If you're above a certain age, you know that "Miami Vice" was once the coolest show on
TV.
Whether you're old enough to remember it or not, keep watching to find out what made it
so cool.
Miami Vice was unlike anything else on the air when it premiered in 1984.
The series sprung from the mind of NBC Entertainment president Brandon Tartikoff after being inspired
by MTV.
The most revolutionary thing on '80s television at the time was MTV, the network which at
the time aired music videos 24 hours a day.
Tartikoff wanted NBC to cash in on the craze, and while brainstorming ideas one day, he
wrote down two simple words: "MTV cops."
He sent along this tiny memo to Hill Street Blues writer and producer Anthony Yerkovich.
Yerkovich immediately started to work on a project that could fit Tartikoff's vague description.
Yerkovich had gotten the idea for a movie about police officers in Miami working vice
-- aka, the beat for drugs and prostitution.
He turned it into a double episode-length pilot script initially titled "Gold Coast".
Speaking to Time in 1985, Yerkovich had this to say about the idea:
"Even when I was on Hill Street Blues, I was collecting information on Miami [...] 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."
Don Johnson has scored some notable parts since spending six years starring as Sonny
Crockett on "Miami Vice."
He played the title character on the light-in-tone cop drama "Nash Bridges" and later had a turn
as a police chief with dark secrets on HBO's "Watchmen."
But he'll likely never move out of the large shadow cast by his big "Miami Vice" gig, so
it's baffling to think that NBC almost went another way.
Brandon Tartikoff pushed hard to cast Larry Wilcox as Sonny Crockett on Miami Vice.
At the time, Wilcox was just wrapping up a long run as a motorcycle-riding highway patrolman
on CHiPs.
Wilcox auditioned and filmed some fight-based test shots for "Miami Vice," only for them
to cast Johnson instead, who was just coming off of five unsold pilots.
At one point, the show's producers toyed with casting two major movie stars of the time,
Jeff Bridges and Nick Nolte.
Part of what made Miami Vice so different from other police and crime shows of the 1980s
was its look.
And by look, we mean the unique grooming style and fashion-forward clothes of Don Johnson's
character, Sonny Crockett.
"I mean, uh, you're not exactly up my alley, style and personality wise.
Heaven knows I'm no box of candy."
He wasn't clean-shaven, and he didn't rock an era-appropriate mustache.
However, he did sport the fuzzy beginnings of a beard, as if he hadn't had a chance to
shave in a while.
Johnson talked to Rolling Stone about the look, saying:
"The stubble was born out of the character, because it was intimated that he had been
up partying with drug dealers for two or three days at a time.
That was sort of an unspoken thing, which is why he was always unshaven and looked like
he slept in his clothes."
As for those clothes, countless guys co-opted the Sonny Crockett 'look' -- a light-colored
blazer over a bright T-shirt, as well as shoes with no socks.
All of those choices were just practical.
Johnson added:
"The rolled-up sleeves was a function of the fact that I had to have a jacket to cover
the gun and the holster.
I just stripped everything down to the bare minimum.
I didn't wear socks because it was too hot to wear damn socks."
After all, they were in Miami.
The popularity of Miami Vice peaked in its second season.
For the year of 1985 to '86, it ranked #9 in the Nielsen ratings.
NBC naturally ordered up a third season, but star Don Johnson balked at his salary.
The $35,000 per episode he'd been making up to that point was commensurate for an actor
on a new show, not the mega-star of an ultra-successful hit.
According to the Associated Press, Johnson wanted a raise to upwards of $100,000 per
episode.
He feuded with his bosses at Universal Television, and refused to report to work until he got
what he wanted.
Executives called his bluff, filing a $10 million breach of contract lawsuit and leaking
the news that they were prepared to let Johnson leave the series.
They even had two potential actor replacements lined up: "St. Elsewhere" star Mark Harmon
and the rising Treat Williams.
