Video: Cool Cops, Hot Show

The rat-a-tat sound of machine gunfire resolves into a pulsing electronic rock beat. Staccato images flash by. A flock of pink-plumed flamingos. Bikini- clad girls on the beach. Race horses bursting from the starting gate. The ocean speeding by under the bow of a boat. And, of course, the familiar art deco logo, glowing in vibrant turquoise and pink.

If viewers are not sufficiently hopped up by the credit sequence of NBC’s Miami Vice, chances are they will be before the hour is over. The plots whiz by with a minimum of exposition, the dialogue is tough and spare, the rock music almost nonstop. Characters may be shot in lyrical long shots or bathed in moody lighting or framed against semiabstract pastel backdrops. The local color of South Florida is augmented by the local colors: flamingo pink, lime green, Caribbean blue. Miami Vice has been filmed under what may be the strangest production edict in TV history: “No earth tones.”

A year after its debut on NBC, Miami Vice, TV’s hottest and hippest new cop show, is reaching a high sizzle. Scheduled on Friday nights opposite CBS’s popular Falcon Crest, the show languished in the bottom half of the Nielsens for its first few months on the air. But viewers gradually began to take notice of its high-gloss visual style and MTV-inspired use of rock music, its gritty South Florida ambience and the cool charisma of Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, who star as Miami Detectives Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs. Since the end of May, the show’s reruns have finished in the Nielsen Top Ten for ten of eleven weeks. Following the pattern of another innovative cop show that caught on during its first summer of reruns, Miami Vice is poised to become TV’s next breakthrough hit. “Like Hill Street Blues before it, Miami Vice has redefined the cop-show genre,” says Brandon Tartikoff, programming chief of NBC, the former last-place network that is suddenly doing everything right (see following story).

Miami Vice already seems to have supplanted Hill Street as the darling of one segment of the TV audience: the Emmy Awards committee. The program has garnered a record 15 Emmy nominations (compared with Hill Street’s eleven), including ones for best dramatic series and best actor (Johnson). No matter how it fares at the awards ceremony on Sept. 22, the show is changing the way TV looks and sounds. Two new series debuting this month, ABC’s The Insiders and Hollywood Beat, each feature a pair of young crime fighters and a pounding rock score, a la Miami Vice. Other Vice imitators are currently in the works.

Perhaps more important, the innovative visual style of Miami Vice has helped show TV executives that there are alternatives to the cookie-cutter blandness of most network fare. Says Joshua Brand, a co-creator of St. Elsewhere who is co-producing Steven Spielberg’s new series Amazing Stories: “The success of Miami Vice shows that people do notice production values, lighting and what comes out of those little television speakers.”

Nor has the show’s impact been limited to the TV screen. This month MCA Records will release a Miami Vice album containing the show’s theme music, several songs used in last season’s shows, and three new numbers recorded for the coming season by Glenn Frey, Chaka Khan and Grandmaster Melle Mel. Meanwhile, the show’s tropical-chic fashions (especially Don Johnson’s typical ensemble of Italian sport coat, T shirt, white linen pants and slip-on shoes) have begun to catch on. “The show has taken Italian men’s fashion and spread it to mass America,” says Kal Ruttenstein, a senior vice president of Bloomingdale’s. “Sales of unconstructed blazers, shiny fabric jackets and lighter colors have gone up noticeably.” After Six formal wear is bringing out a Miami Vice line of dinner jackets next spring, Kenneth Cole will introduce “Crockett” and “Tubbs” shoes, and Macy’s has opened a Miami Vice section in its young men’s department. TV cops have never been so glamorous. Says Olivia Brown-Williamson, who plays Undercover Detective Trudy Joplin on the show: “Who wanted to look like Kojak?”

The flash and dash of Miami Vice has not been universally welcomed. Some critics have objected that the show makes violence alluring by dressing it up in pretty photography; others complain that coherent stories and fully drawn characters have been junked in favor of visual flourishes and a rock beat. Some of the show’s creators admit there is a certain laxness about narrative matters. Says Lee Katzin, who earned an Emmy nomination for his direction of the episode Cool Runnin’: “The show is written for an MTV audience, which is more interested in images, emotions and energy than plot and character and words.”

