A shady British game show host gets more involved in the Miami criminal underworld than he intends to.
We've got a Miami Vice Comedy Episode, here, folks; I love when Vice does comedy and think a big part of the charm and appeal of the series overall is that it has a really weird sense of humor, so my feelings on Phil the Shill, like Made for Each Other and the later Season Four oddballs, are that it's great. I am aware not everyone shares my enthusiasm for Vice Does Comedy, but like. They should.
Our guest star in this one is Phil Collins (the guy that did that song in the pilot, you know the one, he was like, in a band or something), who was not actually a stranger to acting-- he had played the Artful Dodger as a preteen in the West End, and is apparently an uncredited child actor in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. (He continued to act occasionally after Vice as well, including in a 1988 movie called Buster where he also plays a small time criminal who ends up in over his head. Weird typecasting for the former lead singer of Genesis.)
Phil is having a Tony Danza moment playing Phil Mayhew, and there's some weird, utterly unaddressed metafictional questions raised by this episode regarding his identity. Like, Phil Mayhew runs a TV quiz show called Rat Race, the theme song for which is a Phil Collins song called The Man with the Horn, sung by Phil Collins, with reworked lyrics referencing this fictional game show. So. Does Phil Collins exist in the Miami Vice universe? Did Phil Mayhew license this song from him? (Or steal it, given that he is a criminal and this was a show on local TV?) Or is Phil Mayhew this universe's equivalent for Phil Collins (like Lou DeLong is Miami Vice's James Brown)? Is he a competent singer and composer on top of being a swindler, and he sang his own theme song? If they do exist simultaneously, has anyone ever noted how weird it is that local TV personality Phil Mayhew looks, and has the exact vocal stylings of, famous British musician Phil Collins?
Well
Anyway!
Stan is on Rat Race answering questions about Elvis (did you know that Phil Collins' nickname as a kid was apparently Little Elvis?) against, of all people, Emo Phillips. If you live on tumblr you probably know him best as "the guy with the joke about religion on the bridge;" if you're a Weird Al fan you might recall him as Joe Earley from UHF or Salvador Dali from the recent Weird: The Al Yankovic Story. He is a stand up comedian who has been performing his lilting, meandering, often quite dark material for decades, and he has done a fair bit of acting as well. If you are unaware of his stage persona, however, you may be wondering who this kook with the pageboy haircut and the belief that Graceland is a country is.
The opening of the episode cuts between Stan and Lar-Bear (who are playing hookey) on Rat Race and Sonny and Rico trying to bug a car and Sonny getting the crap beat out of him by a giant man; for the first half of the episode everyone appears to equally be in a comedy
After Sonny gets beat up, he and Rico sit together at dinner(? drinks?); Sonny holds a napkin to his bleeding face and Rico says, "I know you're not a masochist, man, but it does give you character." Rico baby you are such a bitch. He also appears to be picking up something from a dish (nuts, maybe? we can't see them from the angle the scene is shot), briefly holding them over the candle at the table, and then eating them. Why are you doing this.
Also why are you so certain Sonny isn't a masochist, Rico, oh he-who-knows-more-about-leather-bars-than-expected-for-a-purportedly-heterosexual-vice-cop, huh, huh
There is a shot of two dead people swinging, hung upside-down, in a warehouse, that cuts from night to day that reminds me so much of a shot from Texas Longhorn, a Starsky & Hutch episode that Michael Mann wrote. I get it. It's a good enough device to use multiple times. I feel you, Mikey.
Despite being a comedy episode, Phil the Shill is actually really gorgeously shot overall
Twice in the episode characters refer to Phil as "a teabag," which is the weirdest anti-British epithet I have ever heard
I always sit like this with my coworkers, with my knee up their butt. Rico seems Weirder With Sonny in this episode than in the last few, like something has prompted him to be a little mean and possessive about him. (We certainly know from Val that Rico is not always unflaggingly nice to the people he cares about.)
Every time I watch this episode, I am always like, "WTF, that's Kyra Sedgwick" because I have forgotten once again that she is in it
Izzy has a really fantastic role in this one as Phil's interior designer; he is conning a conman, and his commentary throughout the episode is both utterly hilarious and makes it very clear that his malapropisms are purposeful and that he is just playing a role to keep people off their guard. Izzy is extremely smart, but he desperately does not want anyone to know that.
