Ellen Greene | Through the Shattered Lens

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 is currently streaming on Tubi!

This week, two supporting players get an episode all their own.

Episode 1.18 “Made For Each Other”

(Dir by Rob Cohen, originally aired on March 8th, 1985)

After spending most of the first season as background comedic relief, Detectives Switek (Michael Talbott) and Zito (John Diehl) are at the center of this week’s episode of Miami Vice.

With the Vice Squad trying to make a case against criminal fence John Costeleda (Johnny “Vatos” Hernandez), Switek and Zito recruit two informants — Noogie (Charlie Barnett) and Izzy (Martin Ferrero) — and send them in undercover to get close to Costeleda’s lieutenant, an electronic store owner named “Bonzo” Barry Gold (Mark Linn-Baker). For once, it’s Zito and Switek who are pushing ethical boundaries to take down the bad guy though, notably, they never get quite as angsty about it as either Crockett or Tubbs. If Crockett and Tubbs are secretly aware that they’re fighting a losing war against crime, Switek and Zito are a bit more earnest in their outlook.

This episode also takes a look at Switek and Zito’s life outside of Vice. Zito likes to take care of fish and is something of an eccentric. Switek is dating Darlene (Ellen Greene), who used to date Zito. Switek is also a big fan of Elvis, though Darlene has tossed almost all of his Elvis stuff out of the apartment and instead replaced it with pictures of Princess Diana and baby Harry. (Prince Harry’s father is not seen in any of the pictures. Neither is the future King Charles III.) When Zito’s house explodes due to a gas leak, he moves in with Switek and Darlene. Darlene is not particularly happy about that and, by the end of the episode, Switek has decided that his partner is more important to him than his girlfriend. As the title says, Switek and Zito are made for each other.

I like the fact that Miami Vice would occasionally allow people other than Crockett and Tubbs to headline an episode. After all, the show is called Miami Vice and there’s more to the Vice Squad than just Crockett’s houseboat and Tubbs’s fake Jamaican accent. Michael Talbott and especially John Diehl are both likable in their roles, with Diehl in particular making Zito into the type of strange guy who you can’t help but love. That said, this episode was a bit too silly for its own good. It would have been interesting to see Zito and Switek go after the type of criminals that Crockett and Tubbs regularly went after but instead, Costeleda was too much of a buffoon to really be a serious threat. The emphasis here was on comedy but Miami Vice works better as a serious show with funny moments than as a funny show with serious moments.

It was nice to see that Zito and Switek were made for each other but, otherwise, this episode never worked as well as one might hope.

What has become a yearly ritual, whenever a new season of The Walking Dead inches closer to it’s premiere AMC and the folks running the show shoot a series of webisodes telling the story of a group of survivors outside of the show’s main cast. These individuals never come into contact with Rick and his band of survivors, but they do come across similar places that we’ve seen in past episodes.

The first webisode series was the 6-parter “Torn Apart” arrived just prior to Season 2 and told of the origins of the so-callled “Bicycle Girl” zombie Rick comes across soon after waking up from his coma. Then we had the 4-parter “Cold Storage” preceding Season 3’s premiere. Now we have the 3-parter “The Oath” which extends each webisode and deals with a surviving couple whose camp have been overrun by a swarm the night before.

“The Oath” stars Ashley Bell (The Last Exorcism) as Karina with Wyatt Russell (Cowboys & Aliens) playing Paul. The duo races to find medical help in the early months of the zombie apocalypse and they soon come across an abandoned hospital that should be familiar to fans of the show from the very beginning. We even see the origin of the barricaded door in the hospital with the ominous warning to keep any passer-by away.

While the webisodes themselves have been hit-or-miss when it comes to the casts performances they do fill in some backstory on the fringes of the main show. With “The Oath” we see that the Governor and Michonne may not be the only ones to have found a way to use the zombies as a sort of mascot/camouflage.

Overall, “The Oath” was a nice webisode with some average acting from the cast. The teleplay by Luke Passmore was actually quite good and series executive producer Greg Nicotero does a good job directing the whole affair. Some sequences turn out to be very tense and scary. Maybe it’s the nature of the webisode itself that the acting could be uneven, but it was still a good little story that should help whet the appetite of the fans who have been waiting a year for Season 4 to start.

“Alone”