Stephen G. Anthony | 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, Crockett and Tubbs — or is it Burnett and Cooper? — enter the art world.

Episode 5.14 “The Lost Madonna”

(Dir by Chip Chalmers, originally aired on March 17th, 1989)

When Crockett and Tubbs take down what they think is a drug deal, they’re shocked to discover that Stanley Costa (Stephen G. Anthony) was actually smuggling two paintings! They could always ask Stanley what’s going on but — whoops! They killed him during the show’s precredit sequence.

Detective Whitehead (Michael Chiklis) comes down from New York City and explains that the two paintings are the side pieces for a triptych called The Last Madonna. It was recently stolen from a Paris museum and Whitehead is convinced that theft was masterminded by Joey Scianti (Peter Dobson).

It’s time for Tubbs and Crockett to — *sigh* — go undercover. Why they’re still always going undercover, I have never really understood. Every time they go undercover, their cover gets blown. Do the members of the Miami underworld just not communicate with each other? Shouldn’t everyone know, by this point, that Tubbs and Crockett are cops? In this case, Tubbs goes undercover as someone who appreciates art. Crockett goes undercover as the crude Sonny Burnett….

Yes, Crockett is still using the Burnett cover. He’s doing this despite the fact that he just recently had a mental breakdown that led to him not only thinking that he actually was Burnett but also becoming Miami’s biggest drug lord. Even if the Scianti family was dumb enough to not know that Crockett was a cop, surely they would have heard enough about drug lord Sonny Burnett to wonder why he would be hanging out with a connoisseur of fine art.

(Indeed, it’s hard not to notice that everyone has apparently moved on rather quickly from Sonny’s mental breakdown and his time as a drug lord. For that matter, Sonny certainly doesn’t seem to ever give much thought to his dead second wife. Remember her? The world-famous singer who was literally gunned down in front of him? She appears to have been forgotten.)

This episode was dull, largely because the Scianti family was never really a credible threat. They came across as being a bunch of buffoons and, as such, it was hard to really get that concerned about whether or not they would figure out that Crockett and Tubbs were actually cops. This is another episode that features a twist that you’ll see coming from miles away. From the minute Michael Chiklis first showed up, I knew that he was eventually going to try to steal the The Lost Madonna for himself.

Considering that there was a lot of humor in this episode (Crockett, not surprisingly, struggled with understanding modern art), there’s also some surprisingly graphic violence. Crockett and Tubbs gun down Stanley Costa and blood splatters all over the wall. Whitehead shoots Joey Scianti and the shocked Joey looks down at his wound and says that it’s “real blood.” Tonally, this episode is all over the place.

Everyone seemed kind of bored with this episode. This was definitely a final season entry.

This week, it’s the most infamous episode of Miami Vice ever!

Episode 4.7 “Missing Hours”

(Dir by Ate De Jong, originally aired on November 13th, 1987)

This is an episode that I had been waiting for years to see. From the moment I decided to review Miami Vice, I started to read about and hear about this seventh episode of the four season. This was the episode was supposedly so bad that many people consider it to be the point that Miami Vice “jumped the shark.” This is the episode were James Brown plays a white-suited singer named Lou de Long, who has going from performing songs to giving lectures about UFOs. (James Brown is essentially playing himself, right down to the presence of I Feel Good on the soundtrack.) This is the episode where Trudy disappears for 12 hours and then returns with no firm memories of where she was. This is the episode where even Crockett and Tubbs see a UFO. Even though his appearance here does not receive as much attention as much a James Brown’s, Chris Rock made his television debut as a nerdy technician named Carson who was into UFOs. Carson mentions getting his information for “computer bulleting boards” and everyone looks at him as if he’s speaking Esperanto.

This is the episode that is frequently cited as being the worst in Miami Vice history and really, who am I to disagree?

It pains me to say that. I really wanted to like this episode, just because it is so strange and and I’ve always been a bit of a contrarian at heart but …. no, this episode really doesn’t work. The sad truth of the matter is that, for all of his other talents, James Brown was a lousy actor and, with the exception of Michael Talbott and Philip Michael Thomas (who both appear to be having fun), the regular cast gives performance that suggest they all knew this episode was a bad idea. Miami Vice was at its best when it was a cynical and downbeat show about the futility of the war on drugs. There’s really no reason for Miami Vice to ever do a science fiction-themed episode. Somehow, this is the second such episode to air during the fourth season.

Of course, the episode’s most unforgivable sin is that it ends with Trudy waking up in bed. Not only is that ending a cop out but it’s also pretty rude to anyone who was actually trying to follow the plot or who was actually worried about whether or not Trudy had been brainwashed by the aliens. Perhaps if this had been a Halloween episode, all of this could have been excused but apparently, this episode aired in the middle of November.

Poor Trudy. Seriously, Olivia Brown didn’t really get many episode built around her character. It’s a shame that, when they gave her one, it was this one. Next week on Miami Vice, who knows? I’m on vacation. We’ll see what happens!