Let's Reboot Miami Vice!

It took some doing, but I finally convinced my wife to watch the original Miami Vice with me via Amazon’s FreeVee service. We’d just finished The Sopranos, and for as much as we enjoyed The Sopranos, I gotta say we're both enjoying Vice a good bit more. Part of that is undoubtedly down to nostalgia. My wife and I were both 80s kids. Most of it, though, comes from the vibes, which were immaculate at the time and remain unchanged even to modern eyes. I have therefore started wondering what a modern reboot of Miami Vice might look like. 

Here’s my idea.

Revisiting Miami Vice

Vice might’ve been a groundbreaking show for its time, but it existed long before what we might think of as “peak TV”. Not every episode is great, but as noted, it’s always a vibe, even when it’s little more than an extended music video. In fact, it’s at its best in some ways when the plot runs second to the setting, mood, and accompanying musical score.

Don Johnson’s Sonny Crockett got most of the buzz, but Phillip Michael Thomas’s Ricardo Tubbs actually serves as our viewpoint character through most of the early part of the series. Tubbs had been an NYPD detective on the trail of Columbian drug lord “Calderone,” and being that this is the 80s, Calderone had recently killed Tubbs’s brother, making the case personal. Tubbs pursues Calderone to Miami in an off-book investigation, has a meet-cute with Crockett, who also just had a partner killed by Calderone, and from there, we see Miami as a kind of Strange New World through the lens of an NYPD detective. 

Crockett and Tubbs team up, and the rest is history.

The strangest thing about watching any 80s show now is that all those shows are absolutely episodic, and it’s especially weird considering that Vice’s initial high concept seems much better-suited to a season-long storytelling format. Almost every episode exists as its own self-contained story because, for better or worse, weekly TV didn’t start doing season-long story arcs until the X-Files premiered nearly ten years later -- in 1993. So the guys’ pursuit of Calderone runs for a single two-hour premier episode plus another two-part, “to be continued” storyarc a few weeks later. In another era, Calderone would’ve been the Big Bad for an entire season’s worth of storytelling.

Being a product of the 80s-era “War on Drugs,” Miami Vice spends maybe half its time chasing drug dealers, another 25% of its time chasing pimps and sex traffickers, and the balance goes towards random acts of a violence that border at most tangentially on the typical subjects of a vice squad. Sally and I have just reached the first season’s penultimate episode, and the guys are chasing gun runners. No idea why a local vice squad would be after illegal guns, but whatever. So far, so good as far as the episode itself is concerned, and anyway, the vibes are impeccable as always.

Rebooting Miami Vice

I liked the show’s early focus on Tubbs. We see Miami through his eyes, and it works. He’s the one who’s more apt to fall in love in the early episodes, and he’s also the one who’s a little more apt to take cases personally. By comparison, Crockett starts as a guy who’s a hairsbreadth short of total burnout. He’s living on a boat with a freaking alligator and having an on-again-off-again affair with a woman in his office while his wife files for divorce due to the stress of his job. It would be easy to explicitly reframe his story around this kind of dead-end existence. Imagine Crockett basically about to quit on life writ-large before he meets Tubbs, whose fresh-faced enthusiasm for Miami reawakens Crockett’s own love for both the city and his job.

I mean, that’s almost subtext in the original. They just never quite leaned all the way into it.

For our reboot, we’ll base Tubbs’s character very loosely on the real life story of Army cornerback Brandon Jackson. Jackson’s mother was an NYPD detective. In our imagined reboot, Tubbs graduates from West Point (naturally), finishes his Army service, joins the NYPD, and moves up to detective before getting involved in the Calderone Affair. Events in the reboot will play out more or less the same way they do in the original, though as noted, we’ll stretch the conclusion out to run the length of the first season. Beyond that, we’ll include several of my favorite episode arcs, including “Heart of Darkness,” “No Exit,” “Smuggler's Blues,” and “Nobody Lives Forever”. 

“Heart of Darkness” is a good one because it focuses on a horrific sex trafficking ring. That’s an appropriate plot point for the modern audience and probably ought to make up about 50% of the episodes by total subject-matter. “No Exit” is good because it also involves sex trafficking as well as an FBI agent who can’t get out from his undercover role. We’ll make that agent another West Pointer, tying into our rebooted Tubbs’ background. “Smuggler’s Blues” is a classic staring Glen Frey that I wouldn’t mess with too much. 

Finally, “Nobody Lives Forever” sees Crockett fall in love with an uptown girl who can’t understand why he wants to be a cop and ultimately wants him to quit the force. We watched this episode last night, and if I'm being honest, I hated that women. However, the plotline is perfect. Again, I’d swap it for Tubbs, using his West Point backstory. By the time we’re in our 30s, every West Pointer knows a shitload of high-powered corporate types who’re all too ready to help us do whatever in the corporate world. This gives a chance to get all existential. Why does Tubbs even want to be here?

Answer: Tubbs likes the job, and he likes Miami. That’s not hard to understand unless you’re a careerist asshole, which -- alas -- many West Pointers are.

As noted, the reboot probably needs to focus about 50% on prostitution and sex trafficking, at most 25% on the drug trade given modern sensibilities, and 25% on whatever else comes out of the writers’ room. This isn't a huge switch, but it's worth noting the reality that the War on Drugs is over, and Drugs won.

The modern reboot also needs to get the modern vibes right. We probably can’t take Crockett out of his trademark white linen suits, but again, we can do something with Tubbs. I also don’t know what the music should be, but man, figuring that out would be half the fun of working on this project.

I Googled "Miami Style Men" and found this glorious look.

Anyway, that’s the bones of the idea. What do you think?