THE 1980S COP DRAMA ‘TAPPED INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE TIMES,’ AS EVIDENCED BY THE DEBUT EPISODE’S HANDWRITTEN FIRST DRAFT
By Robert Wilonsky
Miami Vice turned 40 years old in 2024, yet it looks like it could have debuted the day after tomorrow. No television show looked like Miami Vice when its two-hour pilot, “Brother’s Keeper,” debuted on September 16, 1984. But every show that followed owes a debt, if not its very existence, to the series that was “pulp but full of ideas, often gorgeous, rarely dull and hugely influential,” as critic David Thomson wrote in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film.
To celebrate the series’ milestone anniversary, Heritage presents creator Anthony Yerkovich’s first draft of the pilot – more than 180 handwritten pages on yellow legal paper. As critic Matt Zoller Seitz pointed out in his recent love letter to the landmark pilot, the late NBC executive Brandon Tartikoff never handed Yerkovich a napkin upon which he’d suggested a show about “MTV cops”; it was just a tall tale circulated by the media until it hardened into legend. As this draft reveals, the show’s pairing of former football hero-turned-undercover cop Sonny Crockett with New York City detective Ricardo Tubbs was almost there, fully formed, when Yerkovich first put ballpoint to paper.
Anthony Yerkovich’s handwritten manuscript for the 1984 pilot episode of ‘Miami Vice’ is available in Heritage’s December 7 Hollywood/Entertainment Signature® Auction.
“The 97-minute Miami Vice pilot (two hours with ad breaks) aired on commercial TV but felt like it should’ve been in a theater,” Seitz wrote for Vulture. “It was a shimmering postmodern neo-noir in the vein of movies like Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo, [Miami Vice executive producer Michael] Mann’s Thief, and Brian De Palma’s Miami-based remake of Scarface (to which Vice would often be compared). … Another element in the mix was MTV, which debuted in 1981 and normalized a music-video aesthetic that was more about highlights and moments than literary concepts of conventional storytelling.”
This document, the genesis of not merely one show but every one that came after it, is so gripping that even just reading it, one can hear Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight” buzzing in the background as Crockett guides his Ferrari Daytona through Bal Harbour.
Below, Yerkovich discusses the genesis of Vice – and everything that came after.
The founding document of ‘Miami Vice’ stretches across more than 180 handwritten pages.
Robert Wilonsky: To be able to hold this document is extraordinary because it takes me back to a time when Miami Vice didn’t exist outside of your head, your pen and your paper. As you think about it, as we approach this auction on the show’s 40th anniversary, what does that stack of papers mean to you now?
Anthony Yerkovich: I have some understandably bittersweet feelings about this manuscript, which has been so important to me and a meaningful part of my professional life. But I feel really good that someone else who’s possibly – and hopefully – a big Miami Vice fan will have it for themselves. Everything I’ve written in my professional writing career has been on paper. I’m very old school in that regard. I just like the feel of it.
RW: You were writing Hill Street Blues when you conceived the series. At what point did you sit down with that legal pad and say, “I now know what I’m going to write?” Because you’d done so much research about Miami, its crime rate, its population at that point. There’s an enormous backstory that goes into all of this. So, how do you know you’re ready to write?
AY: Around 1982, I was working as a good soldier on Hill Street Blues as a writer and producer, locked in an office, cranking out scripts. We were doing 22 episodes a season, believe it or not, back then. It was backbreaking. I was taking a two-minute lunch break. I grabbed some newspaper in the reception area, and this article in The Wall Street Journal was about Dade County, Florida, and how 20 percent of the unreported income in the United States hailed from Dade County, Florida. What’s unreported income? It’s all the money that criminals don’t want the feds to see from drug trafficking, from prostitution, from gambling, from all sorts of illegal enterprises.
Now, if you’re a television writer and lucky enough to get a go-ahead on a series and a renewal, you’ve got to crank out 22 episodes a season. So you’re looking for a sphere with a lot of activity. That’s why there are a lot of law enforcement-related shows and hospital shows. There’s a lot of action.
Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, seen here in the premiere episode of ‘Miami Vice,’ played Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs, the fashionable lead characters in Yerkovich’s groundbreaking series.
RW: MTV obviously played a part in this, too. But talk about how you decided Crockett and Tubbs would become, as you like to say, our tour guides “through this labyrinth of criminal landscape.”
AY: I came up with Sonny Crockett because I wanted a local guy who knew the topography and that the audience could hopefully relate to. He is playing a criminal for most of his on-screen life and most of his professional work. And so I wanted somebody that the audience could relate to and that the audience hopefully would like.
Then I wanted to have another protagonist he could have conversations with, who would help educate the audience or help clue them into what they’re thinking and what’s going on. I wanted to have a protagonist who was different than him, had a different outlook on life, and was from a different world. So I came up with Ricardo Tubbs, who was from New York. So you’ve got a Florida good ol’ boy and a slick, Hugo Boss-wearing, half-Black, half-Latin guy from New York. So I put those together. I said, “OK, now I got something going on.”
I outline everything pretty thoroughly before I can build up the confidence and, if you will, the courage to start writing. When I got to that point, then I wrote this manuscript.
Johnson and Yerkovich circa 1987, when ‘Miami Vice’ was in its fourth season.
RW: Sopranos creator David Chase once said Miami Vice was the first television show in history that cared about how it looked. You can’t know how that vision will be realized when writing this document. Yet it’s all there in these yellow legal pad pages.
AY: The cool thing about this manuscript is it’s a work in progress, and whoever reads through it can see that there are also scenes in there that aren’t in the two-hour pilot because we had to cut them for reasons of economy or production practicality. It’s really cool when you get to sort of enter the realm of filmmaking and see what’s going on from the inside.
This draft captures the feeling and the ambience and the characters and the plot and the topography and the cityscape and all the action. I want whoever sees this to know that there’s also some extra stuff in there, and from a writer’s perspective, there are some interesting elements that have to do with a work in progress.
RW: What was your reaction when you saw the finished pilot for the first time?
AY: When I saw it all put together, I thought, “This could make a big splash. This could be a huge hit, and I think it should be.” But you never know that as a writer, as a filmmaker. You don’t know how the audience is going to react. And we’ve all been on both sides of that equation. Sometimes we’re pleasantly surprised by the audience’s appreciation of something. Sometimes we’re surprised and disappointed if they don’t like it.
After the two-hour pilot aired, I heard from a lot of friends and colleagues. Then, I felt very confident that it would be a big, big hit. And, of course, it wasn’t a big, big hit in the first few months. It aired on Friday nights, opposite Dallas and Falcon Crest. It wasn’t until the summer reruns that it kicked into the audience’s imagination.
Author Hunter S. Thompson with Yerkovich circa 1990. “Hunter once told me that ‘Miami Vice’ was his favorite television show of all time,” Yerkovich says of his late friend.
RW: I guess summer was the perfect time for a show about guys who were really sweaty in Miami to take off. But it’s one thing to have a hit. It’s another thing to be a cultural and artistic phenomenon whose tentacles are so far-reaching.
AY: There are several factors that contribute to that, which are totally outside of one’s control – the economy, the politics at the time, the fashion (or lack of it) at the time, the musical landscape, and the technological landscape. All those are not obviously under our control, and they all contribute. You could say that’s part of the zeitgeist, right? That’s an often-used term, but it applies in this case. Miami Vice tapped into the spirit of the times. And that Phil Collins song, “In the Air Tonight,” just based on the show, went from being outside the Billboard Top 100 into the stratosphere.
One could also confidently argue that the renaissance and rebirth of Miami is due nearly entirely to the launch of Miami Vice in this manuscript. It is simply the manuscript that launched the TV series that launched the rebirth of Miami. So I think that’s pretty cool.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ROBERT WILONSKY is a staff writer at Intelligent Collector.