Vice flaunted its unreality, its movieness, every chance it got, from the much-noted wide shot in the pilot episode showing Crockett in a phone booth beneath a neon sign that appeared to be floating in space to the lengthy crane shot in 1985’s “Milk Money,” which frames cops and their prisoners in a motel room window, then pans very slowly to reveal a nightclub on the corner, a real locale lit so that it looks as spectacularly artificial as a studio set.

The city presented on the show was ultimately no more “real” than the title locale of Casablanca, a film that Vice, in its glamorously grubby way, often resembled—a global way station, a port city where people came to make a fortune and remake their identities and whereinternational political forces—the CIA, the FBI, the Medellin Cartel, the IRA, the Yakuza—wrought havoc with individual lives. The weekly body count made real-world, mid-’80s Beirut or El Salvador seem like Club Med. Crockett, Tubbs, and their fellow officers rarely went a week without shooting several people and having several more killed on their watch—often innocents too naive or stupid to realize their dreams were unattainable. The show's depiction of violence is Exhibit A in the case for Mann as an irreconcilable mix of reporter and huckster. Depicting the impact and aftermath of violence, Vice was at once empathetic and glib. The bloodshed was grotesque and lovely. It meant everything and nothing. And by next week, it was usually forgotten.

The series’ frank fascination with drugs, sex, and street violence