On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television STYLISH VIOLENCE BY MARVIN KITMAN This past summer was Miami Vice. Oddly enough, I discovered that NBC was doing the reruns on my local WNBC-TV news program, Live at Five. Every...
...jl n these circumstances, it will hardly come as a surprise that I could not keep Miami Vice from my thoughts as I started picking through tapes of the new fall shows which have been arriving...
...But some viewers have told me it is not any of these innovations that excites them...
...What do you think your friends are doing...
...Hollywood Beat (Saturday, 8 p .m .) is i ts especially bad imitation, with a contemporary rock beat and horizontal, vertical and circular car wrecks...
...And those white linen pants...
...Insiders should be renamed Hollywood Lice...
...Flip Wilson and his mustache star in CBS' black copy of The Cosby Show, called Charlie <fe Company (Wednesday, 9 p.m...
...My children agree with me...
...There is nothing more rewarding than passing off network commercials as news...
...My wife thinks either the Miami Police Department (MPD) is given a high clothing allowance, or they run a prison dry cleaning establishment in the basement...
...In fact, Ibegan to encounter hints of Miami Vice everywhere I went...
...I don't want to know what people on detective shows are saying...
...The same network will offer us the Insiders (Wednesday, 8 p.m...
...Crockett and Tubbs are both well-portrayed...
...Another nice aspect of Miami is its lack of dialogue...
...He started listing all their prescriptions...
...No earth tones...
...There is a personal side to my interest in Miami Vice...
...How else could they dress so fashionably at today's prices...
...Better to listen to the explosions...
...ABC, demonstrating why it is solidly entrenched in last place, leads this field...
...I watched it to see if any of my Florida relatives were selling smack...
...Each network has more Cos-by-type shows waiting in the wings, proving that success transcends color lines...
...NBC is reviving Alfred Hitchcock Presents (Sunday, 8 :30p.m...
...at least it can't be worse than the movie...
...The Panama hats and loud Hawaiian shirts that appear in the show remind me of the way Harry Truman and his Cabinet members dressed in the 1940s...
...And Lieutenant Castillo (Edward James Olmos), the boss of Ihe MPD narcotics bureau, is superb...
...Corgard...
...All you see are punk colors, Miami colors: lime green, cocaine lemon, drug-dealer orange, peach, melon—the washed-out hues I've always hated...
...I think Olmos will go down as one of the great actors in the annals of TV police lieutenants, right alongside Daniel J. Travanti of Hill Street Blues...
...Ommm....'" They realize it is the pastel shades that account for the special look of this series...
...The Twilight Zone is being resurrected at CBS (Friday, 8 p.m...
...You have to admire his diet, the way he eats everything that isn't tied down...
...I'll have more to say about these anthologies when I have had a chance to view further episodes...
...On Good Morning America, you can barely distinguish between the heavily earth-toned set and David Hart man, the only morning news anchorman on a life support system...
...Everybody was tuned in...
...It was covered more frequently and thoroughly than the President's Star Wars "ultimate defense weapon" and tax reform proposal combined...
...Drugs...
...Ommm...
...Anything he wants...
...Obviously these guys are all on the take...
...Next, of course, the networks are trying to duplicate Bill Cosby's blockbuster...
...The rest of the hour curiously coiffured sportscaster Mary Albert talked to other practitioners of his art who bring us NBC Sports events...
...It must be a Zen concept...
...Every week, it seemed, someone from the series was being interviewed...
...and will weigh in as well with Steven Spielberg's/ Amazing Stories (Sunday, 8 p.m...
...What accounts for the phenomenon...
...They are drawn to the show, they say, by the bodies of the principal characters, Detective Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) and Detective Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas...
...I am still amazed at how such clothes have become popular...
...The grandson rolled his eyes...
...My friends can't even walk or drive," Gramps said...
...What is it...
...They're all pushers...
...Nothing," he said...
...I'm not too well-informed about drug dealing or usage, so I tend to miss a lot—just as I generally miss the nuances of an Ingmar Bergman film, since I don't know Swedish...
...I recall thinking at the time...
...Pushers...
...The show even made the cover of Time, among other magazines...
...But during the summer, having come in from the country (New Jersey) to dine one night at a fancy restaurant on Tofutti Avenue (as the cognoscenti call Manhattan's Columbus Avenue), I noticed that many people in the restaurant were dressed in $800 pastel Armani silk suits and $7 T-shirts...
