Keeping with the Michael Mann theme, I took a trip down memory lane yesterday. One night in the early days of 1985, I watched an episode of "Miami Vice" in the den. I'm thinking I was on the floor, leaning against the coffee table, my preferred position, while my dad was sitting in his chair, reading a mystery novel. My dad never just watched TV.
The episode was about two young, naive guys who fly into Miami to do one deal, make it rich. Crockett and Tubbs bust them, then use them as bait to get the bigger dealers. Things go south, but the cops protect them. Then (spoiler alert), in the last minutes of the episode, the more innocent of the two kids ... gets shot and killed in the airport going home.
This blew me away. It's the first time I can remember that a story didn't end on a happy note. And that one of the most sympathetic characters is the one who pays, which is not only the opposite of the morals we're taught in most of our stories, it was very rare on television at the time. I was just sitting there trying to absorb it.
So I'm a couple weeks before my 12th birthday when this is on, slackjawed, and my dad has looked up from his mystery novel, realizing where this episode is going. And he lets it finish, but then he says, "I don't want you watching this show anymore." That it had a relentlessly depressing worldview. He's a man of his word, I think I miss most of the early part of the series, though by the time I'm a teenager, it's back on.
Hulu.com is a great site. I found the episode yesterday, it's called "The Milk Run." I'm amused to see it's Evan Handler (with hair!) playing one of the kids and even more hilariously, it's Eric Bogosian as one of the drug dealers. But it still holds up, at least in the sense that I still want the kid to get away. And he doesn't.
I can't make the online version of this bigger, unfortunately, but if you could, you'd see the bottom of the page says "by Eric Torbenson" and "by Mayrav Saar." Yes, it's the Big Action edition of The Post.
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