Miami Vice Series on Netflix

[kmarc]

Originally Posted by Enigma777

Favorite episodes--The Big Thaw and The Dutch Oven

Heh, just recently saw The Big Thaw, it does provide a bit of slapstick comic relief in the series. I loved the final scene of the cryo capsule floating way through Biscayne Bay.

I like the way The Dutch Oven featured Trudy's dilemma between romance and her job, and the agony of killing someone, even in the line of duty.

Missing Hours with James Brown, and Trudy/Olivia Brown in a featured role, was pretty weird. Interesting to see a really young Chris Rock in the episode, though. Ties for weirdness with Shadow in the Dark from Season 3, so far.

My favorites are the Sheena Easton episodes. They sort of tie in to the payola scandals of Miami in the 1980s. And of course, I do enjoy the romance with Sonny Crockett.

Sigh. Call me old fashioned, but IMO Ricardo Tubbs and Sonny Crockett were the peak of handsome American manhood on the small screen, in black and white. I couldn't bring myself to watch the movie with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. They don't even come close to Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas.

[Mouldy Old Schmo]

I was thinking about Miami Vice last night while I was walking our dog. I wondered if the series broke new ground. Was it the first to feature cops-as-sex-symbols? And do the people who were its fans in the 1980s still enjoy it?
I was a teenager then - a member of the MTV generation that was Vice's target demographic - but I never became a fan. All I know is that when the Eighties ended, so did the series.

I think this is a good review of Miami Vice.

How Miami Vice launched the

[The Big Lebowski Dude]

Great article on the Miami Vice TV series - Thanks for the post.

Big fan of MV, though I only caught a handful of episodes on it's original broadcast back in the '80's. The intro. theme song by Jan Hammer is iconic, and IMHO is one of the top five best theme songs to a TV series. I was a kid back when the show was first released, so there definitely a lot of nostalgia associated with the series.

A while back, I caught the entire series on DVD & made me realize yet again that the series is an amazing time capsule of a bygone era; it captures a time & place perfectly re: the music, clothes, fashion, attitudes, etc. In looking back on the show 30 years later, it seems like the show actually strongly influenced the fashion/look of the '80's, rather than the other way around.

I'm currently going back & re-watching the DVD's, and one of the many things that stands out is the Lacrosse-like?! sport Jai Alai (sp?!), which is featured both in the opening credits of the series & is also the focus of one of the episodes. Prior to watching MV, I was completely unaware of this sport - the little I know about this is from watching the show. Though it looks interesting, it seemed extremely dangerous - i.e., if the ball they were playing with hit a player (or anyone else) in the head, they would very probably get brain damage and/or die as a result (which happened to a character on the series).

Coincidentally, I was also recently watching S3 of the great TV series Mad Men, which revolves around an NYC ad agency in the early 1960's. A couple of episodes actually featured a wealthy young guy trying to promote Jai Alai in the U.S. - I wonder if this was based on something that actually happened, or was made up for the series?! In any case, I'm not surprised that the sport never caught on - on a national level, that is.

[tallrick]

Interestingly the boat show used a Miami-Vice like intro for its TV ads. You can also catch Miami Vice on channel 6-2 (COZI tv) at nights. The show had a huge influence on people I knew, many teens even imitated fashions from the show. The whole sleeveless shirt, with jacket never made any sense to me. My style in the 80's was 1950's and friends called me Richie Cunningham as a joke. Jai-Alai was very popular when I was a kid, we had several family friends who would go to the fronton. It was in the tri-county area and a hit, never realized it lost popularity.



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ps4__ZtlzX4

[Felix C]

El Rey channel re-airs Miami Vice episodes every weekday mornings and some weekends.

I never cared for the show back in the day nor now.

[The Big Lebowski Dude]

Yeah, I have absolutely no idea how popular Jai Alai is now. It's just that I had never heard of the sport prior to seeing it played on Miami Vice. I guess it's a local Miami/Florida?! sport, and never lost it's popularity - but outside of this region, there's a good chance many haven't heard of this.

Slowly making my way through my re-watch of MV, and am in the middle of Season 3. This is not a bad season by any means. So far, I'm liking this almost as much (and in some cases as much) as Seasons 1-2.

I found the two-parter when

Spoiler

Zito gets killed (Down for the Count - Episodes 1-2) to be especially well-done. Very poignant, especially how Zito was mentoring the up-and-coming boxer & ended up getting killed by gangsters (who made his death look like a drug overdose). I remember when I first saw this episode, I was surprised that they killed off a main character. It's interesting that prior to the death many of the previous Season 3 episodes did not feature Zito as much - i.e., Stan Switek was pretty much going it alone in many of these shows...possibly foreshadowing Zito's death?!

Also really impressed by the S3 episode where Crockett raced against time to prove the innocence of a guy he thought he had mistakenly send to death row years earlier.

Spoiler

However, at the very end of the episode (as the guy was walking out of prison) he realized he had been played - and that the guy actually WAS guilty. Fantastic & unusual episode - I can't imagine any other series at that time would have had the guts to write/produce a story like this.

These types of episodes pretty much went along with one of the major themes of this series - i.e., good people do die & even if they don't, many of the episodes did not have happy endings by any means.

[The Big Lebowski Dude]

For what it's worth, I recently got the "Miami Vice" 5-season set on Blu-ray. I haven't had a chance to delve into this yet, and probably won't be able to until next year.

A brief review of the physical aspects of the set:

Box cover art: Great!

Individual Blu Season case(s) cover art: Great!

Packaging: Leaves a lot to be desired. I don't like that they stacked two discs on top of each other, since this will increase the chances of the discs getting scratched.

That being said, I do like how slim the individual season cases are, and visually this set looks great. It's just that the packaging is sub-par.

Here's a link with more info.:

Miami Vice DVD news: Announcement for The Complete Series on Blu-ray | TVShowsOnDVD.com