At Vulture, Matt Zoller Seitz writes about the 1984 premiere of Miami Vice. “Created by writer Anthony Yerkovich, helmed by filmmaker Thomas Carter, and guided by executive producer Michael Mann, Vice was ostensibly a police procedural: Crockett is a deep-cover operative based in Miami who partners with Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), a New York detective who came to the Gold Coast to bust the Colombian drug lord who killed his brother. But it was more than the sum of its plot points. It was a Reagan-era update of hard-boiled crime fiction, about fallen characters who were cynical about life (Crockett smoked like a Bogart hero) but also looking for innocents to defend (and often watching in horror as they died anyway). It was a down-and-dirty portrait of the War on Drugs, and a critique of domestic and foreign policies that fed it, based on events that were really happening in the 1980s worlds of arms dealing and trafficking. Most of all, though, Vice was stylish.”

Read more here.