Brothers Keeper - Greatest pilot in TV history ?


Payback22

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Granted, I've not seen every pilot episode of every series ever made, but the 1st ep of Miami Vice is just so much better than anything I could imagine was ever put on the small screen. Its cinematic quality is such that it could have actually done well in theaters in the mid 80s. 

In fact its much better than many big screen cops movies from the late 70s - early 80s period

 

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Granted, I've not seen every pilot episode of every series ever made, but the 1st ep of Miami Vice is just so much better than anything I could imagine was ever put on the small screen. Its cinematic quality is such that it could have actually done well in theaters in the mid 80s. 

In fact its much better than many big screen cops movies from the late 70s - early 80s period

I completely agree. It has an undefinable element of magic throughout. Far superior to anything at the time, and even today

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I agree as well! :)

When I first watched it on the BBC in '85 I was mesmerised! :cool:

I still am 30 years later! :)

The production was off the scale for its time. Michael Mann's influence was brilliant.

:thumbsup:

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Brother's Keeper was a brilliant start to the series that defined the 80s. It easily could have been a movie with sequels.  Fortunately for us it became weekly fun viewing.  

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I have to agree with Payback22......."Brother's Keeper is hard to distinguish from a big screen movie.

 

Miami Vice begins on a dark NY street with detective Tubbs on surveillance. It grabs your interest right from the start as some young hoods try to shake him down for some money. Tubbs pulls his double barreled shotgun on them & sends them running!

 

What an electric start to a fantastic series!  :thumbsup:

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Agree, again so much. From those first two minutes in, I think we all realized we were watching something special. Groundbreaking, timeless and worthy of recognition here in 2015.

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Hard to imagine a pilot better than Brother's Keeper. Just a fantastic way to start MV and introduce the characters and scenario. 

 

The pilot of Crime Story was great and the pilot of Wiseguy was excellent too. I didn't really see the pilot of The Sopranos although I watched the show regularly.

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Hard to imagine a pilot better than Brother's Keeper. Just a fantastic way to start MV and introduce the characters and scenario. 

 

The pilot of Crime Story was great and the pilot of Wiseguy was excellent too. I didn't really see the pilot of The Sopranos although I watched the show regularly.

It's been about a year since I've seen it, but the pilot of the Soprano's was basically Tony in the shrinks office for the duration of it and introducing characters that way, as if Tony Soprano himself was introducing them to you (as he was introducing them to his shrink). 

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Agree, again so much. From those first two minutes in, I think we all realized we were watching something special. Groundbreaking, timeless and worthy of recognition here in 2015.

Agreed! There have been a number of excellent television shows now but in my entire life there has been no other that has had the immediate affect as DeepCover333 stated and the long lasting greatness of Brother's Keeper. The best and most influential ever.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I'd nominate the pilot of Breaking Bad as one of the best, too, a true harbinger of things to come for the rest of the series. MV's pilot episode is tops, though, no doubt to the huge budget and purveyance of Michael Mann. Even though he didn't direct it, it basically looked like a Mann film, with the same excellent standards he put into Thief a few years before.

Edited by Spyder
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  • 4 weeks later...

what was great in that pilot and that gave the tone of the upcoming episodes was the music . i don't know who had the idea of adding a song that matches with the action but that was a brilliant idea . those two freshly met guys going to a dangerous rendez-vous with the music "i don't know if you really know who i am .." was just awesome . a guy posted some cool stuff on Youtube

 

https://www.youtube.com/user/Palelec/videos

Edited by jpm1
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  • 3 weeks later...

Here is some probably new info about the making of the Pilot.  My apologies if this interview has already been posted.  It's an excerpt from the Facebook page of Paul Hampton Crockett (no relation) Miami historian. Also from his great page is a photo of a billboard that was somewhere in the Miami area.

 

In a "Rolling Stone" interview published on Oct. 9, 2014, when asked if he'd been to Miami before the show, and about his first impressions, Actor Don Johnson responded as follows:

"I'd been there a few times with the Allman Brothers Band, recording at Criteria Studio. I'd passed through...
It started to change dramatically in the early Eighties. The drug flow was just insane — thus the creation of the show. 
When I got off the plane to do the pilot, you could feel the pressure cooker of violence in the air. We were shooting the pilot in a house down in Liberty City/ Overtown. And the [1983] Miami riots broke out. We had to shut down production because they were afraid for our lives. 
It was one of those cases where, "Well, we ain't in Kansas no more." But it was rich and raw. The whole city was just dilapidated, and it was during that time where there was a huge transition from the old white establishment to the influx of Cubans and Hispanics."

 

click for larger image

post-14-0-44296400-1445349468_thumb.jpg

Edited by miamijimf
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This is probably the best pilot I have ever seen. Most pilots of otherwise good shows struggle with introducing the main character or characters, as well as the setting. Brother's Keeper had none of these issues. Everything clicked into place at the right pace and by the end of the double episode you were already very familiar with the main protagonists, as well as their position in this very delicate setting. The production quality was amazing and the scene with Crockett and Tubbs in the Daytona with Phil Collins' "In the Air Tonight" blasting in the background turned this show into an instant classic.

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  • 1 month later...

I'd say that the pilot episode of Twin Peaks is one of the best too

 

Yes!  Fantastic pilot and show!

 

Actually, it's tough for me to decide whether Twin Peaks or Miami Vice is my favorite show... Both are so important to me!

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A one-off. From the moment of the club scene, with its sumptuous neon, supple camera work, and minutes without dialogue (!) -- allowing the groove to set the pace -- up until the stark shot of Rico in the alleyway, you know that there's very little today that can touch it.

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Yep gotta be one of the best. 

 

One of the things that's strange about MV is that the Pilot contains most of the iconic moments people remember like the "In the air tonight" scene and is one of the strongest eps in the entire series. The pilot is so great that the show very rarely reaches the height of that first ep, maybe that's a weakness.

 

In other shows, the pilot is usually the worst and basically there to force feed all the neccessary info to the audience.

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  • 2 years later...

Yes.  If not the best then certainly one of the most rewatchable.  And one of the most representative of its time.  Before the dvds came out, the Pilot VHS was all most people had to make do with officially (unless you were a subscriber to that club with vhs tapes which I wasn't).  So I've watched it maybe a 100 times by now.  Plus In The Air Tonight alone elevates it way above other pilots.

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  • 2 months later...
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I thought The Shield had an incredibly strong pilot, especially considering it's a true one hour pilot. They're totally different shows, but for raw impact I'd say The Shield's is better. For setting the mood, Vice's is very strong.

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  • 3 months later...

BK is so far past ANY pilot ep. much less any ep. of MV in the entire series its pointless to debate it...although if BK was (and it most certainly was) THE best ep. of all pilots ever filmed it was IMO also THE best of the entire series w/ many later eps. coming up a very close 2nd.  

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