Miami Vice - The Best Television Of My Life

Now that Sonny Crockett had himself some powerful ennui. Who ever thought that a post-it note with the words MTV Cops on it would spurn another pop culture explosion. I so remember the night this show premiered and how watching the pilot thrilled me while breaking my heart.

Because of the outrageous cost of combining popular music with dramatic television you almost never saw the combination. However, in the Age of Video, the team-up was unavoidable and was a huge selling point for this series. It succeeded spectacularly and became the norm but people forget what a risk this was at the time because it drove up the cost of production. The drama is so much stronger with the great song by Phil Collins powering the emotion and that feeling is what I remember most about this great television moment.

Don Johnson gets the time and the character and the swagger completely right and Phillip Michael Thomas just gives him the Caribbean credibility this series needed to survive and set it set apart from the pack. It set a vivid tale of the Miami drug scene in the 1980s that pushed the limits of network television. I can only imagine what it would look like today if one of the cable networks like HBO or AMC had the property. I suspect it would be much like Scarface with scenes of chainsaw executions and Colombian neckties.

Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as James "Sonny" Crockett and Ricardo "Rico" Tubbs