“Sonny, what’s wrong?” his ex-wife asked when he called her, in the unexpectedly poignant scene (watch it here) in the first episode of Miami Vice (1984-1989). It is not only poignant but also immensely influential, due to the way light, colour, music, fashion, and editing work together in a new and, for television, unusual way. It is a key event in 1980s popular culture; a popular culture that had a formative experience on me as the 1980s was when I became old enough to live it. But it is not just me. Lately I have had several reminders of the persistence and importance of popular culture of the 1980s, and here are some thoughts about it.1
The other week I was at a Japanese bar in Stockholm and was struck by the fact that all the music that was playing was from the 1980s, and that I knew almost all of the songs.2 I do not know what it is like in the rest of the world, but at bars and cafés in Stockholm, and various shops, music from the 1980s seem to dominated. A few places play recent music, when I usually do not recognise the songs or the artists and it is the fact that I do not recognise it that makes me recognise it as new. Except for some massive global hits by Taylor Swift or Beyoncé and a few others, there are fewer shared experiences of art and culture that is being created now, and life in general seems more fragmented. Partly because there is just more of everything and therefore impossible to keep up, and partly because there are many more separate outlets for all the things that are appearing. In the 1980s and 1990s, whatever was popular would usually find its way to me because the same television channels, radio stations, and newspapers/magazines were shared by those who were interested and there was not more than that it was possible to keep track of. (Even if you sometimes had to wait until whatever it was you wanted arrived from, usually, London.) Now there are too many films, series, and music releases on too many outlets, windows, and niche publications. Even things that might be tailor-made for me I will never hear of, because they will disappear in the noise or they will be available on some platform that I do not have. And this is not only true for me.
As has been noted, and discussed, in various places, older music is much more popular today than new music. If you for example explore what people prefer to listen to on Spotify, regardless of age-group, it is music from the previous century.3 Likewise, among the most popular shows on streaming platforms remain those of yesterday, such as Seinfeld (1989-1998), Frasier (1993-2004), Friends (1994-2004), and The Gilmore Girls (2000-2007). Is it maybe the case that people sign up for some new popular show, like Stranger Things (2016-), and then stay for the older, familiar ones?
I wonder how TV series from the 1980s are doing in that regard. It was an influential decade, where many of the current narrative and stylistic themes and traditions were established, but are they being watched today? I believe the first run of Columbo (1971 - 1978)4 is popular still, so the pre-1990s are not completely forgotten, but what about the 1980s? Let us return to it, or at least to two American cop shows. The sitcoms, soap operas, action adventures, and office dramas will have to wait for a later article. The two cop shows are interesting not just for their style and such but for what they said about society at large.
I mentioned Miami Vice above. Another cop show of the 1980s with similar impact was Hill Street Blues (1981-1987).5 On the surface they are very different. Miami Vice is sunny, aggressive, sexy, individualistic, and so stylised it sometimes resembles pop art (“MTV cops” was how it was summed up by the network, NBC), while Hill Street Blues is gritty, melancholic, communal, and aiming for low-key realism. If you have not seen either of them, watching their intros will give you an idea. (Miami Vice here and Hill Street Blues here.) Their stylistic importance is therefore different. Miami Vice primarily in terms of mood, music, and fashion, whereas Hill Street Blues primarily for its busy, faux-documentary visual and aural style and narrative structure. It is high on the list of the most long-term influential series of all time. (Is it not more so than The Sopranos (1999-2007)?)
But while different in style, they both make the same argument: crime is persistent and overwhelming, and the best the police can do is aim for keeping the status quo. They are not able to solve much, or anything, only keep the lid on so things do not explode. Crime is a profession, corruption is everywhere, and the main characters of the shows are usually overwhelmed and despondent. (There was a popular Swedish cop show in the 80s too, Roland Hassel, with a similar mood.)
There is an understandable reason for this mood. Crime in the US in the 1980s was terrible. The rates for several kinds of crimes soared in the 1970s, from property crimes to homicide, and peaked sometime in the early 1980s, remaining stubbornly high during the decade, and then began to drop considerably, and quickly, in the early 1990s.6 Miami Vice and Hill Street Blues, in their own different ways, captured this era of unbearable crime.
