Miami Vice - Season One discussion

Got hooked when I flicked it on mid show and there was a speedboat crashing the waves and it seemed as if The Police tune, Voices in My Head, played through in its entirety.
I thought, well... this is different.
Loved the theme of the undercover cop being in too deep.
Great show.

 

The episode Milk Run is one of my favorite episodes. First I love the opening in Miami international airport. Lots of good footage in this story. The building getting blown up. The statues used for the smuggling. Tubbs knowledge of Santaria. The two guys making the sale. The double cross. And the final scene in the airport in slow motion. I was not expecting that. Music in the episode was "Hit Me With Your Best Shot" and "Legs"

 

Is nobody going to mention Castillo? He made that show for me - he was one cool, bad dude. Dead serious, a man of few words. He could say more with one look than anyone around.

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Its a shame that the show never equaled that first Season, the second season had some good shows and a bigger budget, but wasn't as good, After that it was a slow downhill

 

I think that's fair. In fact I'd say The Prodigal Son seemed to signal a decline...

 

Mann was off doing other things ,including Crime Story

 

Yes and it hurt IMO. Season 2 did have some good shows though, Tale of the Goat, Buddies, Junk Love, etc.

Season One is still one of the best seasons I've seen a series have, period. Pretty damn flawless stuff...

 

Just a head's up, I believe Miami Vice is being pulled from Netflix on July 15th. Maybe it comes back shortly, but you never know.

 

It's on Cozi.

 

I got the DVD box...I'm good!

 

Me too!

 

Me 3

 

I love Miami Vice. The clothes, the music, wow! I also enjoy this Greg Allman and Don Johnson tune :

 

They really didn't skimp on the music budget. They use very long segments of popular (at the time) songs. I've been watching S1 episodes. I forgot how much I like the Russ Ballard tune "Voices". Hadn't heard that in a long time. I used to think it was The Fixx that did that song.

 

The Universal staff editors who worked on the show loved to F with the main title each week. I swear, I think they had four or five different mixes of the theme song, and they'd switch them up every so often just to keep people off-balance. There absolutely was a version with a shot of girls wearing crew jackets with the official Miami Vice logo, which is a very "Michael Mann" thing to do. I fell out of my chair the first time I saw that.

They also had different-length main title sequences depending on whether that week's episode came in short. If it did, they'd just increase the opening titles a little bit (like by :05-10 seconds). I don't know if Universal TV syndication scrapped that and just used one main title version for each season or what in the years that followed.

 

I have the DVD's. I was just watching it on Netflix because it was convenient.

 

I gotcha. I tried watching some episodes on Netflix, and felt the DVDs looked better. (Not that they are exactly crystal clear, either...)

 

I thought it was great until I watched an episode of NYPD Blue. Tried to rewatch season 1, but couldn't really stomach more than 3 episodes.

I would have loved to see Don Johnson get a TV Series with a character like the one he briefly plays in that otherwise awful "Dusk 'til dawn" TV Series - he was awesome !

 

I swear, you could feel them getting more into the music as the first season rolled. They started tentatively with obvious uses of Hit Me With Your Best Shot and This Masquerade, but then they used Todd's Tiny Demons and The Police's Tea in the Sahara in really interesting ways. I was hooked. Then they really hit their stride, the later stuff like Biko, Brothers in Arms, Little By Little, etc really threw me.

 

Was the double episode with castillo's wife and the Thai family in seasons n one...?

Also , it remember a good use of lunatic fringe on that show, not sure the season...

 

Lunatic Fringe opened one of my favorite eps, Evan, with a great performance by William Russ. And the ending showed Crockett was still kind of a hole sometimes.

 

couldn't disagree more NYPD Blue was very good at times ,but visually it was just a slicker Hill Street Blues ,shot mostly on the back lot ,visually it was lame

 

I was hooked on it back in it's original run.
The show looked good from a cinematography point of view, and it sounded great with all the musical content. At the time, I had just purchased a Sony Profeel monitor & tuner package. This fed my McIntosh audio with JBL 4311's. At some point early on, Sony introduced the MTS decoder that allowed for stereo listening. I was in heaven watching and listening to this show.

A couple of years ago, my wife bought me a DVD box set of the 1st & second seasons. Fortunately, my favorite episode, "Out Where The Buses Don't Run" was on there. The shows with Zappa, and Willie Nelson were also stand outs.
Looking at it all 30 years on, I can't believe some of the acting though. Fortunately, the high points helped keep your mind off the low points.

After 2 or 3 seasons, I finally did give up though. Crockett/Johnson started wearing too much make up, and too many frills & lace baseball jackets to be taken seriously. (The 80's "big hair" style that he developed didn't help either).

 

Yes, "Golden Triangle", S1E13 and S1E14. There's another episode with Castillo's wife in a later season with a different actress.

 

I just bought season 1 on DVD and I am watching it every night over the last few week. I never got into it back in the day, but its entertaining. Not sure if its as great as people make it.
The show gets better once Edward James Olmos arrives