Even the show’s much vaunted stylistic breakthroughs can be overrated. Flashy visuals and rock music on the soundtrack were hardly invented by Miami Vice–or by MTV, for that matter. They have been staples of artfully directed feature films for a couple of decades. “We haven’t invented the Hula Hoop or anything,” admitted Michael Mann, the show’s executive producer and stylistic guru, in an interview with Rolling Stone. “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.”

Yet at its best, Miami Vice has brought to TV a swift and evocative mode of visual storytelling. Points are made through looks, gestures, music, artful composition. In one of the season’s best episodes (written by Playwright Miguel Pinero and directed by Paul Michael Glaser, the former co-star of Starsky and Hutch), Glenn Frey’s song Smuggler’s Blues both enhances the mood and comments on a tense story in which Crockett and Tubbs pose as drug dealers to set a trap for a vicious kidnaper. In the climactic sequence, the cops race to defuse a bomb that has been wired to Trudy, the detective who has served as bait. After a narrow escape, the culprit is revealed to be a police lieutenant gone bad. “I can smell ’em but I can’t understand ’em,” says a federal agent involved in the case, as Frey’s lyrics chime in: “It’s the lure of easy money/ It’s got a very strong appeal/ It’s a losin’ proposition . . .” In a subtle and moving final shot, the agent drifts out of the frame to reveal Tubbs and Crockett comforting Trudy, the forgotten victim of this dirty but necessary operation.

In another episode, Crockett’s infatuation with a new girlfriend is distracting him from a case involving a gang of murderous youths. One morning he fails to show up for surveillance duty with Tubbs, who as a result is beaten up by a pair of thugs. No words are spoken between the partners; everything is conveyed by looks of recrimination and guilt. Indeed, the pair say nothing at all to each other until Crockett’s redemption at the episode’s end, when he comes to Tubbs’ aid in a tight spot. Again there are no heavy- handed closeups or explicit dialogue, just an understated shot of the pair walking away from the camera arm in arm and a terse final exchange. Crockett: “Want to go fishin’?” Tubbs: “I’d rather go trollin’. “

With its rich, almost operatic texture and stripped-down story lines, Miami Vice has brought TV’s cops-and-robbers genre back to its roots: the mythic battle between good and evil. Such battles were once commonplace on TV, in westerns like Gunsmoke and The Rifleman, and in an earlier generation of police shows, from Kojak to The Streets of San Francisco. In recent years, however, these hard-nosed cops have been replaced by a new band of lighthearted crime fighters, from Tom Selleck in Magnum, P.I., to Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote. Even the few “serious” police shows on TV, notably Hill Street Blues and Cagney & Lacey, are less about black hats vs. white hats than about ordinary folks coping with the stress of extraordinary jobs.

It took a few episodes for Miami Vice to hit its stride. The earliest segments were sprinkled with predictable character exposition and comic relief. Crockett, for instance, was an ex-college football star with a wife suing him for divorce and a “funny” pet alligator named Elvis. Two mid- season changes were crucial. The alligator, along with most of the comic relief, was dropped. And a riveting new character, the brooding Lieut. Castillo (played with remarkable power by Emmy Nominee Edward James Olmos), joined the show. Castillo, Tubbs and Crockett bear less resemblance to other cop-show protagonists than to classic western heroes–men, in the words of Critic Robert Warshow, whose “melancholy comes from the ‘simple’ recognition that life is unavoidably serious.”

Miami Vice is the most intensely serious cop show on TV. The drug smugglers, mob bosses, psychotic youth gangs and smut peddlers who emerge from the underworld each week are the most vividly portrayed evildoers on TV since Eliot Ness squared off against Frank Nitti on The Untouchables. Even more striking, however, is the show’s depiction of the temptation that evil presents to basically good men. It is no accident that Crockett and Tubbs frequently go undercover, and seem to blend in perfectly when they do. Moreover, the show’s most powerful episodes deal with law-enforcement officials who have gone over to “the other side.”

The seeds of this new cop show were planted in mundane TV fashion, in the Burbank, Calif., office of NBC’s Tartikoff. Trying to figure out how the network might cash in on the success of rock videos, he had jotted down a few notes to himself; one read simply, “MTV cops.” Tartikoff presented the notion to Anthony Yerkovich, 34, formerly a writer and producer for Hill Street Blues, who related a movie idea he had been mulling, about a pair of vice cops in Miami. Yerkovich went to the typewriter and turned out the script for a two-hour pilot, originally called Gold Coast and later Miami Vice.

