![]() The show's slick depiction of Miami as a Mecca for the international drug trade, an American Casablanca teeming with cocaine cowboys and drug runners, initially met with strong local resistance from city officials who balked at the show's glamorization of Miami's chronic crime problems. Two successful Miami Vice soundtrack albums were also released. Tropical pastels-pink, lime green, and turquoise-dominated the show's color scheme, and executive producer Michael Mann decreed early on that there would be "no earth tones." Music was also an integral part of the Miami Vice aesthetic: each episode featured contemporary pop songs that served as critical commentaries on the plots (NBC paid up to $10,000 per episode for the rights to the original songs) as well as instrumental scores by Czech-born composer Jan Hammer, whose synthesizer-driven music supplied the show with its moody atmosphere Hammer's theme song hit number one on the pop charts. The show's production staff selected exterior locations, buildings, and cars with a keen sense of detail, and scenes were composed in a painterly style more akin to cinema than television. Tellingly, the show originated in a two-word memo written by NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff: "MTV Cops." Created by Anthony Yerkovich, a former writer and producer for NBC's more realistic law enforcement show Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice was filmed on location in Miami at a cost of $1.3 million per episode-one of television's priciest at the time. In exploiting the quick-cut visual style of rock music videos, Miami Vice both reflected and consolidated the burgeoning influence of MTV (Music Television) on television and popular culture in the 1980s. 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 to a young, urban viewership that was, according to one of the show's writers, becoming "more interested in images, emotions, and energy than plot and character and words." ![]() ![]() 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. 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. No television series represented the style or dominant cultural aesthetic of the 1980s as fully or indelibly as Miami Vice. ![]()
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