing Strategy,” Variety, February 18, 1987, p. 105. “USA Network’s ‘Miami’ Deal Signals Cable’s Growing Clout.” Geraldine Fabrikant, “Star Entertainer Loses Its Sparkle,” The New York Times, February 2, 1988. Jennifer Holt, “Vertical Vision: Deregulation, Industrial Economy and Prime-time Design,” in Mark Jancovich and James Lyons, eds., Quality Popular Television (London: BFI, 2003), p. 13.

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Index

21 Jump Street 55–6 48 hrs (film) 8 action-adventure TV 34–36 Adamson, Chuck 69, 72–3 The Adventures of Robin Hood Airwolf 9, 25, 27 Allen, Woody 37, 46 Allman, T. D. 12 Ang, Ien 84 Art Deco 52, 53 aspect ratio 45–7, 53 The A-Team 9, 26

36

beats 62, 66 Belton, John 45, 46 Beville, Hugo 78 Blum, Richard and Lindheim 15, 25, 67, 68, 72, 78 Bochco, Steven 15, 32 Bogart, Humphrey 10 Bordwell, David 14 buddy movies 8–9 Buxton, David 9, 30, 85, 86 cable TV 17–21, 32, 35, 46, 57, 61, 106–7 Cagney and Lacey 50

Calderone, Angelina 69, 98, 99 Calderone, Estaban 14, 39, 69, 98, 103, 104 Caldwell, John Thornton 15, 27, 31, 33, 34, 36, 50, 57 Cannell, Stephen J. 55, 56 Carmody, John 58–9 Carter, Thomas 36 Casablanca (film) 10, 42 Castillo, Martin 9–10, 43, 45, 63, 64, 65, 96 Castro, Fidel 11 Chafe, William H. 84 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) 9, 43, 63, 64, 65 Collins, Phil 39, 66, 71 Collins, Robert E. 37 color 47–53 Cops 56, 80–1 corporate mergers and takeovers 19, 107 The Cosby Show 16, 23, 58, 76 Craik, Jennifer 90 Crime Story 72–3 Crockett, Sonny 39, 63–5, 74–5, 94–104 as action hero 34 amnesia 79–80

130

INDEX

Crockett, Sonny (Cont’d) as “buddy” with Tubbs 8–9, 98 and Casablanca 11, 41–2 characterization 8, 10–11, 41 costume/style 33, 41, 49–51, 88, 90, 91 and music 54–5 and narcotics 54, 66, 101, 103–4 and news media 73–4 psychiatry 100–1 quotes 61 risks 94–5, 100 romance/marriage 63–4, 65, 78, 79, 94–5, 97–8, 99–100 sexuality 88–92 and Starsky and Hutch 11, 33 temptations 67–70, 79–80, 86, 94–5 undercover 68–70, 78–9, 95, 98, 103 war veteran 9, 73–4 wisecracking 8 see also Tubbs, Ricardo Curtin, Michael 19

Feuer, Jane 23, 36, 58, 59, 84 film noir 14, 40–3, 46, 50 Fowler, Mark 17 Fox TV 19, 26, 55–6, 80–81 Frey, Glenn 49 Friends 55, 79

Dallas 7, 16, 32, 33, 57, 58, 72, 74–7, 84 The Deep Blue Goodbye 10 Diehl, John 75 drugs see narcotics Dynasty 33, 57, 58, 59

independent TV stations 17, 19, 106–7

Easton, Sheena 78, 99 Emmy awards 14, 32, 37 Falcon Crest 16, 33, 58, 70 Farina, Dennis 69, 72 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) 17, 25, 35, 48, 107

Geraghty, Christine 32, 59 Giddens, Anthony 92–4 Gill, Rosalind 90 Gitlin, Todd 8, 30, 59 Goodwin, Andrew 20 Grant, Bud 16 Hammer, Jan 37, 54 Harris, Robert A. 15 Hiaasen, Carl 10 Highway to Heaven 58, 59 Hill Street Blues 8, 15, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 57 Hilmes, Michelle 16, 25 Holt, Jennifer 107 home theater 24 Hulu.com 26 Hunter 58, 59

Jameson, Fredric 30 Jeffers, Susan 93 Jenkins, Henry 26, 71 The Jericho Mile (film) 14 Johnson, Don 7, 24, 34, 48, 49, 59, 71, 87, 88, 89, 104 Joplin, Trudy 9, 55, 63, 64, 77, 95, 101 Kellner, Douglas 30, 86 The Keep (film) 13–14 King, Benjamin Scott 88–9

