My faith in Vice restored

After a depress­ing­ly slow, awk­ward­ly-paced, and poor­ly writ­ten and act­ed pilot episode (which yosemite­sam and dra­cun­cu­lus were wit­ness to a cou­ple weeks back), where the stylee MTV cars-and-music for­mu­la did­n’t kick in until ten min­utes before the end of a two-hour episode, I final­ly forced myself to watch the first reg­u­lar episode of Mia­mi Vice, Heart of Darkness

This is still bad cop TV, but now I feel I can chalk it up to first-sea­son awk­ward. The pac­ing is mov­ing a lit­tle more, and this time the music and night­time cruis­ing sequence start­ed only 20 min­utes into the episode. And what should I hear as Miami’s sky­line reflects off of Crock­ett and Tubbs’ Corvette-cum-Fer­rari? Devo’s Going Under.

It’s almost as though Michael Mann was try­ing to per­son­al­ly apol­o­gize to me for mak­ing me sit through the pilot.

Mia­mi Vice Theme — Jan Hammer