Shortly after those aggressive actions, the parties worked out a mutually agreeable arrangement.
Johnson returned to the Miami Vice set as a newly minted member of TV's highest paid
actors club.
Show creator Anthony Yerkovich supervised the pilot and first five episodes of Miami
Vice, then moved on to make movies for Universal Pictures.
This left the many day-to-day operations in the hands of executive producer Michael Mann.
The show was so young and relatively undeveloped that Mann could greatly dictate its direction,
particularly its visual style and pastel-heavy color palette.
Mann sought to express Miami's uniquely bright and eye-popping look on camera, inspired by
memories of the city from a mid-'70s vacation as well as a random trip to a paint store
one time when he was looking at color chips.
He shared this experience with the Los Angeles Times:
"I was playing around with [the chips] and I realized: three colors become thematic,
two colors don't.Three colors, you can actually start telling a chromatic story.
You can create a mood with three colors."
As a result, Miami Vice employed a strict hues policy.
Miami Vice episode director Bobby Roth told Time:
"There are certain colors you are not allowed to shoot, such as red and brown [...] 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."
Miami Vice was, to use the language of then and now, both cool and hot.
It was so cool that its theme song for a time became the hottest pop song in the land.
The extended version of "Miami Vice Theme," written and performed by Jan Hammer, went
to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in November 1985.
Even though Hammer never made it to the pop chart again, his composition is still one
of only five TV theme songs to ever sit atop the Top 40.
As well as Hammer's theme song performed, the first Miami Vice soundtrack album did
even better.
Released in 1985, the record included Hammer's theme song and other bits of incidental music,
along with pop songs prominently featured on the series, including Glenn Frey's "You
Belong to the City" and Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight."
It spent 11 weeks at #1 on the Billboard album chart and sold four million copies, ranking
it among the most successful TV tie-in albums of all time.
There's an old saying about how imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, which means
the people who made Miami Vice must have been very touched when the airwaves were flooded
with ripoffs.
In 1985, a year after NBC premiered Miami Vice, ABC answered with The Insiders, which
it claimed offered "contemporary music" and a "highly stylized visual approach."
Nicholas Campbell and Stoney Jackson starred as edgy crime reporter Nick Fox and an ex-con-turned-informant
named Mackey.
In true "Vice" style, the pilot episode contained fancy cars, a visceral sequence depicting
a seedy crime, and almost everybody dressed in hip clothes.
"The Insiders" was cancelled after 13 episodes, and ABC's other Vice clone, "Hollywood Beat,"
only lasted 14.
Miami Vice also helped lead to one of the most beloved and successful sitcoms of all
time.
Older actresses Doris Roberts and Selma Diamond performed a bit during an event announcing
NBC's 1984-85 season and joked that they were starring on a show called "Miami Nice."
That gave Tartikoff an idea -- a show about retirement-age women all living together in
Miami.
That show, which hit the network in 1985 to ratings and critical success, was none other
than "The Golden Girls."
When "Miami Vice" debuted in 1984, the real city of Miami wasn't as glamorous and flashy
as the show made it seem.
According to the Miami Herald, the city was recovering from riots and struggling to house
a large number of Haitian refugees.
Drug cartels were gaining power and influence, and violent crime was dramatically rising.
But Miami Vice made Miami's rundown, Art Deco architectural style look cool and vital.
That's a big part of what makes the city's South Beach nightlife district so attractive
to this day.
Crews fixed up and painted over the dulled-with-time exteriors of disused buildings, providing
Miami with a free makeover that was revitalizing and restorative.
Don Johnson talked about this makeover to Rolling Stone, saying:
"We painted the facades of virtually every building up and down Collins Avenue and Ocean
Avenue to match the color palettes we had for the show [...] The whole town kind of
reinvented itself in the image of a television show."
All those reworked buildings allowed new businesses in Miami to flourish, turning South Beach
into a tourist destination which initially catered to big fans of Miami Vice.
