Ten Things That Make Miami Vice Awesome

My favorite television show of all time: Miami Vice.

No, really. I own the box set on DVD, which, naturally enough, comes in a white faux-alligator box lined with seafoam-green velvet.

Miami Vice, which aired for five seasons on NBC from 1984 to 1989, now exists as a pop culture punch line. It’s mostly remembered as a relic of the hyper-stylized Eighties. That’s a shame, because there’s more to it than that.

For example:

1. Edward James Olmos. Miami Vice kicked off its first season looking like a fairly traditional cop show, albeit one with terrific production values and a whopping budget for music rights. Then Edward James Olmos joined the cast as Lieutenant Martin Castillo, and everything changed. In his cheap black suit and skinny tie over a white short-sleeved shirt, his face obscured by a gigantic bushy mustache, Castillo is physically unprepossessing, especially compared to the glamorous Vice cops under his charge. The perpetually-somber Castillo speaks so softly it’s often difficult to hear him. He seldom makes eye contact. He sleeps in his office. At times, he seems self-contained and introverted almost to the point of being autistic. Don’t be fooled: he’s crazy, in the best possible way. Throughout five seasons, bits and pieces emerge about his background: he’s a former DEA agent with ties to the CIA who worked extensively in the Golden Triangle. He dabbles in Santeria. He runs afoul of the KGB. Also? He’s a ninja.

Olmos scooped up a Best Supporting Actor Emmy for the role, and deservedly so: it’s a hell of a character and a hell of a performance. He’s still a skilled performer, though I respectfully disagree with fans who feel he’s been robbed by the Emmys for his current work on Battlestar Galactica: it may be only because he set the bar so high in his earlier performance, but compared to Castillo’s mix of profound stillness and coiled energy, Olmos sometimes seems to be phoning it in BSG.

2. Crockett and Tubbs are downright adorable. I feel like I’m damning the show’s leads with faint praise by listing them after their costar Olmos. This was not the intention; yes, they take second place, but it’s a pretty tight race. The pilot episode played up the differences between white southern Vice cop Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) and his brand-new partner Rico Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), a black cop transplanted from New York. The whole odd-couple conceit soon became irrelevant: Crockett might be more intuitive and impulsive, whereas Tubbs might be smarter and more skeptical, but the two are much closer to a matched set than a study in contrasts.

At heart, Crockett and Tubbs are a couple of nice guys in the process of being destroyed by their line of work. Stuck in deep cover as loathsome drug runners Burnett and Cooper, it bothers them to no end that much of Miami thinks of them as scumbags. They’re not coming out of this with their souls intact; the show makes it clear it’s only a matter of time before they become crazy or corrupt or both (it’s no accident that a handful of episodes – “Evan,” “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run,” and “Payback,” among others – feature corrupt, burned-out, or certifiably insane undercover cops who serve as Bizarro-world versions of Crockett and Tubbs).

The oft-imitated and oft-derided fashions of Miami Vice -- the unstructured pastel suits over t-shirts and the loafers without socks -- are undeniably silly, but Tubbs and Crockett are sleek and polished and handsome enough to turn them into a coveted and iconic look. The casting is dead on: Johnson and Thomas have sparkling chemistry together, they’re both immensely likeable and sympathetic, and they anchor the series.

3. It was a breeding ground for future film and television stars. Pick an episode, any episode: someone you recognize will pop up in a supporting part. A significant percentage of today’s working actors earned some solid early exposure by guest-starring on Miami Vice: Viggo Mortensen, Michael Chiklis, Liam Neeson, Wesley Snipes, Bruce Willis, Chris Rock, Helena Bonham Carter, Annette Bening, Kyra Sedgwick, Ving Rhames, Stanley Tucci, John Leguizamo, Dennis Farina, Julia Roberts… The list goes on.

4. The stunt casting. Miami Vice featured an insane panoply of bizarre and entertaining guest stars: James Brown, Ted Nugent, Willie Nelson, Little Richard, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, Penn and Teller (who appear on separate episodes – the perpetually-silent Teller even speaks!), Lee Iacocca, G. Gordon Liddy, George Takei, Eartha Kitt. Madness! In the best possible way!

5. The set design. I’ve never been to Miami, and I’m not sure I ever want to visit. The reality, particularly twenty years on, can’t possibly live up to the aggressively unfriendly and uncomfortable awesomeness of the Miami Vice sets. Here, everything’s either a blinding white or an unending vista of washed-out pastels. (As demonstrated by Castillo’s sickly salmon-pink office and the institutional pale green wall of the Vice squad room, pastels aren’t always demure and pretty). Houses rise up from stilts in the water, while monstrous structures of concrete and sheet metal with round windows and jutting balconies dot the shoreline. The interiors lean toward weird pop-art, bizarre architectural flourishes, and off-putting color schemes, all of which telegraph a clear message: things ain’t right in Miami.

6. The music. I once watched Miami Vice with a music-savvy friend who expressed his concern that the collision of so many wildly diverse types of music – in this particular episode, Depeche Mode, Guns N' Roses, and Willie Nelson – would rip open a vortex in the fabric of the universe.

7. The weirdness. Oh, lordy, Miami Vice is weird. It’s as bleak as it can get without becoming outright post-apocalyptic. Episodes are jam-packed with characters with unfathomable motives, loopy romantic interests, off-kilter encounters, sudden violence, and boatloads of free-form insanity, as though the brightness and heat has boiled everyone’s brains and turned the entire population of Miami into deadly, feral lunatics.

8. It’s escapist television at its finest. Bleak, yes. Hostile, absolutely. Still, Miami Vice should never be mistaken for a gritty depiction of reality. Some elements of the show are nothing short of gratuitous wish-fulfillment. Take Crockett, for instance: He drives a Ferrari. And lives on a boat. With a pet alligator. To the best of my knowledge, series creator Anthony Yerkovich was not fourteen when he dreamed up this character, but it sort of seems like it.

9. Gina and Trudy. Long-suffering, under-appreciated, and totally hot. I have much love for Vice cops Gina and Trudy (Sandra Santiago and Olivia Brown). They never get much action -- mostly, they pose undercover as hookers and carry out thankless drudge work for Crockett and Tubbs -- but they’re pretty awesome anyway.

10. It (almost) pulls off the whole “Crockett loses his memory and becomes crazy and evil” plotline. Some background is required here: at the conclusion of the fourth season, after suffering a severe personal tragedy (I’d go into greater detail, but it would involve invoking the words “Sheena Easton,” which is a topic one should take pains to avoid whilst extolling the awesomeness of Miami Vice), a grieving Crockett gets caught in a boat explosion, develops amnesia, and becomes convinced he’s his murderous drug-running alter ego, Sonny Burnett. This kicks off the fifth and final season in grand style, as Crockett murders his way up the ranks of a crime family, shagging Julia Roberts and trying to kill Tubbs along the way. This is a ridiculous, preposterous, overwrought, impossible plotline, but it works. Johnson, who has a tendency to over-emote, reigns himself in and delivers a cold, manipulative, emotionally-bankrupt performance that helps sell this nonsense; it helps that he’s surrounded with heavy-hitting (and downright weird) guest stars, including Matt Frewer and Jon Polito. Yeah, it’s absurd, but near the conclusion of this arc, as Crockett wanders around Miami, his marbles slowly returning to him while Peter Gabriel’s “Don’t Give Up” wails in the background, then drifts into Vice headquarters only to find his horrified friends and coworkers holding him at gunpoint, I defy you not to be fully emotionally invested in this mayhem.