The series were not only important for the development of television but also important to me. I was following them closely even though I was perhaps somewhat too young for them. Most important was Miami Vice, because it was the first time I connected something I liked with a specific name, Michael Mann. The episodes ended with this:
and that gave me goosebumps. Who is this guy I was wondering, and what else is he doing? I was watching many different shows and series in the 1980s, my formative decade, but the only creator behind the scenes I was interested in was Mann.7
Despite its importance, people rarely write or talk about 1980s television. It is different with film, where on the one hand there is a persistent enthusiasm for action adventures, such as films about Indiana Jones, and on the other hand a persistent complaint that while the cinema of the 1970s were great, the 1980s were bad. The 70s cinema was allegedly about art and criticism of society and the 80s cinema only celebrating rightwing politics and consumerism. On a superficial level, Hill Street Blues could be seen as continuing the ideals of the 70s and Miami Vice representing the 80s, even though they are similar underneath the surface. These beliefs, connected with the cult of “New Hollywood,”8 have a couple of problems and often seem more related to non-cinematic things, such as a general dislike of Ronald Reagan and “neoliberalism” among film critics and film scholars. (Scare quotes around neoliberalism are necessary as it is the most abused and overused term in contemporary thought.)9
One obvious flaw with the “the 70s were great, the 80s were bad”-argument is that there was continued greatness in Hollywood during the 1980s, and in American independent cinema. Jim Jarmusch is the centrepiece of the independents, but the exceptional Hal Hartley also appeared, as did John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and Spike Lee. Michael Mann was another. Mann, together with Walter Hill, James Cameron, and John McTiernan, also formed a new generation of action filmmakers of remarkable quality and inventive professionalism. The 1980s was when Nora Ephron became one of many women who finally could have persistent careers as filmmakers, for the first time since the 1920s. Penelope Spheeris, Amy Heckerling, Penny Marshall, Susan Seidelman are some others. Joan Micklin Silver made the wonderful Crossing Delancey (1988). I also need to mention the many films written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, often directed by Ron Howard, as well as the work of the filmmaking trio Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker, with their peak achievements being Airplane! (1980) and Top Secret (1984). There was David Lynch, Jonathan Demme, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter, Joel and Ethan Coen, Lawrence Kasdan, Robert Zemeckis, and on top of all that there was the continued importance of the movie brat generation; several of them made some of their best films in the 1980s.
Regardless of which genre you consider, the 1980s was a decade capable of greatness. It might be the most underrated decade in both film and television history. The exception are westerns. Few were made and even fewer great ones; one (the only one?) being Clint Eastwood’s majestic Pale Rider (1985):
Another problem with “the 80s were bad” argument is that it is completely Hollywood-focused. In the UK, France, Iran, Taiwan, Australia, and other places, the 1980s was an exceptional decade. I am not going to list any of the marvellous films and filmmakers because it would just be a drop in the ocean. Suffice to say that many of the New Wave filmmakers of the 1960s continued to do great things, as did many newcomers.
While I am pleased that there are at least some things that can unite us today, like 80s music and 90s sitcoms, I wonder what will be shared global experiences of what is being made today, and has been made in the last decade. Will anything? Does it matter one, way or the other?
A decade is of course something arbitrary, nothing abruptly changes between December 31 and January 1, and there are always several things going on simultaneously during any given time period. The 1970s and 1980s are here more like images of an era than calendar-specific.
Inspired by the Japanese pub night I began making my own 80s playlist on Spotify. It is now over five hours long, with over 70 songs, yet I am only getting started. (One thing I have noticed is how many of these songs have been used by Michael Mann.) For those who want more of 80s music, I can recommend a new documentary on Netflix about Wham!, called Wham!, directed by Chris Smith. It is lovely.
There were a couple of episodes of Columbo already in 1968 that were trial runs. But the Steven Spielberg-directed episode “Murder by the Book” from 1971 is considered the first episode of the first proper season, shown on NBC. After 1978 the series took a long break and returned on ABC with some scattered episodes from 1989 to 2003.
There was a third, very influential, cop show, Cagney & Lacey (1982-1988), but I have unfortunately not seen it other than a few clips here and there.
There has been much research on this, but the reasons for why crime rates suddenly began to drop so rapidly are many and complex and can not be put down to any particular policies in any particular place. Here is one report: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/homicide-trends-united-states-1980-2008
TV and authorship is a vast, complicated, under-researched, and under-appreciated subject, which I will not engage with here despite having a lot to say. Miami Vice was created by Anthony Yerkovich, who chose Miami as the location and wrote the pilot, but Michael Mann was involved from the beginning and had considerable influence over the look and sound of it. Yerkovich had also been a writer on Hill Street Blues, which was created by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll.
I have written about New Hollywood before, and the many misunderstandings around it and the period: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2021/02/1970s-and-economics.html
Much of what Reagan has been celebrated or accused of doing in the 1980s was initiated by his predecessor Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. Reagan did not change things as much as you might think, and while he is famous for cutting taxes, he raised taxes more often than he lowered them. See for example https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-12-15/the-mostly-forgotten-tax-increases-of-1982-1993 or
"The exception are westerns. Few were made and even fewer great ones"
I feel like 80's westerns, too, don't really deserve the terrible reputation. There's "Pale Rider", but also "Walker" by Alex Cox, "Silverado" by Kasdan, epic "Lonesome Dove"; "Rustler's Rhapsody" is a hilarious comedy western, and Eastwood's "Bronco Billy" as well.
There's also some excellent western films hiding inside other genres: "Witness" by Peter Weir, one of the best westerns of the decade, was made out of a script for a western film, but then marketed as a romantic drama; "Near Dark" by Bigelow — western inside a vampire film; "Streets of Fire" by Hill — western inside an urban-sci-fi-musical; "The Untouchables" — western ("TIn Star" basically) in the clothes of a gangster flick.
Also, there were some smaller, independent and underappreciated productions: "The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez", "Barbarosa", "The Grey Fox", "Powwow Highway", "Dudes", Indian-centered Windwalker (1980) and The Mystic Warrior (1984) where actors talk Cheyenne and Crow way before Kevin Kostner made it cool (and by the way "Dances with Wolves" was shot in 1989).
I could stretch the list a bit more, but anyway — I think it already has more interesting westerns than 1930's did before "Stagecoach".