A reading list of Florida films

How They See Us

From sea hunt to Miami vice to burn notice, the small screen portrays a Florida of the imagination, with all its quirks, and less often, its diverse realities.

By Eric Deggans

The Camera shot begins close in on a corpse splattered across the ground, before arching up quickly to catch automobiles zipping across an elevated freeway, holding for a moment to frame Miami’s skyline in the distance, wavering in the muggy air.

This was a signature image from the second episode of Showtime’s quirky drama about a serial killer who hunts murderers, Dexter. And it announced, with a showy flair, that this was an offbeat story set in an environment TV viewers had never quite seen in this way before.

Showtime’s series debuted in the mid-2000s, featuring Michael C. Hall as a killer who worked in the Miami police department’s forensics unit, with a setting cribbed from the books that inspired the show: Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter novels. And Lindsay, who was living in Cape Coral when I interviewed him in 2007 for the St. Petersburg Times (now called the Tampa Bay Times), said he placed Dexter Morgan in Miami because, when he lived in the city during the ‘80s and ‘90s, it needed an avenger like his killer of killers.

Chaos and unrest were rising in Miami back then, he said, in part because the city struggled to cope with thousands of immigrants from Cuba who arrived as part of the mass emigration from the Mariel boatlift in 1980. “I like the idea that there’s a jaguar prowling the playground,” he told me back then. “And all the nuts roll downhill to Florida.”

That’s what happens when creative minds tap into the true potential of Florida – a state large enough to hold Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg combined, with just as many different cultures, social situations and climates.

I’ve been a TV critic living and working in the state since 1997, and I haven’t seen many projects take full advantage of the area’s unique settings and people (even Dexter mostly filmed in California, filming the pilot and other selected scenes on location in Florida).

Too often, Florida is a lazy shortcut for storytellers – an odd place where working-class eccentrics and tropical heat come together to produce a bumper crop of bizarre “Florida Man” crime stories (NBC’s The Good Place – an excellent series which kept flashing back to knucklehead adventures by Manny Jacinto’s not-too-sharp Jason Mendoza in Jacksonville – was a prime offender).

It’s tough for people in Hollywood to realize there are many different Floridas in one state, from the South Georgia feel of cities like Jacksonville and Pensacola to the theme park-filled tourist mecca of Orlando; retirees from the Northeast packed into places like West Palm Beach or Fort Lauderdale, and the multicultural melting pot of Miami.

Florida is often a place where people come to start over; a place where people with big dreams and sometimes sketchy histories can leave the past behind and reinvent themselves. And the best TV shows set in Florida have managed to capture that vibe, in one way or another, while showcasing the stirring, unique landscapes that only the Sunshine State can offer.

Florida as a home for
“Blue Sky” Television

Florida has offered indelible images on TV since the medium’s earliest days. And those early shows positioned the state as a place with boundless, bright skies, blue waters and endless adventure – a genre often called “blue sky” television – epitomized by action adventure series like Sea Hunt and Flipper. Sea Hunt aired from 1958 to 1961, starring Lloyd Bridges as a former Navy frogman who would tackle a different diving job every week, in scenes often shot in Florida locations like Silver Springs and Tarpon Springs.

Flipper was an adventure centered on a young boy and his pet dolphin – a kind of Lassie in the water – that began as a film and later became a TV series airing on NBC from 1964 to 1967. Set in the fictional Coral Key Park and Marine Reserve, the series was actually filmed at Greenwich Studios in Miami (then called Ivan Tors Studios) and in Key Biscayne, working with the Miami Seaquarium.

Both series had family-friendly content and strong pro-environment messages, thanks to Hungarian producer/director Ivan Tors. The producer, a longtime advocate for family-friendly programming, helped develop Florida’s image as a home for wholesome, often water-based adventures that Disney would supercharge with its massive theme parks, hyped by its own TV shows like The Wonderful World of Disney.

Flash forward 60 years or so, and you reach a time when TV rediscovered “blue sky” series, and a few of them were actually set and filmed in Florida.

Perhaps the best known of those shows was USA’s Burn Notice, a drama that mixed action, humor and intrigue in a story about a former CIA hotshot spy trapped in Miami when his cover gets blown and he’s, um, burned. The show developed a new formula for “blue sky” TV that included a fun sensibility, hopeful tone and eccentric lead character who could be a bit of an antihero.

When I visited the show’s production back in 2010, hanging with chain smoking co-star Sharon Gless (yes, THAT one – the Cagney & Lacey star), it was obvious what set the show apart. Filming inside Miami’s Coconut Grove Convention Center and across the area, the show captured the white sandy beaches, rich skies and blazing, bright visuals in Florida that were tough to reproduce anywhere else.

“One of the stars of the show is Miami,” Gless told me back then for a St. Petersburg Times story; she had lived on nearby Fisher Island for years. “They use it so beautifully.”

