Miami Vice Turns 40: From the Clothes to the Cast, How the ’80s Classic Reinvented TV

There are few series in the history of television that have had as great an influence as Miami Vicewhich debuted with little fanfare 40 years ago this week on September 16, 1984And yet the series literally rolled up its sleeves and changed pop cultureboth in its prime and for future generations.

In just five seasons, producer/filmmaker Michael Mann’s glossy, conceptual police drama starring Don Johnson, Philip Michael Thomas and an almost laughably dour and taciturn Edward James Olmos—plus a bunch of guns, speedboats and pastel-colored everything—has influenced fashion and music, helped revitalize Miami’s South Beach neighborhood, solidified the concept of stunt casting and changed the nature of TV cop shows.

Its influence on men’s fashion is still felt todaywhile tRiviera lovers can give out Spent hours online hunting for obscure clips of countless actors who used the show as a springboard to fame, far surpassing the show’s lead actors, from Liam Neeson to Julia Roberts Unpleasant Ben Stiller And Viggo Mortensen.

Cheers walked longer, Hill Street Blues was praised more, and Valleys had better ratings. But nothing on primetime in the 80s surpassed Miami Vice for cool. It was palpable. Teenage viewers heard the same contemporary music from the series they heard on the radio – a hugely innovative concept that kept pace with the launch of MTV in 1981.

Adults, meanwhile, were stunned as they watched the super-slick Sonny Crockett (Johnson) and Ricardo Tubbs (Thomas) casually donning Versace and speeding through the mean streets of Miami in a sports car, en route to the houseboat where Crockett – in the brash words of singer Sheena Easton, who played his second wife on the show – practiced his “specialty of taking girls in that thing and getting them wet.” Hey, it’s Miami ViceBaby.

From 1984 to 1989, Miami Vice made staying home on Friday night a defensible decision. To groundbreaking 40th anniversary of the drama, we‘looking back on some of its benchmarks, and most sustainable, performance.

The clothes

In a recent interview with The Hollywood ReporterSeason one costume designer Jodie Tillen noted that Miami Vice“changed the way men dressed in the world. It gave men permission to wear pastels.” It also gave them permission to wear T-shirts under blazers, loafers without socks, and designers like Hugo Boss.

Like so many aspects of the series, the idea of ​​the fancy clothes was meant to enhance the illusion that undercover agents Crockett and Tubbs were actually in the same stratosphere, and even working in the same field, as the drug dealers they busted with the heavy weapons they kept concealed beneath their baggy blazers and loose-fitting trousers.

Both Tillen and season two costume designer Bambi Breakstone scoured Europe for their characters’ signature looks, noting that while Crockett’s vibe reflected his rebellious nature, Tubbs’ more understated aesthetic reflected his New York City roots. But it was Crockett’s look that took over.

The Hollywood Reporter points to five red carpet appearances by actors in 2024 that could have been lifted from 1987, with a diverse roster including Sterling K. Brown, Simu Liu, Ryan Reynolds and Gosling, and Sebastian Stan. Who needs a tie when you’ve got a flamingo-pink T-shirt?

Did you know? Miami Vice had a Canadian connection outside of Leonard Cohen in a guest role. One of the show’s many marketing collaborations was with the Montreal new wave-inspired clothing brand Parachutealso loved by 80s tastemakers such as Madonna and David Bowie.

The music

As television historians have noted, Miami Vice was expensive to make, especially since visionary producer Michael Mann insisted on very high-quality visuals. As costume designer Tillen revealed to The Hollywood Reporter“We had a color palette: no earth tones, no primary tones, all pastels. Every car color, every wall the actors walked in front of, was designed – nothing was by accident. There was a lot of coordination between the art department, locations, costumes.”

Another major expense was licensing original music to play on the show, which in the 80s brought in as much as $10,000 an episode. But it was money well spent, securing broadcast rights to a jukebox-worthy selection of hits from Depeche Mode, Glenn Frey, Honeymoon Suite (Canada again!), Jackson Browne plus Don Henley, Bette Midler, Peter Gabriel, Tina Turner, Pat Benatar, George Thoroughgood, Foreigner and multiple copies of Phil Collins, then a huge pop star. What’s more, the show’s synth-tinged theme and Jan Hammer score effectively became the most recognizable background music of the decade.

Did you know? The iconic In the air tonight was used twice in Miami Vicemost notably in the 1984 pilot episode, “Brother’s Keeper.” Nearly the entire song plays as Crockett and Tubbs drive toward a confrontation, though the drive is interrupted by a phone call from Crockett to his ex-wife to say goodbye, possibly for the last time.

The stunt casting

At the time, the idea of ​​having famous rock stars play the role of tough guys was novel, to say the least. Yesand are somehow perfectly in sync with the show’s extensive use of original contemporary music and the rise of MTV, which suddenly made musicians recognizable to the mainstream. Ergo, Miami Vice cast Frank Zappa as a drug dealer, Ted Nugent as a villain and Phil Collins as a con man, all in season two, while Willie Nelson played a moody retired Texas Ranger in season three and James Brown guest star as a cult leader with dubious connections in season four.

And that wasn’t the only tongue-in-cheek casting during the series. In 1987, Melanie Griffith—then Johnson’s real-life ex-wife, and his wife for the second time two years later—was cast as his girlfriend who, unfortunately for an undercover vice cop, turns out to be a madam, leading to the episode’s fantastic title, “By Hooker By Crook.”

Did you know? When that the latter The episode – one of four Johnson directed – that first aired featured a love scene between Johnson and Griffith that anyone lucky enough to see would know was between two people who had done something like this before, really. It was deemed too racy for TV and was subsequently cut, never to return, not even on DVD.

It made South Beach famous

Miami Vice is widely credited with spearheading the revival of the now iconic Ocean Drive, which at the time the series was filmed was a deteriorating, crime-ridden strip of hotels and co-ops used primarily as retirement homesIn other words, far from the celebrated and tourist-friendly Art Deco destination that it is today. Indeed, as IMDb notes: “Miami tourism officials are proud that the series has transformed the city’s image from a retirement community to a fun and exciting place for young people to visit.”

Fittingly enough, a 40th anniversary Miami Vice reunion weekend The performance, planned for the region and attended by much of the crew and cast (but not Johnson, now 74, or Thomas, 75), will benefit the Police Officer Assistance Trust of Greater Miami.

Did you know? Some parts of South Beach were so dilapidated that the show’s set designers and production crew had to paint over graffiti and make repairs to buildings before filming could begin. Ironically, Miami city officials had to initially concerned that the word “vice” in the show’s title would reflect poorly on the city’s reputation.

It changed the way we watched police shows

For Miami ViceNo one thought cop shows had a cinematic sheen, with high production values ​​and top-notch cinematography. They were raw. Cops had worked undercover before, but they hadn’t gone all in like Crockett and Tubbs, with the clothes and the cars and all the wealth-and-status regalia.

There certainly wasn’t much noise on TV about drug cartels and arms dealers or depictions of the extravagant lifestyles they offered their top lieutenants. Perhaps most substantially, on Miami ViceThe good guys weren’t always clearly distinguishable from the bad guys. By allowing for ethical ambiguity, the show rewrote the cop show forever. Forty years later, it’s still a joy to watch, especially when Crockett pulls over that high-performance Ferrari Daytona Spyder to use a pay phone.

Did you know? According to IMDb, each episode cost about $1.3 million to make, about 30 percent more than most other police procedural shows at the time. The series was one of the first to air in stereophonic sound, a novelty on television in the 1980s, which allowed the music and sound effects to come through in a way that was rarely seen at the time.

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