MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

By: Tom Nealon
March 8, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating favorite TV shows from the Eighties (1984–1993). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

MIAMI VICE | 1984–1989

When I was in middle school in suburban NY, I took ballroom dancing on Friday evenings. This was an emotionally scarring sop to my parents’ parents’ ideas of social mobility and the necessary skills for adulthood. Lessons were given at an Episcopalian church, although we dancers were mostly Jewish and Catholic. We sat in chairs on either side of the “ballroom” floor, wearing formal attire. It was unadulterated 13-year-old nightmare material. After, my parents would take me to Carvel.

When Miami Vice began airing — on Friday evenings, right after ballroom dancing, it changed everything. Inside that Episcopalian church we may have been stuck in the ’50s, but the ’80s were happening right afterwards… and they were moody and violent, sexy and dangerous. Why didn’t we have Jai Alai, cocaine, and cigarette boats? Was there any way to roll up the sleeves on our worsted wool blue blazers with gold buttons? Suddenly my peers and I didn’t want to go to Carvel, for fear of missing even a moment of the show’s opening sequence. We had found a perfect and immediate remedy to ballroom dancing — one that was better than Fudgie the Whale, better than Fantasy Island, and almost as good, we supposed, as cocaine.

Now, of course, everything is a vibe, a mood, a gesture, a series of distractions from the distraction, but back then this sort of thing was completely new. Some of the more outlandish conceits demanded explaining. Because they were the Miami vice squad, they had an endless supply of seized boats, cars, homes, cash, cocaine, guns, clothes, that they could use to outfit themselves in appropriate style. Sonny, Don Johnson’s character, lives on a sailing yacht, wears hand-tailored suits, a Rolex, and he has an alligator… who used to be the mascot at UF… where he’d been a wide receiver. Like us ballroom dancers, Miami had basically just emerged from mid-century. How was anyone to know what it was actually like there?

Hill St. Blues and St. Elsewhere had just started their runs blending nighttime soaps with the excitement of hospitals and police departments in a way that we still haven’t recovered from. Miami Vice, by contrast, offered a neon world where the stakes were higher — maybe the highest — but also sort of non-existent because the characters were vibrant, beautiful, terrible simulacra of real people. You could root for them, but did you feel what they felt? Impossible — it would have been like emotionally identifying with a character in a medieval morality play. Everyone was in love with Sonny Crocket’s charming brokenness, or the cool exterior, dead eyes, and sawed-off shotgun of Philip Michael Thomas’ Ricardo Tubbs. But if there was an avatar for my own detachment, it was Edward James Olmos’ Lt. Castillo. A gravelly, inscrutable man, if he had any feelings, he’d done with them what a 13-year-old boy like me wanted to do with my own: He’d put them in a bag filled with cash and cocaine and thrown them off Venetian Causeway.

I learned a lesson from Castillo. And if those dopes at ballroom dancing had had the sense to explain to us that the cha-cha was Cuban, I might have learned that too.

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MORE ENTHUSIASM at HILOBROW

MacGYVER YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

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