Yerkovich (who supervised the first five episodes after the pilot, then left to develop film projects for Universal) was fascinated by South Florida as a setting for his new-style police show. “Even when I was on Hill Street Blues, I was collecting information on Miami,” he says. “I thought of it as sort of a modern-day American Casablanca. It seemed to be an interesting socioeconomic tidepool: the incredible number of refugees from Central America and Cuba, the already extensive Cuban-American community, and on top of all that the drug trade. There is a fascinating amount of service industries that revolve around the drug trade–money laundering, bail bondsmen, attorneys who service drug smugglers. Miami has become a sort of Barbary Coast of free enterprise gone berserk.”

If Miami was an ideal setting for this new-wave Casablanca, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas were inspired choices as the defenders of law and order. Both were picked only after the network had auditioned dozens of candidates and had twice delayed shooting the pilot. NBC had particular doubts about Johnson, 35, a journeyman actor who had appeared earlier in several unsuccessful pilots. A Missouri native, Johnson made his movie debut at age 20 in The Magic Garden of Stanley Sweetheart, and later starred in such films as A Boy and His Dog and the TV mini-series From Here to Eternity. He has also dabbled in songwriting, collaborating on two numbers that were recorded by the Allman Brothers in their 1979 album Enlightened Rogues.

Johnson’s offscreen life has been more eventful. At 22 he began a four-year liaison with 14-year-old Melanie Griffith, the daughter of Actress Tippi Hedren, with whom he had appeared in the movie The Harrad Experiment. Later Johnson plunged into drugs and alcohol. “I never drank or did drugs while I was working,” he told PEOPLE magazine. “But brother, when they said ‘Wrap,’ I would try to set the land speed record.” Johnson rehabilitated himself with the help of his current mate, Actress Patti D’Arbanville, and Miami Vice has put him in the fast lane to stardom. Among his upcoming projects are a starring role in next month’s NBC mini-series The Long Hot Summer.

For Thomas, 36, Miami Vice also marks a career breakthrough after a variety of stage, screen and TV roles. Part Irish, German, American Indian and black (“I’m American gumbo”), Thomas writes poetry, markets a line of women’s clothing and peppers his conversation with upbeat spiritual homilies (“If you love anything enough it will give up all its secrets”; “I replenish myself by giving, and it comes back”). Easygoing and exuberant, he is a sharp contrast to Johnson, who is described as meticulous and demanding on the set. “We’re like night and day,” says Thomas. “Don’s like a truck driver, and I’m like an angel that sits up there and watches over everything. Don is real intense; I’m more intuitive. He maps out the way he wants to go. I just do it.”

The most driven performer on the show, however, may be Olmos, who plays the stone-faced Lieut. Castillo. The Los Angeles-born actor won a Tony nomination in 1979 for his supporting role in the play Zoot Suit and produced and starred in the 1983 film The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez. He has an unusual nonexclusive contract with the series, which enables him to do other work during the season. Yet Olmos approaches his role with almost mystical dedication. “One of the things I have found most exciting about Miami Vice is that they have allowed me to play this character the way I wanted to play him,” he says. “Castillo is very disciplined, very obsessive in his routines. He is a Ninja warrior. In order to be a very good combatant of crime you have to understand crime. So Castillo walks a very thin line.”

Even a Ninja warrior might have a hard time competing for attention with what many consider the real stars of Miami Vice: the music and the visual pyrotechnics. Both are largely the contributions of Michael Mann, who joined the show as executive producer when NBC decided to turn Yerkovich’s pilot into a series. Mann had directed the stylish film thriller Thief and the TV movie The Jericho Mile, as well as creating the TV series Vega$. But Miami Vice marked his first opportunity to bring a cinematic eye to the small screen.

“There is a very definite attempt to give the show a particular look,” says Bobby Roth, who directed a Miami Vice episode last season and is now executive producer of the new ABC series The Insiders. “There are certain colors you are not allowed to shoot, such as red and brown. If the script says ‘A Mercedes pulls up here,’ the car people will show you three or four different Mercedes. One will be white, one will be black, one will be silver. You will not get a red one or a brown one. Michael knows how things are going to look on camera. A lot of it is very basic stuff that has never been applied to TV. For example, Michael carried a water truck around with him on his movie Thief, watering the streets down. So I decided to water the streets at night in my episode of Miami Vice. You get a different look, a beautiful reflection of moonlight off the pavement.”

