‘M.I.A.’ Review: Peacock’s Meandering Miami-Set Revenge Thriller From ‘Ozark’ Creator Is Only Sporadically Entertaining

As stories about how extrajudicial revenge is the straightest path to building a cohesive friend group, Peacock’s M.I.A. is at least better than Netflix’s Man on Fire.

It’s a bluntly entertaining, thoroughly disposable series nestled partway between prestige antihero drama and enjoyably brainless pulp, not quite providing the pleasures of either but not exactly failing at its mid-level aspirations.

Naturally, what I want to talk about instead is “Ride Like the Wind.”

The recent yacht rock renaissance has elevated the profile of both the song and of singer-songwriter Christopher Cross, restoring its status as a certifiable bop after years spent wandering in the desert of unintentional camp. “Ride Like the Wind” was always cool enough to be the centerpiece of an all-time classic SCTV sketch, but now it has become cool enough that three different shows have featured the song in a not-incidental capacity. Since January.

In Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson’s The Beauty, Anthony Ramos’ Antonio, a 60-something assassin made to look like a 30-something by the magic of the titular rejuvenating drug, introduces his new protégé to yacht rock and they sing and dance to “Ride Like the Wind” as part of a torture ritual.

In Sam Levinson’s Euphoria, drug mule Rue sings along to “Ride Like the Wind” as she drives frantically to the border of Mexico.

In M.I.A., created by Bill Dubuque (Ozark) and showrun by Karen Campbell (Dexter), Dylan Jackson’s Stanley is a neurodivergent Haitian immigrant newly arrived in Miami. Stanley is a big yacht rock fan and the genre is the only thing that calms him when he experiences extreme tension. “Ride Like the Wind” is the first song we see him enjoying, but when Stanley becomes involved in Etta’s (Shannon Gisela) bloody quest for revenge, she uses “Sailing” to help him chill.

In all three cases, it’s a middle-aged, white, male creator showcasing “Ride Like the Wind” through the prism of a crime-adjacent younger person of color, because over-explained ironic counterpoints are fun!

Consider this, then, as a warning to any writer currently mulling a cheekily dissonant juxtaposition of youthful criminality and adult contemporary jams: “Don’t.” And consider it a warning to any prospective viewers that everything that happens in  M.I.A. is probably something you’ve seen elsewhere on TV in the past few months (or certainly years).

Gisela plays Etta Tiger Jonze, a 21-year-old leading wildlife swamp tours out of her family’s marina in Key Largo.

Etta, who has an eidetic memory, is good at her job. She’s already dreaming of life at the University of Miami. But the wildlife tours aren’t the part of the family business she’s interested in. Much to her mother’s (Danay Garcia) chagrin, Etta wants a piece of her dad’s (David Denman) side operation transporting drugs for a Miami-based cartel. 

Etta has no qualms about the narcotics portion of the gig, but when the cartel adds “human trafficking” to the shipping slate, Etta balks and makes a decision that leads to her family’s murder. When the massacre takes place, Etta is at the docks, but a thoroughly random girl is with her family, leading the cartel killers to believe they got all of the Tiger Jonzes, leaving Etta alive and reciting a 12-person revenge list like a South Floridian Arya Stark.

(It’s here that I pause. Etta Tiger Jonze is not a Sri Lankan rapper recently removed from Kid Cudi’s concert tour, an action franchise starring the late Chuck Norris, nor is she part of the military in any capacity. There isn’t “action” and she isn’t “missing” in it. None of the show takes place at the Miami International Airport, nor at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Plus, “MIA” is an abbreviation for “Miami,” but once you throw in the periods, it isn’t anymore. The show’s title is wordplay that doesn’t play. And it’s a search engine black hole.)

Before Etta can wreak vengeance on the cartel, fronted by brothers Mateo (Maurice Compte) and Samuel (Gerardo Celasco), plus their vicious enforcer Elias (Alberto Guerra), she has to get her life in order, which is where Haitian siblings Stanley (Jackson) and Lovely (Brittany Adebumola) come in. Confusingly.

