Vin Diesel Planning To Murder All Goodwill Via MIAMI VICE TV Reboot

Let’s begin with the perfunctory facts: Vin Diesel is planning to Executive Produce a Miami Vice ‘revival’ for NBC (via his One Race Television banner) with his longtime Fast & Furious series cohort, Chris Morgan. Peter Macmanus (of Spike TV's ill-advised Stephen King series, The Mist) will pen the script for the project (which has apparently been in the works “for months”) with a release planned during the 2018 – 2019 season.

Let me be clear: I like Vin Diesel. The Fast & Furious films are wonderfully silly diversions, and this year’s XXX: The Return of Xander Cage is one of the best examples of our current action cinema renaissance. That said: fuck all of this. Miami Vice was a quintessential product of its gaudy decade – sporting loud threads, fast cars, and Don Johnson doing that Don Johnson thing. Furthermore, Michael Mann’s ’06 big screen iteration is a goddamn masterpiece – a fragmented, impressionistic take on the auteur’s precious cop melodramas that distill everything he’s ever been good at into 135 minutes of digital bliss. Without its creator (Mann also helped produce Anthony Yerkovich’s serial), there’s literally zero reason to return to this creative well.

If Fox’s recent Lethal Weapon small screen dumpster fire taught us anything, it’s that we shouldn’t be looking to the past in order to create present day cheap thrills. With Lionsgate bringing the John Wick universe to living rooms soon (with their series, The Continental), it’s hard not to wonder why Diesel isn’t adapting some semblance of his own established mythologies instead (imagine a Buck Rogers-style weekly adventure serial based in the Riddick universe).

No word on whether Diesel actually wants to star in the reboot (though it could be cool if he made Tubbs the lead, I guess). Let’s just hope they shoot the pilot and it dies a quick death before ever getting picked up to series. You’re better than this, Vin. I trusted you.