With virtually all filming done on location in Miami (at an average budget of $1.3 million per episode, compared with $1 million for a typical cop-show episode), the show goes to unusual lengths to find the right settings and props. “I found this house that was really perfect,” says Roth, “but the color was sort of beige. The art department instantly painted the house gray for me. Even on feature films people try to deliver what is necessary but no more. At Miami Vice they start with what’s necessary and go beyond it.”

The show’s directors are encouraged to look for creative ways to use music. “What I wanted to do was not to use music as just background but as psychological subtext, if you will,” says Thomas Carter, who directed the pilot episode. “What I felt was happening to Crockett at one point was he had lost touch with reality. His marriage had fallen apart, and he had discovered that his ex-partner was leaking information to the bad guys. So I said, ‘I want to do a sequence with Crockett and Tubbs in a car, lay some music over it, and I think they should drive somewhere.’ I came up with the idea of using a Phil Collins tune, In the Air Tonight.” The song, combined with striking shots of the street lights glinting off the detectives’ sleek black Ferrari, gave the scene a mournful resonance. Says Carter: “That is probably the prototypical Miami Vice sequence.”

Unlike other TV shows that have utilized rock music, Miami Vice can spend more than $10,000 per episode buying the rights to original recordings, rather than using made-for-TV imitations. The selections have ranged from ’50s hits like the Coasters’ Poison Ivy to recent numbers from Todd Rundgren, U2 and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. The rest of the show’s bracing musical score is supplied by Jan Hammer, a Czech-born composer, using sounds stored in a digital computer synthesizer. Working in a state-of-the-art studio in his 150- year-old colonial home near Brewster, N.Y., Hammer composes the score for each episode from a rough cut sent to him by network courier. That is another break with TV tradition. “The old style was for the composer to sit in production meetings, and someone would say, ‘Let’s put something here,’ or ‘Let’s put something there,’ ” says Hammer. “We have managed to bypass all that. The only occasional talk with Michael is when he wants even more music.”

The same attention is lavished on the show’s fashions. On a typical episode, Crockett and Tubbs wear from five to eight different outfits–always in shades of pink, blue, green, peach, fuchsia and the show’s other “approved” colors –from such chic designers as Vittorio Ricci, Gianni Versace and Hugo Boss. “The concept of the show is to be on top of all the latest fashion trends in Europe,” says Costume Designer Bambi Breakstone, who has just left for a trip to Milan, Paris and London to pick outfits for the coming season.

Back in Miami Beach, the show’s crew has taken up semipermanent residence in the Alexander Hotel, where the walls are painted peach, the carpet has a magenta stripe, and even the lines in the parking garage have been repainted pink. Some civic leaders were originally unhappy at the prospect of a network- TV series blaring the city’s crime problems into living rooms across the nation. But Miami Vice’s success has quieted most of the naysayers. Miami officials estimate that the production contributes $1 million per episode to the city’s economy, and the show may even be boosting the tourist trade. “I like Miami Vice,” says Mayor Maurice Ferre. “It shows Miami’s beauty.” Adds William Cullom, president of the Greater Miami Chamber of Commerce: “It has built an awareness of Miami in young people who had never thought of visiting Miami.” Since its debut last September, Miami Vice has been the No. 1-rated network show among local viewers.

If summer trends extend into fall, the series may be poised for a long reign in the national Top Ten as well. The two-hour fall premiere episode, shot in New York City and scheduled for Sept. 27, will feature such guest stars as Gene Simmons of Kiss and Peter Allen. The show is also playing a major role (along with such new series as Amazing Stories and The Twilight Zone) in attracting writers and directors who have previously avoided television. “The old stigma against TV is gone now,” says Bobby Roth. “A lot of shows are going to sound better, and they are going to look better. And I think Miami Vice is a big reason for that.”

Not everyone is so enthusiastic about the direction Miami Vice is taking TV. “Miami Vice is a cop show–very well done and stylish, but still a cop show,” says Bruce Paltrow, the executive producer of St. Elsewhere. “It’s hip and glib, but not very deep.” Concedes Creator Yerkovich: “In the long run you can only rely so much on color coding and Bauhaus architecture and the Versace spring catalog.” Yet Vice may be revving up to move beyond such trendy props. “As soon as they get a handle on the script situation,” says Yerkovich, “the show is going to burn rubber.” With Crockett and Tubbs at the wheel of their Ferrari, designer jackets whipping in the wind, the TV world had better run for cover.