Don’t get upset if you do not see somebody who played a part. The list of people who participated in Miami vice is HUGE and a good part of them went on to have memorable careers.
Top of my head, I have fond memories of two who went on to be very famous. The first is Ed O’Neil who gave in the first season of the series, gave an amazing performance in the episode “Heart of Darkness” where he played an undercover FBI agent teetering between going rogue and staying the course. I never saw the end coming as for the day it was shocking as hell, but then Miami Vice changed a lot of the way co shows were written.
The other actor is Bruce Willis in the episode “No Exit” where he played a gun dealer who was abusing his wife and acting like a total scumbag and I mean somebody who you would shoot without thinking much. His acting was so good at being so bad that my wife had blocked him in that episode from her memory and she is a total Bruce Willis fan. She ate all the episodes of the series Moonlighting that came right after Miami Vice and watched every Bruce Willis film. It was not till we got the DVD set and I knowingly played that episode that she realized that the character she hated the most in Miami Vice was played by her favorite actor. It also tells you about the change of the TV bad guys dynamics when a show had a bad guy with zero redeeming values and the audience wanted popped or worse.
You may want to spend your lunch break perusing the list and go “Hey! I don’t remember him/her in the show!”
(PS: I am watching Hill Street Blues again and they also have a decent roster of actors who went on to be great and/or famous. Not as huge as Miami Vice, but entertaining)
Never saw it when it originally aired. Tried watching it last year online but couldn’t make it past season 1. Might be worth another try and play the “hey, I recognize that guy/gal” game.
A lot of stuff you see in Miami Vice has now been used and abused by other shows afterward.
You have to look it from that point of view, Guns alone, prior to Miami Vic you would see a 1911, a &W Model 10 revolver, a snubbie and the bad guys carried Lugers or Walther P08 besides revolvers. Long Guns? M1, maybe an M16 if there was a SWAT involved and a Tommy gun.
Miami Vice introduced what was the lastest in firearms at the time. Crocket’s gun was a 10mm and you could not go any fresher at the time since IIRC the round was not even a year old in production.
Well, the A-Team and their opponents relied on Mini-14s.
One of the very few exceptions and I will make the case that looking like a shrink version of an M1 helped it make it to the screen.
A similar “who’s who” guest star list comes with the “Gunsmoke” series. Granted, it ran for 20 years, but lots of surprising names in their cast list.
I occasionally catch reruns of “Gunsmoke” and say to myself, wow that’s a (very) young Charles Bronson, or other well known star. Same thing with the original “Perry Mason”.
Emo Phillips guest appearance was memorable sinsi it culminated in a character shooting a TV Elvis style.