music friday: miami vice, "in the air tonight"

I spent ten years working swing shift in a factory, from 1974 to 1984. I didn’t get to watch much television in those days … only the shows that were on the weekends. I quit the factory in August of ‘84, and back then, TV networks still held to the time-honored traditional Fall Season when the new year would begin for series. On September 16, 1984, we watched the pilot episode for new NBC series called Miami Vice.

The perhaps apocryphal legend is that the head of NBC’s Entertainment Division wrote a memo that had two words: “MTV Cops”. The series fulfilled the expectations of that memo. To watch Miami Vice now is to be a bit unimpressed, but that’s the way it always is with something so trend-setting. Thirty years later, we are used to the style of Miami Vice … it no longer seems new.

Here, Crockett and Tubbs are off for a showdown with a drug kingpin. The lead-up exemplifies the style of Miami Vice … this comes from that very first episode: