Seth Steiger | 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 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!

This week, Sonny and Rico somehow still manage to work undercover.

Episode 2.7 “Junk Love”

(Dir by Michael O’Herlihy, originally aired on November 8th, 1985)

“What’s a four letter word for dirt?” Switek asks, while on a stakeout.

“Mud,” Zito offers before correcting himself, “I mean …. sand!”

However, according to Switek, the correct answer is Vice!

And indeed, there’s a lot of dirt to be found in this week’s rather sordid episode of Miami Vice. A raid on a brothel leads the Vice Squad to arrest a notorious smuggler and pimp named Ivory Jones (legendary Jazz musician, Miles Davis) and one of Ivory’s girls, a strung-out junkie named Rosella (Ely Pouget). When they find out that Rosella is apparently the girlfriend of a notorious dealer named Juan Carlos Silva (Jose Perez), they decide to use her and Ivory to take Silva down. While Tubbs is convinced that Rosella will say anything get her next fix, Crockett is convinced that Rosella is someone who truly wants to change her life. Hmmm …. isn’t Crockett usually the cynical one?

Silva is sexually obsessed with Rosella, to the extent that he’ll even kill the members of his own organization if he thinks they’re interested in her. The episode’s twist comes towards the end, when Gina does some research and discovers that Silva is not only Rosella’s lover but also her …. ick! …. father! Ewwwww! As with so many episodes of Miami Vice, Junk Love ends with Sonny watching helplessly as a victimized woman throws away her freedom so that she can shoot her tormenter. Miami Vice was a show that always managed to be downbeat, even when the bad guys met a deserved end.

This episode felt like an attempt to recreate the emotional drama of the season one episode that featured Bruce Willis as an arms dealer with an abused wife. Both episodes even feature the same basic ending, just with the setting moved from the courthouse steps to a yacht. Unfortunately, this episode doesn’t work anywhere half as well as any of the episodes that aired during the first season. Jose Perez may be playing an evil character but he simply does not have an intimidating enough screen presence to be convincing in the role. Miles Davis, meanwhile, delivers his lines convincingly enough but his character disappears in such a way that it almost feels as if he left the set before all of his scenes were filmed.

The main thing that I found myself thinking about, as I watched this episode, was how could Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs still convincingly go undercover after two years of busting drug kingpin after drug kingpin. You would think the entire Miami underworld would be on the lookout for them. Instead, Sonny is still somehow convincing everyone that he’s actually “Sonny Burnett,” aspiring drug dealer. I’m starting to think the criminals in Miami might not be that smart.