Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 5.4 “Bad Timing”

Posted on October 27, 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, Crockett tries to find himself.

Episode 5.4 “Bad Timing”

(Dir by Virgil W. Vogel, originally aired on December 2nd, 1988)

With the case against him still unresolved, Crockett goes on vacation. He doesn’t tell anyone where he’s going, which is a bit unfortunate as he ends up being taken hostage in the Bayous by a group of cartoonishly evil escaped convicts. (Pruitt Taylor Vince plays one of the hostage-takers but is fairly forgettable. A young Melissa Leo appears as a fellow hostage and shows none of the grit that made her so memorable as Sgt. Kay Howard on Homicide.) Somehow, Tubbs still shows up at the last moment and, looking resplendent in a white suit, he shoots the final convict before the latter shoots Crockett. Crockett doesn’t even ask Tubbs how he knew where Crockett was. (If Tubbs had been following Crockett the entire time, why would he have allowed Crockett to have been taken hostage to begin with?) This episode might as well have been called Dues Ex Tubbs.

Watching this episode, it occurred to me that, as a character, Crockett really doesn’t have anywhere left to go. By having him turn into Burnett and become one of Miami’s most powerful drug dealers, the show pretty much pushed the character as far as possible. It’s impossible for Crockett to come back from that and it’s equally impossible to watch an episode like this one and not wonder why Crockett wasn’t in prison. He’s suspected of committing four murders. He was witnessed shooting a cop. He attempted to kill his own partner, twice. The episode begins with several high-ranking cops saying that they don’t buy Crockett’s excuse that he had amnesia. And yet, Crockett is allowed to leave Miami while the department tries to figure out what to do with him.

Really, the whole idea that Crockett — a minor celebrity due to his college football career — could maintain his Burnett cover for five seasons was already pretty hard to believe. Crockett and Tubbs’s cover got blown in nearly every episode during the first three seasons. Having Sonny “Burnett” marry a world-famous singer without anyone noting that Burnett looked just like Crockett was probably this show’s true shark jumping moment. Once that happened, it became increasingly difficult to take Miami Vice seriously. The whole arc of Sonny thinking he was Burnett was fun to watch and Don Johnson gave a good performance as a conflicted bad guy but it’s also left the show with nowhere to go. With this episode, Crockett has been reduced to being taken hostage by a group of backwoods yokels and waiting for Tubbs to materialize from out of nowhere.

In short, it’s time for Sonny to move on. And seeing as how this is the final season …. well, we’ll see what happens!

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 4.8 “Like A Hurricane”

Posted on June 23, 2025 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Crockett gets married! Huh?

Episode 4.8 “Like a Hurricane”

(Dir by Colin Bucksey, originally aired on November 20th, 1987)

Crockett is upset when he’s assigned to serve as a bodyguard to singer Caitlin Davies (Sheena Easton). Caitlin is a witness to the criminal activity of music industry executive Tommy Lowell (Xander Berkeley) and the Vice Squad is worried that he might send someone to kill her. Crockett doesn’t have much use for celebrities and Caitlin doesn’t have much use for a cop continually telling her what to do. But after Crockett saves Caitlin’s life multiple times, they fall in love and the episode ends with Crockett and Caitlin getting married.

Wow, Crockett got married!

I mean, is Caitlin going to live on his boat? Is the crocodile going to be okay with this? For that matter, wouldn’t the fact that he just married a celebrity make it difficult for Crockett to continue his undercover work as Sonny Burnett? I mean, I imagine there was a lot of press coverage of the marriage. Caitlin, we’re told, is a pretty big deal.

Honestly, Crockett getting married should have been a big moment but this episode just fell flat. The main problem is that Don Johnson and Sheena Easton didn’t have much romantic chemistry so their sudden love for each felt as if it came out of nowhere. Sonny getting married that quickly seemed a bit out-of-character for him. This episode, like much of season 4, felt like it was mostly the result of the writers grasping at straws to find something new to do with the show. Last week, Trudy got kidnapped by aliens. This week, Crockett got married. Maybe next week, Tubbs will take on the Yakuza. Who knows? At this point, it all feels random.

We’ll see what happens. For now, here’s Sheena Easton performing one of my favorite Bond songs.

Retro Television Review: Miami Vice 3.9 “Baby Blues”

Posted on November 25, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

This week, the Vice Squad investigates a baby broker!

Episode 3.9 “Baby Blues”

(Dir by Danial Attias, originally aired on November 21st, 1986)

In honor Miami Vice‘s violent nature (and in recognition of the fact that it’s the holidays and I’ve got a lot of things that I need to do), I’m going to review this week’s episode bullet-point style!

The episode starts in Colombia. Babies are being kidnapped from local villages. In some cases, they’re literally snatched from the arms of their mothers. The babies are taken to Miami where a sleazy lawyer named Howard Famiglia (Tommy Koenig) essentially sells them to wealthy families.
Maria Escobar (Patrice Martinez) illegally crosses the border to search for her son in Miami. She nearly dies in the attempt. When she and a planeload of babies are discovered on a Miami runway, law enforcement gets involved.
Castillo doesn’t think that the case is one that Vice should be investigating. Gina and Trudy set him straight.
It doesn’t take long for the Vice Squad to discover that Famiglia is a baby broker. One of his customers is played by a young Stanley Tucci. The customer is willing to testify against Famiglia.
Famiglia sends his henchmen out to intimidate and kill all of the witnesses.
Famiglia also kills his main hitman and then booby traps his apartment. When Crockett and Tubbs jump out of the exploding apartment, it looked like Tubbs leg caught on fire. “Wow,” I said, “that really looked real!”
It turns that it was real. Philip Michael Thomas’s stunt double was severely burned as a result.
Eventually, the Vice Squad is able to trick Famiglia into believing that Maria is being kept at a local hospital. Famiglia sets up a meeting for women looking to adopt. While the women watch an educational film, Famiglia crawls through a ventilation shaft and tries to enter Maria’s room.
SURPRISE! That’s not Maria in that hospital bed …. it’s Gina! The Vice Squad shoots Famglia dead, leaving his corpse awkwardly hanging out of the hospital room wall. For some reason, that sight really disturbed me.
Maria is reunited with her son but, upon realizing that he now has a life and a family in America, she decides to let him stay with his new parents. She is then deported back to Colombia, where she will probably be killed by the same people who stole her baby in the first place.
Overall, this episode suffered because the villain was miscast. Looking at the imdb, the majority of Tommy Koenig’s credits appear to have been comedic. He’s an actor who looks like he should be on a sketch comedy show and not a gritty crime drama. Even when Famiglia is crawling through an air duct with a gun, he just looks goofy. Plus, considering that he had a people working for him who were willing to murder, would Famiglia really have gone to the hospital himself?
Stanley Tucci and Tommy Koenig should have switched roles.
This episode gave Trudy, Gina, Switek, and Zito more to do than usual. That was good. This show often underused its supporting cast.
Miami Vice was often a cop show with a political subtext. In this case (and I’m just pointing it out, I’m not necessarily agreeing or disagreeing), the subtext was that America’s immigration system sucked, as Maria only had a limited amount of time to find her son before being deported. But then she decided to leave him in America rather than take him back to Colombia. Miami Vice was not just political. It was also usually kind of depressing.