Soon, Etta is planning revenge and working a pair of jobs, one at a cool Miami club and the other at a less-cool Miami motel owned and operated by Lena (Tovah Feldshuh), who has a cool secret.

Eventually, people are looking for Etta, including Kincaid (Cary Elwes), a character from a Carl Hiaasen minus the humor and personality, but sure to make fans of Hiaasen realize that TV has offered us multiple Carl Hiaasen adaptations in the last couple of years and this definitely isn’t one.

For somebody with a 12-person kill list, Etta has a total lack of urgency, working her two jobs, bonding with her two new besties and embarking on a wholly unconvincing love story with a college student named Matt (Tyler Tomás Perez, less appealing here than on Abbott Elementary). Gisela, a relative newcomer whom I only know as one of the lead voices from Netflix’s Strip Law, doesn’t offer much intensity either, which is a fully reasonable character choice but hinders the middle of the season, when I needed somebody, anybody, to do something.

There’s some friendly chemistry with Gisela, Adebumola and Jackson, though the series can’t grapple with the gap between “Let’s be a found family!” and “Sure, let’s collaborate on a dozen murders together” — but it’s still more plausible than multiple other things related to Jackson’s part.

For a show with a main character with a 12-person kill list, M.I.A. is distressingly prone to narrative slack. When the focus is on Etta, at least the objectives are clear even if the momentum is lacking. Too often, though, it just meanders. 

Mateo and Samuel aren’t interesting characters, forcing me to ponder what alternative steps needed to be taken so that I would feel curiosity, much less sympathy, for a pair of cartel bosses dabbling in human trafficking. Neither brother has a notable personality — Mateo is fiery and Samuel is boring — and the insight we get into their lives is negligible. There’s a key death in the season’s homestretch, involving a character I’m not sure we were even introduced to before their demise, but darned if the show doesn’t treat it like we’re supposed to be devastated. 

The cartel brothers have a sister, Caroline (Marta Milans), who is in charge of laundering the cartel’s money through Miami real estate, and she’s pretty much every criminal-trying-to-go-straight from every prestige cable crime drama, including Ozark. And no, given Dubuque’s background, it’s no surprise that M.I.A. plays like Ozark meets The Accountant in Miami, but it could use more of the silliness from the latter and less of the self-seriousness from the former. Other than acknowledging Miami’s Haitian and Dominican communities, plus references to several local food delicacies, M.I.A. doesn’t go deep on its location.

None of the secondary plotlines is, on its own, even vaguely gripping, but at least they feature guest stars. You may not recognize a lot of the regulars, but stick around long enough and the familiar faces popping up at various points include Mike Colter as a Miami councilman, Paul Ben-Victor as a Russian mobster, Loretta Devine as Stanley and Lovely’s stubborn aunt, plus Billy Burke, Edward James Olmos and Sonia Braga. I’m not saying any of the guest stars are great, but I’m sure they enjoyed the trip to Miami.

The best of the guests is Feldshuh. I don’t love the connection the show tries making between Lena’s family dying in the Holocaust and Etta’s family dying because they were criminals, but when we learn Lena’s secret, it spins the series off into a place that is borderline ridiculous and borderline awesome in a way that nothing previously had approached. Getting more use out of Feldshuh, wearing a delightfully silly orange wig, correlates directly to the narrative acceleration in the last three episodes, following a flashback episode dedicated to filling in a blank that could have been filled in with a one-sentence answer — or, as it actually is later, a single snapshot.

The closing episodes raise the body count and push M.I.A. into a darker and wilder place. Up until that point, the series could have easily belonged on USA Network or even on NBC proper, where the pilot is going to get primetime one-off airing next week. It’s not a bad choice, because the pilot is amusing, even if it’s 45 minutes of getting viewers to invest in a bunch of characters who never appear again.

I could have checked out on the show entirely at midseason — there’s an episode with a lame house party that’s astonishing dull — and never wondered what I missed. But as I watched the closing beats of the finale, complete with large cliffhanger, I needed to find out what happened next. Then, within a half-hour, I’d forgotten that urge entirely.