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Pastel and pistols

Miami Vice was as much revolution as TV series, remaking a city's image, capturing pop culture and renovating its medium. Twenty years later, the first season is available on DVD.

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published February 8, 2005

	Hear the Miami Vice Theme
	[AP photo]
	The new DVD collection contains many bonuses, but missing from the extras are new interviews with stars Philip Michael Thomas, left, and Don Johnson.

Before Miami Vice, there was brown.

Television cops worked in rundown precinct houses, background music was just that, and earth tones screamed 1970-something.

Then there was Vice, painting South Florida in pastel and neon, reinventing a city's image and delivering an increasingly sophisticated generation of television viewers something new on Friday nights: intense color, sound, vibe.

Fans can finally toss their tattered, homemade VHS tapes. Miami Vice is back with the release of the first season today on DVD.

The hourlong weekly series, a cross between Scarface and MTV, aired on Friday nights from 1984 to 1989. Through much of the '90s, it bounced around in syndication, then disappeared along with the three-day stubble and no-socks look, left to Internet fan sites and rumors of a movie revival.

In a DVD market awash with less deserving shows - Who's the Boss, Designing Women and Knight Rider, for instance - it seems like it took forever for Miami Vice to come home as the rights were negotiated for the show's extensive music library. The collection arrives amid reports of a 2006 movie version (rumored to star Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell).

Miami Vice: Season One, complete with Don Johnson in white cotton pants and turquoise tank tops, Philip Michael Thomas in striped silver suits and open-collar shirts, and Edward James Olmos in skinny silk ties.

But in a way, Vice never went away. Hindsight highlights its strengths and themes, and its stamp can be found on other shows and on South Florida itself.

With Vice, executive producer Michael Mann (who would go on to big-screen credits for The Aviator, Ali and Collateral, to name a few) crafted a new image for Miami. Instead of clips from the evening news - the 1980 Liberty City riots and the Mariel boatlift - Mann presented a cosmopolitan, glowing city steeped in mystery, sun and fashion. Sure, the show was about crime, but the crooks, and the cops, had style.

When Miami Vice premiered, cocaine still held high-dollar cachet, before the drug cut a destructive swath in its cheap, street incarnation, crack. Colombia supplied at least half of the country's cocaine through South Florida, according to the DEA. Miami was the perfect setting for tales of mysterious foreigners, international trafficking and cash.

"Drugs, along with its propensity for political intrigue, has given Miami an image of a subtropical Casablanca," wrote Miami Dade College professor Paul George in a history of Miami-Dade County. "This image was burnished by Miami Vice."

In an interview, George said including Miami Vice in his account wasn't just a casual nod to pop culture. He remembers the buzz in his town when the show debuted. It created its own reality. Property owners saw the show's version of Miami and painted their homes and businesses to reflect it. South Beach came alive, he said.

"It was sort of a landmark in this area's history and development," he said. "Al Pacino's Scarface showed you the gritty side. Miami Vice showed you the beauty and the edginess. (Miami) really morphed into that from "God's waiting room.' It was exotic and dangerous and edgy."

With so many pieces in place - crime lords, sunshine, drugs and money - Miami Vice costume designer Jodie Tillen said she couldn't go wrong with the last part of the equation: fashion.

"You can't do research on Miami and not do the right thing," Tillen said in a telephone interview. "The show dictated something tropical, and there was all that color."

Tillen said she was mindful of the script, the setting and the mood. She aimed for a vaguely European look, since Johnson and Thomas - as undercover cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs - moved among drug dealers who would have splurged on designer labels.

Tropical temperatures meant light fabrics, and hidden weapons meant loose-fitting jackets.

The look spread across the country.

"Television reaches such an unbelievable audience," she said. "It was just extraordinary when that show hit. Anybody could do that style at any store, and you didn't have to spend a million dollars to do it."

Looking back 20 years later at the style she created, Tillen said it's hard for her to judge. It was right for the time, she said.

The style may be dated, but time has helped uncover the themes beneath the surface of the show, said David Tetzlaff, a professor of film studies at Connecticut College (and Miami Vice fan). The show, he said, was about moral men taking a stand against the growing wave of commercialization, fast money and raw greed.

Tetzlaff jokingly referred to the flashy images of Mann's Miami as " '80s commodities porn."

"Miami Vice was made to signify the '80s," Tetzlaff said. "You've got the cool architecture and the drug trade and the notion that everyone has money coming out of their pockets."

The cops of Miami Vice took a stand in a morality play that hooked its audience with a struggle between good and evil, he said.

"Neither Crockett nor Tubbs has a wavering from good. Their moral compass has no error, they always do the right thing," Tetzlaff said. "Yet the result of always doing the right thing is that they almost always fail. It's a deeply sad show, which I think most people do not get. By being unambiguously good in a bad world, the characters are isolated. They're lonely guys."

Tetzlaff's dissertation, "The Politics of Postmodernism Popular Culture," dissected Miami Vice, and he's not the only academic to study the show. Wichita State University professor Ramona Liera-Schwichtenberg wrote how it "mirrors the commodified cultural conditions in South Florida," and French philosopher Jean Baudrillard also analyzed the show.

In one of the DVD collection's bonus features, Vice creator Anthony Yerkovich says in an interview that he had a vision from the start, and he insisted on characters who moved through a world of corruption and temptation yet made a clear distinction between right and wrong.

"I created Crockett and Tubbs as a reaction to that sort of cloying pop humanism of the late '70s and early '80s, like Ed Asner's Lou Grant and the entire cast of M*A*S*H," he said.

The music, the clothes, the wordless montages as characters moved through the night, everything was designed with image in mind, he said.

The DVD collection's bonus segments offer interesting insights into the show, but there's something missing. Fans will notice immediately that the interviews with Johnson and Thomas are from 1985.

In a statement, Universal Studios Home Entertainment senior vice president Vivian Mayer explained the lack of fresh input from them: "Production schedules and availability issues frequently preclude talent and filmmaker participation."

Neither Johnson nor Thomas - who is co-producing Sacha: A Musical Review in Broward County - responded to interview requests. If there's some hidden animosity, it's well-hidden. Both have been mum about the subject. In those interviews that have surfaced in recent years, the duo's relationship with the show hasn't come up. The rumor mill lists neither as taking part in the new Vice movie, despite the buzz about Mann's involvement.

Reflecting on the legacy of Miami Vice, Tetzlaff said he sees hints of the show in any new TV drama with high production qualities. Vice's biggest mark may have been in shattering the perception that television shows should be low-budget affairs.

Thematically, flashes of Miami Vice's legacy might be seen in X-Files, where a good man struggles against an invisible authority, or on ER, which uses some of the same scene-setting cinematography.

But the day when a network television show could remake a city's image, capture a generation and create a style has passed, Tetzlaff said. Shows such as HBO's The Sopranos still break new ground, but network TV's impact has been diluted by cable, DVD rentals, video-on-demand, premium movie channels, computer games and the Internet.

"If you're looking for the true children of Miami Vice, they've now moved off networks and are on pay cable," he said. "Big chunks of the youth audience are no longer interested in TV at all. I don't think that television is the touchstone of culture anymore."

[Last modified February 7, 2005, 16:17:03]