Art Deco interiors, neon-wrought nighttime cityscapes, high-styled men's fashions, "designer stubble," and perhaps most importantly, an aesthetic approach to mood, music, and visual style unlike anything else in television history'. This book captures the glitter and glamour embodied by Crockett and Tubbs in Miami Vice, and offers students an anatomy of a ground-breaking work in the police procedural genre.

• Explores Miami Vice's combination of disparate influences (MTV, film noir, soap opera, "high concept" action films) as well as the social, cultural, and industrial moments when it burst onto the network
• Introduces readers to major components of televisual analysis -- style, storytelling, the television show as commodity, and ideological critique -- that illustrate the show's unique features
• 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