Its greatest impact, though, was that it changed the physical landscape of South Florida. But it changed the landscape of all the television crime shows that followed it (and no, I don’t just mean Cop Rock ).

(He had once been a stand-up comic!)Ĭompared to long-running shows like Law & Order (20 seasons) or Murder, She Wrote (12 seasons), Miami Vice wasn’t on the air but for a minute. His baleful glares were so convincing that a Chicago Tribune reporter found it remarkable that the actor could, in fact, laugh and smile. He wore all black, and he was so terse he seemed to do all his acting with his eyes. Castillo, played with stone-faced super-cool by Edward James Olmos. My favorite character, though, was their boss, Lt. They were backed up by a multicultural squad of two male goofballs who provided some comic relief and two female detectives whose usual assignment involved dressing up as prostitutes. It starred Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas as James “Sonny” Crockett and Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs, two South Florida cops whose duties involved wearing designer clothes, driving fast cars and going undercover to bust up drug cartels and gun-running operations, all to the beat of the hippest music the ‘80s could provide. Premiering 35 years ago this September, Miami Vice ran for five seasons on NBC. And like my friends, I quickly became addicted to it. Week after week they bugged me about it until finally I gave in and bought a TV set, just so I could watch this show they were all talking about. There was this new TV show, they said, that was unlike anything they’d ever seen before. Instead I read 100 books, listened to a lot of music and swam nearly every day.īut after a year some friends of mine started telling me I really ought to go buy a TV set. I spent a year living on the beach with no TV set. In the mid-1980s, back when I was a single guy, I moved into an apartment on the beach in a small Florida town named Englewood.

Miami vice colors clothes