Few shows have changed so radically the look and sound of broadcast television in the way that Miami Vice did when it debuted as NBC's latest cop series in September 1984. Commissioned by the network in order to help it compete with the burgeoning cable channels for the attention of young, affluent viewers, Miami Vice set its stall out by offering an approach to the police procedural genre unlike anything else that had come before: Art Deco interiors, neon-wrought nighttime cityscapes, high-styled men's fashions, "designer stubble," and perhaps most importantly for television history, an aesthetics of the music video that eschewed traditional storytelling, plot development and dialogue. The terms of its social and industrial production (Director Michael Mann was given a "cool" million budget/episode) were likewise controversial.Miami Vice captures the glitter and glamour embodied by Crockett and Tubbs by offering students an anatomy of a ground-breaking work in the police procedural genre. The volume explores Vice's combination of disparate influences (MTV, film noir, soap opera, 'high concept' action films) as well as the social, cultural and industrials moments when it burst onto the network. Each of the chapters in MIAMI VICE introduces readers to a major component of televisual analysis--style, storytelling, the television show as commodity and ideological critique-- that illustrates the show's unique features. Miami Vice provides a model for students' own assessment of other shows, and confirms precisely how--and on what terms--Miami Vice redefined the police drama and an era.