TEASER - 140: Miami Vice: The Glamorous Life (with Sean Armstrong)

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The Miami Vice sidebar series continues with returning guest Sean Armstrong, a Toronto-based veteran boom operator for film and television (Star Trek: Discovery, Hannibal)

For this episode we discuss the influence Vice had on the city of Miami itself, how the city conformed to the image the program had of it, which had implications for tourism and Miami as a major production hub for film and television.

But we also talk about how the program was eventually a victim of its success, and the aspirational tones of the series degraded over the course of five years as the drug war accelerated, the creatives left and popularity waned, with the show finally chasing after trends where once it set them.

We sample episodes throughout the series to illustrate this, from Abel Ferrara’s season 1 episode The Home Invaders(which has major elements Michael Mann would later return to in Heat and the upcoming Heat 2) to mid-series episodes about miscarriages of justice and the paranoid world of surveillance and counter-surveillance, and what the show looked like in its final days (including one of the worst episodes of the series, a backdoor pilot for a potential ripoff of 21 Jump Street).

Follow Sean Armstrong on Twitter.

Episodes discussed on this show:

The Home Invaders - Season 1, Ep 20

Forgive Us Our Debts - Season 3, Ep 11

Lend Me An Ear - Season 3, Ep 18

Leap of Faith - Season 5, Ep 20

Music video for Sheila E.’s The Glamorous Life, 1984

The classic NBC Miami Vice promo, 1987