Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.10 “Love At First Sight”

Posted on July 7, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Welcome to Retro Television Reviews, a feature where we review some of our favorite and least favorite shows of the past! On Mondays, I will be reviewing Miami Vice, which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1989. The entire show can be purchased on Prime!

This week, as the drug epidemic rages out of control, Sonny searches for a serial killer.

Episode 4.10 “Love At First Sight”

(Dir by Don Johnson, originally aired on January 15th, 1988)

What the Hell, Miami Vice?

Seriously, remember when this show was about Crockett and Tubbs going after drug dealers while Phil Collins played in the background? Season 4 feels like a completely different show.

This week’s episode finds Sonny going undercover (*massive eye roll as Sonny does his, “My name is Sonny Burnett” routine for the thousandth time*) and joining a video dating service. The plan is for Sonny to bust prostitutes but instead, he finds himself as the latest client to be targeted by a serial killer.

Sonny goes on dates, never knowing if the woman he’s with is a killer. One woman approaches him with something behind her back. Is it a knife? No, it’s a vibrator! “I can see the headlines now — Undercover cop slugs woman after assault with a sex toy!” Sonny says while wearing a yellow sweater and having a nice grapefruit breakfast at his mansion.

Meanwhile, cocaine is flooding Miami, the crack epidemic is spiraling out of control, there are communist taking over Central America, Fidel Castro is still alive, there’s a lot of going on out there and apparently it’s being ignored so Sonny can be used as serial killer bait — hey Vice Squad, why don’t you let the homicide detective deal with the murders while you get back to what you’re supposed to be doing?

Caitlin, Sonny’s wife, worries. Oh, how she worries. Her best friend tells her that she’s knew what she was getting into when she married a cop. If Sonny is trying to maintain his undercover identity, should Caitlin be telling people that she married a cop? Shouldn’t she be like, “I’m married to drug dealer! His name’s Burnett and he just looks like that guy who used to play college football?” That Sheena Easton was not a professional actress is pretty obvious in this episode. When she previously appeared, she was a singer playing a singer and that brought some authenticity to her performance. Now, she’s having to pretend to be the worried wife of a cop and her acting limitations are much more easier to see.

The killer is eventually revealed to be a woman (played by David Bowie’s future wife, Iman) with multiple personalities. When she feels threatened, she turns into her brother and uses a knife to castrate the men from the dating service. Will Sonny survive? Yes, he does.

Don Johnson directed this episode and usually, when a cast member directs an episode of their show, their character tends to take a background role so they can concentrate on directing. Not our Don! This episode is so much about Sonny that the rest of the Vice Squad is barely in it.

This episode really made me miss the subtlety of Brian Dennehy playing a televangelist or James Brown kidnapping people for aliens. Get it together, Miami!

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 3.19 “Red Tape”

Posted on March 3, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week …. has Tubbs turned evil?

Episode 3.19 “Red Tape”

(Dir by Gabrielle Beaumont, originally aired on March 13th, 1987)

There’s a turncoat in the Vice Department. Someone is leaking information about search warrants to the bad guys and, as a result, cops are walking straight into booby traps. When a routine search for a low-level thief leads to an explosion that kills one cop (Viggo Mortensen) and leaves Tubbs covered in the man’s blood, Tubbs announces that he’s fed up with all of this and he refuses to take another assignment until the leaker has been caught. Castillo tells Tubbs he can either accept his new assignment or quit. Tubbs says he’s done.

The problem is that all of Tubbs’s money is wrapped up with the department’s credit union and Tubbs can’t withdraw it quickly enough to get back to New York. The usually cool and collected Tubbs throws a fit, getting himself arrested when he starts threatening people at the credit union. Crockett gets him out of jail and Tubbs says their partnership is done. Switek tries to open up about his feelings after Zito’s death. Tubbs says he doesn’t care. What’s going on with Tubbs? He’s acting like a total jerk and he’s also loudly letting everyone know that he’s desperate to get out of Miami and that he needs money quickly….

If you guessed Tubbs was working undercover, you are correct! It’s all an elaborate ruse to get crooked Detective McIntyre (Scott Plank) to approach Tubbs with an offer. (McIntyre’s girlfriend is played by a young actress named Annette Bening) Unfortunately, only Tubbs and Castillo know that Tubbs is still one of the good guys, A hot-headed young detective named Bobby Diaz (Lou Diamond Phillips) thinks that Tubbs really is crooked. Diaz already lost one partner to the leaker. He’s looking for revenge and even while Tubbs and Castillo are planning to take down McIntyre, Bobby is planning to take down Tubbs. In typical Miami Vice fashion, it all leads to shoot out that leaves the bad guys dead but which also leaves Diaz mortally wounded and cursing Tubbs with his dying breath. Tubbs goes from pretending to hate his job to actually hating it.