Not only did Crockett and Tubbs dress cool, they drove cool, too.
Since they frequently were going undercover, and had access to sweet wheels that the MPD
seized from drug lords, the cops of "Miami Vice" got to drive some enviable automobiles.
Detective Stan Switek drove a 1963 Ford Thunderbird, Detective Tubbs had a 1963 Cadillac DeVille,
and Detective Crockett initially cruised with a Ferrari 365 GTB/4 Daytona Spyder.
According to Popular Mechanics, Crockett's car wasn't actually a Ferrari.
Instead, it was custom-made for the show, assembled out of a 1980 Corvette with some
Ferrari parts.
This car garnered so much attention from fans and car lovers that it rubbed executives at
Ferrari the wrong way.
Ferrari North America sought to divert attention away from a car that wasn't commercially available,
so they provided two brand new Ferrari Testarossas to the Miami Vice production.
The Testarossas arrived painted black, but when the cars didn't look good in some of
the show's many nighttime scenes, the crew threw on some white paint.
What did all those things that made Miami Vice so fresh and original actually cost?
They cost a lot.
In the first season of the show, producers spent about $1.3 million per episode.
That's 30 percent more than what other police series spent for an installment at the time.
When adjusted to today's current dollar value, Miami Vice cost $3.1 million an episode -- and
that's before Don Johnson's big pay raise.
A substantial segment of the budget each week went to music.
Early in its run, Miami Vice soundtrack supervisors spent about $10,000 each week to license pre-existing,
well-known pop and rock songs by the likes of U2, Tina Turner, Phil Collins, and Roxy
Music.
That costs a lot more than just hiring studio musicians to make a generic, soft-rock score.
Miami Vice faded into the collective turquoise-and-pink-tinted memory in 1989 after falling to #64 in the
annual Nielsen ratings, no longer the white-hot show it was just a few years earlier.
By the mid-2000s, the franchise's good name had switched from passé to nostalgia, and
series executive producer Michael Mann had evolved into an accomplished and lauded filmmaker.
All of this, however, made for the perfect climate for a Miami Vice revival on the big
screen.
According to Kinetoscope, the film's production was anything but perfect, going over budget
and enduring filming delays.
Star Jamie Foxx grew so disenchanted that he left the film during a location shoot in
the Dominican Republic and refused to come back for any overseas work.
This forced Mann to rewrite the ending and abandon plans to shoot in Paraguay.
Foxx and Mann really didn't get along, but that wasn't an isolated situation.
According to a crew member:
"Michael dressed down everybody and humiliated everybody."
Audiences, likely used to campy, ironic movie versions of era-definitive TV shows, seemingly
weren't ready for a gritty, dark, R-rated drug trafficking thriller.
Critics weren't either, and reviewed it tepidly at the time.
The 2006 film earned a middling $63 million at the domestic box office, less than half
of the film's enormous $135 million budget.
If filmmakers or producers had any plans to bring back Miami Vice in the wake of the 2006
film version, the movie's lackluster performance likely buried those plans in the ground.
But 2006 is a millennium ago to Hollywood, and in the 2010s, talks started happening
on giving Miami Vice another, high-profile shot.
In 2014, Universal Pictures actively accepted pitches from screenwriters who wanted to take
a shot at launching a new franchise of Crockett and Tubbs-headlined adventures.
Those films unfortunately never came, but later that year, original series star Don
Johnson told Rolling Stone that there was, quote, "talk recently about doing new episodes"
and that he had a few ideas on how to pass the torch, narratively speaking, to a new
generation of vice cops.
In 2017, nearly three years later after those negotiations allegedly took place, Variety
reported that movie star Vin Diesel and producer Chris Morgan were hard at work on a new Miami
Vice for NBC.
TV writer Peter Macmanus, who'd penned episodes of The Mist and Satisfaction, was hired to
write the pilot script, but that new take on "Miami Vice" never showed up, either.
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