Anthony Yerkovich and Michael Mann’s crime drama series Miami Vice aired on NBC in the United States. Don Johnson plays James “Sonny” Crockett, a detective of the Metro-Dade Police Department in Miami, and Philip Michael Thomas plays his partner, Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs.
From 1984–1989, NBC aired five seasons of the show. Starting in 1988, USA Network aired repeats of the show, then on January 25, 1990, they aired an episode that had never before been seen.
Rather than relying on the conventions of police procedurals, the show borrowed heavily from 1980s New Wave culture, becoming known for its use of modern pop and rock music and trendy or stylized imagery. “the first show to appear actually new and distinct since color TV was invented,” People magazine said of Miami Vice.
Miami Vice Locations
Before shooting began, it was decided to film the majority of the exteriors in Los Angeles and trick the audience into thinking they were in downtown Miami. This strategy would be used again twenty years later during the creation of CSI: Miami. Instead, almost all of the exterior and interior filming took place in Miami and other parts of Florida.
South Beach, where several scenes from Miami Vice were shot, was a poor, dangerous neighborhood at the time with an unknown voice saying “There weren’t too many people out and about, they were filming all over Miami Beach and could film in the middle of the street.
There was literally nobody there and no cars parked in the street. The hotels along Ocean Drive were full of elderly, mostly Jewish retirees, many of whom were frail and subsisting on meagre Social Security payments”.
In fact, particularly in the show’s early episodes, local senior citizens often played supporting roles and for safety reasons, the production team chose to repaint the external walls of a few buildings on a few South Beach street corners before filming.
Since production wrapped on Miami Vice in the mid-1980s, many of the buildings featured in the show, including numerous beachfront hotels, have undergone extensive renovations, making that area of South Beach one of the most popular in all of South Florida among tourists and celebrities.
Other frequent filming locations for the show are found in and around Broward and Palm Beach counties.
It was planned to shoot interiors at Universal Studios in Los Angeles, but when the production realized how complicated it would be to coordinate filming across the country, they decided to use Greenwich Studios in North Miami instead.
Greenwich Studios’ rear loading dock doubles as the back room of the Gold Coast Shipping building, where the vice squad’s offices are housed, in a few sequences, especially in the first few episodes.
Music From Miami Vice
Popular music from the 1980s, especially synthesized instrumental pieces by Jan Hammer, and popular rock songs from that era are among the reasons Miami Vice is regarded as a groundbreaking example of stereo broadcast music.
Whereas most TV shows used custom-made scores for their programs, Miami Vice regularly shelled out $10,000 or more per episode just to secure the rights to use original recordings.
To have a song featured on Miami Vice was a huge boost for both record labels and musicians. In reality, publications like USA Today used to inform readers of the weekly tunes that would be played.