Seriously, were there ever any unambiguously happy endings on Miami Vice? It seems like nearly every episode ended with Crockett and Tubbs realizing that their latest victory — assuming they were lucky enough to even have one — would prove to pyrrhic. There would always be a new drug boss ready to replace anyone that they took out of the game. There would aways be a new cop willing to betray his colleagues. And there would always be a mountain of red tape, waiting to keep them from making a difference. This episode was dark!

This season seems like it’s been more Tubbs-centric than previous seasons and, as dark as thing got, it was still a little fun to watch Phillip Michael Thomas go totally over the top as the angry Tubbs. The scene in the credit union was one that I’m sure would be enjoyed by anyone who has ever had to deal with red tape. One could argue that Tubbs go so far overboard that the bad guys should have been able to see through his ruse. But, still, this episode was effectively moody and dark. Watching it, it was hard not to feel that Thomas deserved more storylines than he got.

Next week: Crockett falls in love with Melanie Griffith!

14 Days of Paranoia #3: The Lincoln Conspiracy (dir by James L. Conway)

Posted on February 17, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When it comes to conspiracy theories involving presidential assassinations, the theories surrounding JFK may get all the attention but it’s the theories surrounding the death of Abraham Lincoln are usually far more plausible.

Unless, of course, it’s the theories that are pushed in the 1977 docudrama, The Lincoln Conspiracy.

A mix of documentary-style narration and really cheap-looking historical reenactments, The Lincoln Conspiracy essentially indicts almost everyone who was alive in 1865 as being a part of either the conspiracy or the subsequent cover-up. Really, it’s remarkable how many historical figures are implicated in this film.

With the Civil War coming to a close, President Lincoln (John Anderson) hopes to pursue a generous reconstruction policy for the former Confederate States. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Robert Middleton), Senator Ben Wade (Dick Callinan), and a host of other are all opposed to this plan, both because they want vengeance and they also want to make as much money as possible off of the Southern cotton fields. They come up with a plan to impeach Lincoln but, in order to draw up the articles, they have to make sure that Lincoln is not seen for a few days. When Col. Lafayette Baker (John Dehner) discovers that an actor named John Wilkes Booth (Bradford Dillman) is planning on kidnapping Lincoln, Stanton and his conspirators decide to give Booth their unofficial support. However, when the plan changes at the last minute and Stanton decides that it would actually be a bad idea to kidnap Lincoln, an angry Booth decides to just kill Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, and William Seward.

Booth succeeds in shooting Lincoln and making his escape. The other members of Booth’s group all fail in their assignments. Andrew Johnson becomes president. Though grievously wounded, William Seward survives. Booth flees to Canada and …. oh, you thought Booth died? No, that was just a look alike who was shot by a bizarre soldier named Boston Corbett. By allowing everyone to believe that Booth was killed, Stanton is able to cover up any role he and his allies played in inspiring the assassination. Unfortunately, Col. Baker keeps a diary and it seems like he might be planning on revealing the truth but he dies mysteriously before he can.

(And, to give the film some credit, Col. Baker’s sudden death at 41 was an odd one. And, though it’s not really explored in the film, Boston Corbett, the man who shoot Booth, really was a weirdo who was described by contemporaries as being a religious fanatic who castrated himself and claimed to hear the voice of God.)

It’s a big conspiracy theory that is presented in The Lincoln Conspiracy. In fact, it’s a bit too big to really be taken seriously. The film pretty much accuses everyone in Washington of having a part in the assassination. The film itself has the cheap look of a community theater production and the use of Dr. Samuel Mudd as a narrator only adds to the film’s silliness. If you’re a fan of gigantic and thoroughly implausible conspiracy theories, as I am, the film is entertaining in its way. If nothing else, Bradford Dillman certainly looks like how most people probably imagine John Wilkes Booth to have looked. Otherwise, The Lincoln Conspiracy is far-fetched and not at all realistic, which is why I assume that a lot of people in 1977 probably believed every word of it.

Previous entries in 2025’s 14 Days Of Paranoia: