Contempt of Court

After sitting through an unimpressive 3rd season, I was worried about season 4. From what I had read going into it, critics and fans seemed to agree the show peaked in season's 1 & 2 and season's 4 & 5 were where things went bad.

I'll admit, season one was damn good. Aside from the tone being a bit too light at times and the miscasting of the first Lt. (Gregory Sierra), the show really hit its stride by the second half. I expected season 2 to pick up on the momentum, but instead it stalled and didn't get going until the second half. Season 3 was an incongruous mix of good and terrible episodes that ended on a high note with the final episode "heroes of the revolution."

The opening episode of season 4 could arguably be the best episode of MV so far. Make no mistake though, this isn't the same music video, style driven MV that made the series popular. Perhaps this departure in style and tone is the reason the ratings took a huge decline, but if so, it's truly a shame that audiences weren't willing to adapt to the new direction. If this episode is any indication of things to come, a lot more is going to be brought to the table than just a great soundtrack and cool b-roll of flashy cars driving around neon soaked Miami.

The biggest relief for me is to see the demise of the cheap looking studio sets in favor of great on-site (read: real) locations. The writing & directing too have evolved, substituting corny melodrama and silly shootouts for grittier and far more realistic plot lines and character arcs. Unless I'm mistaken, no one in this episode gets shot to death, an overused plot device that had become a tired cliché by the end of season 3.

In "Contempt of Court" Stanley Tucci is center stage as the mobster Frank Mosca, the man the vice squad and the DA are determined to put away for a long time. Even though Tucci hams up his mob boss performance, his character is written with enough skill that Mosca's actions are elevated above being laughably implausible...much more than can be said of other bosses in previous seasons (ie. Leguizamo's Calderon).

If this episode is an indication of things to come, Season 4 should be a treat. We shall see.

"Contempt of Court" for me was a disappointment. It was a harbinger of things to come in season 4, in that it became increasingly apparent that Miami Vice had been burning the candle at both ends and was just getting tired of itself.

A large portion of this episode simply deals with tedious courtroom procedural. All the things that had made Miami Vice great and a pop culture and critics darling were merely glimpsed at, and viewers were made to sit through many minutes of courtroom talk that rarely felt this much out of place on the show that was Miami Vice.

It is said that this episode was chosen as the season opener to start the season with a bang, since Crockett is sent to jail for not giving up an informant. Well, that was an intriguing premise the first time around in "Give a little, take a little" in season one, but it says a lot that the best shot they felt they had at drawing in viewers was a recycled season one story line.

Season three was a slight disappointment in that the lighter tone of seasons 1 and 2 was given up in favor of endlessly brooding, nihilistic story lines that spent more time offering social commentary than staying true to Vice's original premise. On the other hand, storytelling wise, it featured some of the greatest moments of TV film noir in the entire series.

But season 4 was when Miami Vice didn't just jump the shark, but as somebody has said, was also doing back flips and singing show tunes while doing it. Very probably, the producers would have just had to continue the winning formula of seasons 1 and 2 and perpetuate and evolve it very carefully, without most of the radical changes that this TV series saw repeatedly during its five-year run. But Instead, season three first of all alienated viewers who had been tuning in for the gorgeous light pastels and the portrayal of easy criminal living in the Sunshine State, and then season four came along and made it worse by sometimes appallingly poor storytelling, and story lines that would have been too daft even for the campest of its TV crime drama contemporaries. Miami Vice by that point had become a self-caricature of its own former glory, a flaky and incoherent pastiche of elements of its former popular success.

My verdict is: Don't watch "Contempt of Court". Don't watch season four at all, or anything that came after it. Watch the first two seasons for their captivating vibe and gripping story lines, and a careful selection of season three episodes to witness the zenith of Miami noir. That will still leave you with a body of some 50 very watchable episodes, without staring into the abyss of burnout and hapless self-reference that was Miami Vice's latter two seasons.

An unusually sleepy kickoff to a new season, 'Contempt of Court' rides on its guest stars (Meg Foster, Philip Baker Hall) and a memorable villain in Stanley Tucci, perfectly at home as a slimy mafioso. If there's a positive take-away here, it's him. Certainly not the story, the hook being Sonny held in contempt for not naming his witness . . . which has already been done, way back in the first season. Outside of that, this is a dull courtroom drama that's more "Law and Order" than "Miami Vice".

Now *that* is a crime.

5/10

Seasons 1-2 were essence of vice. Art deco style, solid police work. Essence of the series.

Season 3 was darker, gritter vice.

Overall, seasons 1-3 had good and worse episodes. But their level was pretty much balanced, there were not very bad episodes during these years.

But since season 4 things started to downfall down the slope.

Story scrips are unimpressve. Characters lack chemistry. Acting looks forced. Some episodes looks like more X-files than real world police work.

Crockett grew lion lion hair and Tubbs grew beard, I don't know who advised that but it looks terrible.

Jan Hammer watched it and sensed what's going on in S4 and departed from the show, and rightfully so. He wouldn't have liked to compose his great tunes to bad acting and bad script.

I really preferred if MV ended after season 3.

This way the series would have cult and iconic status today, easily with 9/10 rating. But it doesn't.

When I rewatch MV I almost always play first three seasons only. Coincidence?