INDEX

King, Neal 86 Klinger, Barbara 24, 27 Kojak 31, 37 LA Law 58, 72, 76 Lasch, Christopher 92 Levine, Elana 21 Liddy, G. Gordon 70, 71, 73 Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous 33 Littlefield, Warren 77 Lotz, Amanda 76 MacDonald, John D. 10 McGee, Travis 10 McShane, Ian 51, 103 Magnum P.I. 19, 25, 107 Maltby, Richard 5, 6, 38, 87 Manhunter (film) 27, 75 Mann, Michael 3, 5, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 22, 25, 27, 29, 31, 36, 38, 43, 48, 54, 72, 73, 75, 77, 80, 85 Marc, David 24 masculinity 88–92 Miami changing image of 10, 11–13 drug smuggling 12–13 Liberty city riots 11 Mariel boatlift 11–12 Mediterranean revival architecture 52–5 Miller, Toby 26 Minow, Newton 35 Moonlighting 57, 78 Moreno, Izzy 48, 96 Mort, Frank 91 MTV 20–1, 38, 53 Mulvey, Laura 88, 90 music 20, 22, 24, 33, 36–40, 54–5, 78, 99, 104

131

narcotics 9, 12, 86–8, 94–6, 99, 100, 101, 103, 104 narrative problematic 67–70, 74, 77, 79 NBC 7, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19–27, 32–3, 56, 58–9, 72–3, 76–7, 86, 106 Neale, Steve 43, 88–9 Neeson, Liam 50, 73 neo-network 19 neo-noir 27, 43 The New York Times, 10, 13, 23, 36, 39, 49, 52, 86 Newman, Michael Z. 59, 61, 62 Nicolella, John 72 Nielsen ratings 16, 70–71 Nip/Tuck 57 Nolte, Nick 8 National Television System Committee (NTSC) 20, 48 Olmos, Edward James Osgerby, Bill 35, 90

70

Paltow, Bruce 29, 36 Perren, Alisa 17, 56, 81 Piñero, Miguel 14 Pittman, Robert 21 Pollan, Michael 34, 59 postmodernism 29–30 primetime TV 17, 22, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 58, 59, 83, 107 Primetime Access Rule (PTAR) 25, 32 Prince, Stephen 20, 84 quality, TV 72, 76

29, 32, 34, 36, 58, 59, 71,

race 8–9, 11, 14 RCA 22

132

INDEX

Reagan, Ronald 17, 19, 83, 84, 85, 94 Rolling Stone 15–16, 38 Rutherford, Paul 35 Santiago, Gina 50, 63, 70, 73, 91, 95, 101 Scarface (film) 11, 13, 48 Schwichtenberg, Cathy 30 seriality 33, 58–9 series concept 67–71, 75, 77–81 Sheinberg, Sidney 106 Smith, Murray 65 soap opera 32–3, 35, 58, 59, 79 The Sopranos 57, 61 Spielberg, Steven 46 Spigel, Lynn 26 Starsky and Hutch 8, 11, 13, 31, 34 Streamline Moderne 52, 54 stereo TV 21–4 Stockwell, Dean 43 Switek, Stan 65–6, 75, 80 Tartikoff, Brandon 21, 22, 23 Thief (film) 14 Thomas, Philip Michael 7, 59, 71, 83 Thompson, Kristin 60, 61, 62 Thompson, Robert J. 24, 29, 32 Time 7, 12, 16, 23, 83 Truman, Tim 54 Tubbs, Ricardo 8–9, 14, 39–41, 63–4, 65, 73, 75, 100–4 as action hero 34 as “buddy” with Crockett 8–9, 98 characterization 39–40

costume/style 33, 40–1, 49, 51, 88, 90, 91 education 78 and music 54–5 and narcotics 54, 66, 101, 103–4 and news media 73–4, 80 psychiatry 100–1 and race, 9 risks 94, 98, 100 romance 46, 97, 98–9 and Starsky and Hutch 11, 33 temptations 67–70, 79–80, 86, 94–5 undercover 68–70, 78–9, 96–7, 98, 103 wisecracking 8 TV Guide 29, 50, 51, 71, 74, 75, 77 USA Network 106–7 Vasey, Ruth 87 video 17, 18, 20, 22, 26, 27, 32, 46 Vietnam War 9, 10, 43, 63–5, 70, 73 Wasser, Frederick 18 Wolf, Dick 66, 72, 73, 75, 76 Wyatt, Justin 38 Yerkovich, Anthony 8, 9, 10, 13, 15, 36, 39, 68 yuppies 23, 31, 32, 34, 56 zero-degree style 31, 32, 34, 50, 56 Zito, Larry 75, 81 Zoglin, Richard 23