MIAMI VICE COPS & VILLAINS FOR THE '80s
It’s the biggest television phenomenon of the ’80s. Heck, forget the television “qualifier,” and just say that it’s one of the biggest phenomenons of the ’80s in any field. When Miami Vice debuted on Fridays at 10 p.m. last season, NBC carried the show at a loss, meaning it wasn’t scoring terribly high in the TV ratings.
The CREEM Archive presents the magazine as originally created. Digital text has been scanned from its original print format and may contain formatting quirks and inconsistencies.
MIAMI VICE COPS & VILLAINS FOR THE '80s
It’s the biggest television phenomenon of the ’80s. Heck, forget the television “qualifier,” and just say that it’s one of the biggest phenomenons of the ’80s in any field. When Miami Vice debuted on Fridays at 10 p.m. last season, NBC carried the show at a loss, meaning it wasn’t scoring terribly high in the TV ratings. But the program’s unique blend of hipness, seediness, violence and MTVish music video imagery soon garnered Miami Vice a rabid cult following. Thanks to word of mouth and an extraordinary amount of media attention, this season’s edition of Miami Vice is not only him the top of the iiNielsen ratings, but a soundtrack LP of the show has gone to lumber one on the sation’s charts!
Surely the majority of credit for Miami Vice’s success has to go to the show s two stars Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. Johnson plays James “Sonny Crockett, the divorced cop who wears Italian designer suits, T-shirts, no socks, smokes a lot of cigarettes and shares his houseboat with an alligator named Elvis. Thomas plays his partner Ricardo Tubbs, an ex-New Yorkei who wears \rmani trenchcoats and one diamond earring. Together, they battle corruption in Miami, Florida the rCpocaine capital of America.
It’s not often that a television program gets its own soundtrack album, let alone one that goes to he top of the hit parade, but music has always been one of the key elements to Miami Vice’s appeal. The album spans the gamut from rock to pop to rap music. It’s made a star out of Jan Hammer E who contributed the show’s theme song, not to § mention incidental music sprinkled throughout the show. Other artists on the record (and whose music often appears on the show) include Glenn Frey, Chaka Khan, Phil Collins, Grandmaster Melle Mel and Tina Turner. And on the show itself, you might hear anyone from Dolly Parton or Cyndi Lauper to the Rolling Stones and Billy I Idol, since $50 to $70,000 per show goes to the rights for songs which are incorporated uncut in and out of the show’s action.
And it’s not only the stars’ music that gets inti the show—but the stars themselves often pop up on the screen. When an episode plot was based around Glenn Frey’s “Smuggler’s Blues,” it only followed that Glenn Frey himself should turn up playing a character in the show. It was the biggest shot in the arm Frey’s career has received since he left the Eagles. And where else can you see someone like Little Richard playing an evangelist preacher on network TV?
Miami Vice has turned both Johnson and Thomas into two of today’s most visible sex symbols. They’ve both had their faces on more magazines recently than is worth counting. And it’s even big headline news when Johnson goes to a hypnotist to see if he can kick his cigarette habit. And since music plays such a big role in the series, it only seems fitting that the next career step for Johnson would be a record of his own. Word has it that he’s currently in the studio working on an album. And with the talented musicians the star counts among his friends and acquaintances, the record promises to be a real killer! So it looks like Miami Vice will be with us for a long time to come—but with or without the program, it also looks like the show’s two sexy stars have bright futures ahead of them!
