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The Rise of CSI
The stars of CSI are William Petersen, 49, who plays the solitary, brooding, and obsessively scientific Las Vegas Crime Scene Investigations chief Gil Grissom, and Marge Helgenberger, who plays his sidekick Catherine Willows. They have a team of young and hunky criminalists, including a recovering gambling addict and an ex-jock who has fallen in love with a casino hooker. According to Variety, C.S.I. has become the number two drama on network TV (behind ER), with over 25 million viewers a week.
The real star of the show is science. Grissom and Willows and the other criminalists share one pronounced trait -- they believe nothing anybody tells them, and they only trust solid evidence. They depend heavily on a well-equipped crime lab and use a wide variety of scientific tools to re-construct crimes. Like X-Files, the show shoots many scenes in darkness and shadow, and has a tendency to include brief and disciplined flashes of shocking gore: the path of a bullet will be illustrated graphically, or a diseased organ, a rotting corpse or slashed artery. Computers are a mainstream tool of this crew, along with smart thinking, and laser and DNA testing.
Like X-Files, the show has a dark view of science. Science is the real hero and the real star, but it's used mostly to reveal truth in sad circumstances. The CSI criminalists work in a depressing world where they nonetheless seek the raw truth, and believe in the ability of science to uncover it. Grissom is an older David Duchovny. He has a lonely life, a corrupt boss, endemic authority problems, and absolutely no patience for the stupid, dishonest or lazy. He shares another trait with Mulder -- he has to deal with the fact that in this world, the good guys don't always win.
It's fitting that TV's most intelligent drama follows one of its shlockiest programs -- Survivor. It would seem to be a foolish pairing, an idiotic broadcast followed by one so cerebral. Together the two shows cover the spectrum of contemporary TV. But while Survivor seems to become more unbearable by the week. CSI, already good, is getting better all the time -- gutsy, smart and inventive.
CSI is clearly the best looking show on TV. I think that is part of its attractiveness. How many scientists do you know who look like Marg Helgenberger and Jorja Fox?
They might be geeks, but they're Hollywood geeks.
It is by far the best shot HDTV on tv right now. Pitty more people can't see it that way.
Nothing new there, although they do make nice use of Brass on occasion as a stand in Watson to their Holmes. But this is a problem mystery shows, and novels have had for a long time. If your plot is going to be twisted, every now and again you need to explain it to Watson. I really don't see a good solution...
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
I saw CSI (the episode with the animated bullet trajectories) on British TV only last week. A laudable effort to make science accessible to the mainstream, but it did seem to me that the "mainstream" they were aiming for must have the attention span of a goldfish.
The Miami Vice comparison is particularly apt - lots of jump cuts etc. The CG animation is sometimes overused (and the animation of a bullet striking a lung had me rofl).
That said, much of the basic science is sound. I particularly liked the admission that while a $10k electronic nose was very cool when it came to identifying perfume residues, the same results could be had with a bottle of adsorbant and an existing benchtop gas chromatograph).
Anyway - I'll be watching it again to see if they can get the balance of plot/science/graphics right. If nothing else, it is nice to see an attempt to incorporate some properly researched, hard science into a mainstream show. Better they labour the explanations a bit than dumb it down at the expense of veracity.
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
Now, CSI almost never goes after any thing "larger" - it's almost always just some guy offing some other guy. Also, the science is almost as atrocious as Taco's spelling. On one show they made the following bloopers:
In none of the above cases was the error necessary to the plot - in fact the lightning goof would have been far better played out had Grissom said, "No, actually that is a common misbelief. What protects you is the shielding action of the metal car body. If lightning can jump thousands of feet of air gap, what makes you thing an inch of rubber WITH METAL WIRES IN IT would stop it?"
Furthurmore, the show has to have this BS conflict between Grissom and the sherrif (after all, one rule of modern TV is that ALL AUTHORITY FIGURES ARE ASSHOLES). Again, on Quincy, the chief of police and the head of the M.E. department all were foursquare behind Quincy.
Plus, do we have to have all these stupid shots of what the investigators think happened? "Hmmm. The bullet came through this window and hit him in the head " (CUT: blue-tinged shot of fake bullet breaking fake glass and impacting on fake head).
www.eFax.com are spammers
I always saw CSI as successful for pretty much the same reasons as Law and Order. It requires a low emotional commitment but a high intellectual commitment. They're both about systems first and the people within them second. There is a demographic (a lot of them work with computers) that eats that up.
My only complaint would be the same as a bunch of other people here, they play is real fast and loose with the science. Often it has nothing to do with a plot point, it's just poorly researched.
I understand there are crazy time constraints on network television, they aren't made of time. I would suggest hiring a 'resident geek' to read scripts somewhere on the way out and suggest 'technical' fixes to move their science more into reality. I think it would really help the show, and it would give them access to a world of wierd science stuff they aren't getting now. And make it more crediable ta boot.
People who's heads are full of wierd science are a dime a dozen down at the local comic store (or here on slashdot), pick one up..
I don't mean this negatively; I'm sure you're right since it's just another TV show. I'm genuinely curious as to what sorts of facts or "unobtainalbe" things you're talking about...
CSI is gorgeous in HD - the night shots of Vegas from the air, with all the color; the dark exteriors and interiors which would wash into a blur on a regular TV; the closeups of evidence, etc are wonderful in HD. HD does such a good job on color and low-light reproduction compared to NTSC that people who see it at my house are amazed, and CSI is a great example. I think the transfers or camera work has gotten better too since it started.
And everything said in the article is true - it's a riviting drama where science is often the star, for more so than the old detective-story-ish Quincy was.
I'm shocked it ever made it to the screen, and hope it'll be there for a Long Time.
I hate to say this with all the people trashing the quality of the Science of the show, but I love it. Usually the errors aren't so blatant that they distract me too much. I really enjoy it though. Katz OTOH, I doubt has really watched it. His write-up sounds an awful lot like the one I read in TV Guide at the Convienant store. I think that he then added in his "notes" from the last show that was on. Yes, Warric is a recovering gambling addict, and in that epasode, he did take a fancy to a dancer in a casino. That was it, the plot ended there. She is no longer in the show. It's a lot like watching the show from last season where the man died in Grissom's hands, and the blood was litterly on his hands. A priest had talked to him ealier in the show. As he now looking at returning to Catholicism? No, he isn't.
Oh well, another Katz flame. At least it's my first!
--Josh
There are exactly 42,935,718 letter sized sheets in a square mile.
Like X-Files, the show has a dark view of science.
The X-Files has very little to do with real science. Vampires? Weird implants? Alien conspiracies? Pseudoscience doesn't equal science.
The CSI criminalists work in a depressing world where they nonetheless seek the raw truth, and believe in the ability of science to uncover it. Grissom is an older David Duchovny.
I hope you meant Agent Mulder. David Duchovny is an actor.
>>and its near total absence of traditional
>>TV fare like sex
I guess Katz must be a eunic. It's the only explanation for his comment. How many times in one show can they show Marg Helgenberger in a low cut, tight shirt, bend over, exposing the majority of her 'hidden-assets' to the camera?
Please don't take my statement as a critique of the show---it's not. I like the show, just the way it is!