Back then, the state had hopes of luring Hollywood productions to take advantage of all its unique locations and environments, offering tax incentives for projects that came to Florida. But the state didn’t really have the production facilities to house a lot of work – the shutdown Coconut Grove Convention Center was kind of a shabby place to house Burn Notice’s standing sets – and only a handful of TV projects came to play.

Once again, a few TV series revived Florida’s status as a place where you could foil a master spy’s plot against America and then relax with a few Mai Tais by the beach. But given how a certain Miami-based TV show exploded into pop culture in the 1980s, it’s surprising that more series didn’t follow suit.

The Miami Vice period:
gritty, glamorous crime drama

The legend of Miami Vice and its effect on Florida’s image in TV and film is well-documented.

Created by Hill Street Blues writer Anthony Yerkovich and executive produced by auteur director Michael Mann, Miami Vice hit TV screens in 1984 and instantly redefined both the city and its genre. Drenched in a soundtrack of pop hits straight from MTV and a stylish, New Wave-inspired look that would have fit easily into any music video, Miami Vice captured the fear over rising crime in South Florida alongside the glamour of South Beach and futility of cops trying to stop the flow of drugs at a time when cocaine flowed freely on Wall Street and in Hollywood.

Yerkovich explained to Time magazine: “Even when I was on Hill Street Blues, I was collecting information on Miami; I thought of it as a sort of a modern-day American Casablanca. It seemed to be an interesting socio-economic tide pool: the incredible number of refugees from Central America and Cuba, the already extensive Cuban-American community, and on top of all that the drug trade. There is a fascinating amount of service industries that revolve around the drug trade — money laundering, bail bondsmen, attorneys who service drug smugglers. Miami has become a sort of Barbary Coast of free enterprise gone berserk.”

Florida is often a place where people come to start over; a place where people with big dreams and sometimes sketchy histories can leave the past behind and reinvent themselves. And the best TV shows set in Florida have managed to capture that vibe, in one way or another, while showcasing the stirring, unique landscapes that only the Sunshine State can offer.

The look of actors Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as cops Sonny Crockett and Ricardo Tubbs kicked off loads of fashion trends. Musical artists vied to land their songs on the show. And Mann’s meticulous, stylized look revived interest in the area’s Art Deco and Caribbean flavors.

But the show didn’t produce many copycats that survived long. And the crime dramas that came after set in the state would only pick up bits of Miami Vice’s style, using elements to create a new signature crime style that some might call “Florida noir.”

The 2005 ABC series Karen Sisco, inspired by characters from venerated crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s work, lifted the absurdist feel of his characters and melded it with Miami Vice’s gritty glamour. And Ryan Murphy’s 2003 drama Nip/Tuck, centered on a pair of outrageous plastic surgeons based in Miami, amped up the city’s European-influenced styles, balmy sexuality and darker tones, with neon and pink banished from the color palette.

“When I lived (in Miami), it was a city about class…more than any city I’ve lived in, other than maybe New York,” Murphy told me back then. “The colors of the city, the lightweight clothing, that sort of sexual ripeness. I’ve always felt Florida was an untapped resource.”

And when it comes to class, the other face of Florida that gets lots of screen time, is the world of working-class folks trying to do better.

Reinvention and reaching for
a dream in the Sunshine State

Krystal Stubbs is a former beauty queen with a job in a run-down water park, worried that what little money her family has is being wasted by her ambitious-but-gullible husband Travis, who is convinced he will succeed in an Amway-style sales organization.

She’s also the lead character in Showtime’s On Becoming a God in Central Florida, a droll drama that depicts Krystal’s rise from widowed single mom – spoiler alert – to smart, savvy prime mover in that multi-level marketing sales organization. And she lives in Florida – albeit in an unnamed “Orlando adjacent” town that’s more a state of mind than a spot on the map.

“It’s supposed to feel like the space between real spaces…it’s an area that’s sprawling with strip malls and just this kind of everywhere between that’s most of America,” showrunner/executive producer Esta Spaulding told me in 2019. “There’s just a mythology of Florida in a way…the feeling of the gators and beaches and Disneyworld being right there, living in the shadow of that….It was fun to be in a place that had a feel like there was a delay before things reached there. But it also had its own really distinctive identity.”

And what better place to explore that feeling than Florida, a state which is home to everything from a major outpost of the Church of Scientology in Clearwater, to the apex of the televised consumer hustle, The Home Shopping Network — now known as HSN — in St. Petersburg?

On Becoming joins several Florida-set TV shows centered on working class folks trying to succeed in an absurdly unorthodox environment.

TNT’s Claws features Niecy Nash as a nail salon owner secretly laundering money for a local criminal outfit in Manatee County; eventually, she gets the idea she can run her own organization.

And Pop TV’s short-lived Florida Girls centered on four girls living in a trailer park in Clearwater, living the kind of party-hearty lives that usually end as a jokey Florida Man (or Woman) segment on The Daily Show. They pile into a car that can only start when someone who hasn’t been drinking blows into a breathalyzer — a real thing — and work in a dive bar where one of them sits in a big fish tank wearing a mermaid costume (also sort of a real thing in Weeki Wachee).