No television series represented the style or dominant cultural aesthetic of the 1980s as fully or indelibly as Miami Vice. A popular one-hour police drama that aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989, Miami Vice was in one sense a conventional buddy-cop show—not unlike Dragnet, Adam 12, and Starsky and Hutch —featuring an interracial pair of narcotics detectives who wage a weekly battle against an urban criminal underworld. But the look and feel of the series—a mixture of flashy production values, music video-style montages, and extensive use of Miami's beach-front locales and art-deco architecture—elevated Miami Vice from standard cops-and-robbers fare to bona fide television phenomenon in the middle part of the decade. The show's unique attention to sound, form, and color spawned a host of imitators, sparked fads in the fashion, music, and tourism industries, and helped transform the traditional face of broadcast television by appealing...