...If it is not great drama, it certainly is on the cutting edge of fashion...
...Kitman's law reads: There's no hurry...
...Then you have to take into account the $125,000 Daytona Ferrari Crockett drives around town, and the $ 150,000 sailboat he lives on...
...And all because of a TV show...
...After I first previewed Miami Vice last fall, I never suspected it would have such an enormous cultural impact on the nation...
...When the characters do say something, you usually can't hear them because the state-of-the-art handheld audio equipment that was used picked up all the sounds of street violence...
...What is it—smack, horse, flesh...
...The music is also different: The show has hit rock songs playing in the background, instead of the usual boring bongo soundtracks...
...Penney that undercover cops used to wear...
...In one scene a Mustang is actually machine-gunned to death...
...I never saw lawmen wearing peach Giorgio Armani suits with putrid green T-shirts...
...Whatever happened to the polyester Haggar slacks from J.C...
...But the interviews with the stars, directors, chief gaffer, and best boys of the series as they happened to be passing through town for one reason or another never took up more than half the show...
...Where I can hear the characters clearly, I still have trouble understanding what is going on...
...Many people claim Miami Vice is so successful because of its low camera angles...
...And in Miami things seem to blow up as regularly as a third-place network executive's temper...
...A few major trends are apparent...
...There are none of the reds, browns, blues, and mahoganies that make everything appear to blend together...
...the poor old man said...
...Besides, I'm still trying to figure out what Miami Vice is all about...
...You find those in Mac Gruder & Loud, or in family sitcoms where everyone cooks underneath cheap kitchen cabinets...
...Everyone knows drug dealers travel in chauffeured limos...
...A second CBS entry in this category will be the George Burns Comedy Week (Wednesday, 9:30 p.m...
...He adds comic relief to the proceedings...
...The grandchildren smiled at that...
...Finally, there is a resurgence of TV anthologies...
...First, there are the Miami Vice imitations...
...They know what's important on Live at Five...
...Alan Thicke stars in ABC's white copy, Growing Pains (Tuesday, 8:30p.m...
...You never really know how bad a show is until you've seen a few installments...
...Not since Hemingway in his Paris years has fiction so affected the life-styles of the young...
...When my father came up from Florida for his great-grandson's brith a few weeks ago, one of his grandsons asked, "Gramps, what do you do down there...
...No earth tones...
...They shoot it from sewers, the avant-garde critics have pointed out, and their use of secret scissors for editing results in uniquely elliptical cuts...
...Vice virtually became a regular early evening feature, like the weather...
...His pet alligator, Elvis, can't be too cheap to feed these days, either...
...The place was full of would-be Crocketts and Tubbs, all looking sinister in their shades as they waited for dinner...
...Forme, clothing is one of the main attractions of Miami Vice...
...He and his wife rank next to Roosevelt Hospital in the drug market...
...To be fair, I though, I have to admit that interest in Vice was high all summer...
...We know you' re dealing in something...
...I like Elvis...
...No doubt the disciples of Miami Vice have their own mantra...
...A few weeks later I was struck by a similar scene on Fire Island...
...Is there any new series this season that will last beyond its first commercial break...
...When a professional viewer and major cultural force like me watches reruns, that's about as "everybody" as you can get...
...nitroglycerin...
...I'm convinced that thanks to the series dope dealing has replaced shuffle-board and finding the best price for prune juice as the state's leading outdoor sport...
...Sure, we know you're into drugs...
...Vice is as inspiring for today's rebels as The Sun Also Rises was for expatriates back then...
...a drama about two investigative reporters—Crockett and Tubbs look-alikes—who work for a supermarket journal that makes the National Enquirer seem like Foreign Affairs...
...The first few weeks he ate alarm clocks, evidence from an LSD case, and Crockett's Buddy Holly record collection...
...His own network...
...Twenty new series are being launched by the three commercial networks, starting with NBC's Hell Town this month and ending with ABC's Dynasty II: The Colbys in November...
...The cost of cleaning their suits alone has to be prohibitive...
...There was no escaping it: My father had become the biggest criminal this side of the Everglades...
...Elvis could have his own show as far as I'm concerned...
...I heard Miami Vice producer Michael Mann explain his formula during one of the interviews...
...No earth tones," he said...
...What threads...
...This is one more reason why I like the show: I'm always being surprised by the plot...
...There are more tapes in my house than there is snow in Alaska (and I don't mean cocaine...
Vol. 68 • September 1985 • No. 11