He also recommends that Phil get some black velvet toreador paintings, which made me laugh so hard I started coughing
Both Phil and Izzy use the word wanker in this one, twice in quick succession; in another later episode we have my beloved Wankers Aweigh neon sign, so I get the sense the American censorship team was not really clued in to the meaning of that word
Rico calls Swi a CHUMP really loudly in the bug van and it's deeply goofy and the whole conversation frankly makes all of them sound like high schoolers, which I guess tracks given the swimsuit photos Swi and Zito have up in their lockers the van
However Rico is so insanely pretty here I immediately move past everyone's juvenile behavior and go out to get my watercolors and paint him
Sonny mumbles something about "keeping Fellini in line," which is both a dig at Izzy and a soft implication that Sonny, like Izzy, is smarter and more cultured than he likes people to know. While obviously Fellini is a well-known director, Sonny's choice here is an interesting one-- he doesn't go for an American blockbuster director ("keeping Scorsese/Coppola/Spielberg in line") nor an "old man joke" ("keeping Cecil B. DeMille in line"), but instead for an Italian art film director known for skirting and subverting the lines of "decency" and pushing the medium of film forward. Sonny and Izzy have more in common (and care more about each other) than either would like to admit, and one of the ways in which they mirror each other is in how they both appear to be relatively unworldly and uneducated, but ultimately are far sharper and more informed than they let on.
Gina informs the squad that Phil is from Whitechapel, and Rico cheerfully tacks on, "that's the home of Jack the Ripper!"
Izzy, after being ignored and yelled at by Phil, with seemingly no vocal or facial subtext, tells him that his "palace of iniquity is waiting, Uranus," which is to say once again, Izzy's malapropisms are 100% purposeful and that he also 100% knows he's smarter than Phil.
Manny is floating through the background (...polishing? Phil's... speaker?) throughout all this; his presence in this episode is like a comedic "Where's Stoned Teen Waldo"
Like. Just. This shot:
The triple hit of Ridiculous Smiling Waiter Izzy + the fucking shark (Izzy has populated Phil's house with at least 3 sharks) + Manny standing there like a human stick bug just kills me
Around this point in the episode, Sonny and Rico are suddenly not in a comedy anymore; there is a gorgeous, moody night-driving sequence where they try and fail to tail the drug dealer whose car they were bugging, and then their bug is found, and then the drug dealer kills another criminal (his pilot) assuming he had to have planted the bug.
Trudy and Gina go to plant a new bug on his boat, and Trudy has really incredible earrings:
At Phil's pool party, a man lies on a pool float with what appears to be dress pants and dress shoes
We have a wonderful little "Izzy and Sonny are both playing dumb and know this about each other moment," reinforcing what we saw earlier in the episode for both of them-- Izzy tells Sonny he "worships at [Phil's] feet," to which Sonny replies, "He's a phony." Izzy immediately comes back with, "Are you making fun of my beliefs?" To which Sonny, whose Spanish is... marginal, at best, responds, "Si," which elicits a "Muy bien." from Izzy. They know they're in on the same joke, here-- they both know Phil is a dumbass and that Izzy is playing him for a fool, and they both know that the other is making a big joke out of it all. There's a reason that Izzy shows up to Sonny's hospital bed in A Bullet for Crockett-- they might fight, but they get each other.
Izzy later tries to woo one of Phil's party guests with his knowledge of Hemingway; he discusses Pamplona and calls it a "man's fiesta," and discusses the way women have historically "made trouble" at said fiesta. I would presume he's discussing The Sun Also Rises and not Hemingway's lesser-know nonfiction Death in the Afternoon, but a) at the most basic level he is not making shit up and does seem to have familiarity with the writer and his works, and b) a major theme of TSAR is authenticity versus facades and performance, especially in looking at.... uh. At British expatriates who descend upon an area with a large Hispanic population and cause problems because they're empty inside and don't understand the culture of the region they've come to-- which is to say, Izzy might actually be aware of the themes of the episode itself.
While staking out Phil's place, Rico is once again nibbling on some unseen food; Sonny also seems to be chewing at this point, but what he is chewing is a mystery. Oral fixation buddies!
Everything about the four chipper businesspeople going in on a key of coke together is so, so fucking funny, up to and including the fact that they all quite suddenly realize that "oh, wait, drug dealers are.... criminals?"
Sonny is reading (er, looking at) something I can't quite make out:
Some kind of... photobook? What show or movie it is for eludes me.
At the end of the episode, Stan shoots his television upon learning that Phil has become a televangelist; this is make 700 times funnier by the fact that he and Larry appear to have a tiny cousin to Tipu's Tiger on their coffee table.
Tipu's Tiger, if you are not familiar with it, is an 18th century (nearly life-size) moving figure of a missionary being eaten by a tiger; it was commissioned by Tipu Sultan of Mysore, India, and represented his hatred of the British and his triumph over them.
Gosh. I wonder why Stan might have an object that calls to mind the death of a British religious figure as he shoots the little British conman yelling about Jesus inside his TV.
PHEW it’s been awhile since i’ve posted….mb school has been schooling😵💫
Was assigned to do a puppet rig + animation for class and decided to use Dennis as my model ^_^ The audio used originates from Shannon in Home Movies, who’s also voiced by Emo Philips. Fun fact, Dennis’ character was heavily inspired by Shannon, given Billy Lopez’s love for Home Movies !!
Background was just a screenshot taken from S1 Ep17 that i added for fun (since it wasn’t a requirement for the assignment lol). My work isn’t supa perfect and DEFINITELY not close to replicating official WttW animation, but my teacher seemed to like it and i loved getting to study Dennis’ movements/design 🦐🩷
