CSI: Crimes Against Television
The Watcher column for the Canberra Times 28 November 2006


It's Gary Sinise I feel sorry for. One minute he was in Forest Gump being called Lieutenant Day-an by Tom Hanks, and the next, he's signed up for CSI New York, and...oh, dear. All the good scriptwriters were taken already. The show's crap. Almost as crap as CSI Miami.

The whole CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) genre follows the success of novels and shows making the coronor a star (on TV it started with Quincy ME and the thread runs through Silent Witness, McCallum, and NCIS). Now it's all glass, chrome, hard edges and stratospherically high-tech forensic investigation nonsense that makes real scientists, detectives and computer folk do snorty-snonking noises when they watch it. If only the real forensic investigators had endless funds and ironed white coats and hair-dos and high-resolution giant screens that can make a convenience store security video look like a BBC wildlife documentary on the leg hairs of insects.

Each version of the CSI franchise starts with a two-generations old but still rocking Who song with fast-cut shots introducing the characters and glossy style. The original CSI, set in Las Vegas, has "Who Are You?", Miami gets "Won't Get Fooled Again", and New York has Baba O'Riley "Out here in the fields..."). Each episode also shows some science experiments set to music.

CSI scientists get to inspect and collect things at the crime scene, interview suspects, and generally caper about with guns, which is, as Kath and Kim would say, different and unusual. Luckily, the crims tend to do stuff like keep carrying the bloodied knife they used to shiv someone the night before.

All the CSIs compensate for lots of screen time in labs by punctuating with golden-dawn helicopter shots of the city the show is supposed to be in. Perhaps all the script money went on pilots. So what's the appeal? Not making the viewer think? Chit-chat about semen deposits? Close-ups of viscera and various other insidey bits? Am I alone in thinking it a tad overly slicey-dicey for a relaxing evening on the couch? Anyhoo, it's making squillions for producer Jerry Bruckheimer and anyone else with a piece of the merchandising. Even author JG Ballard confessed his addiction in the Guardian recently.

The original CSI has the best characters, led by the detached Gus Grissom and the highly strung (and stringy) Catherine Willows, a former "exotic dancer" and single mum. After that it's slim but pretty pickings. It's mainly about the investigations, while the characters' private lives sometimes hove into view like a rhinocerous which blunders into a paddling pool and wonders, along with everyone else, what it's doing there.

Horatio Caine in CSI Miami, played by the gingernut David Caruso who left NYPD Blues as a huge star only to crash and burn in movies, is just plain shocking. He usually puts his sunnies on at the start of an episode to deliver a tedious aphorism or statement of the bleeding obvious. There is a compilation of them on YouTube.

Last week I had another look at CSI Miami, and was rivetted to see that the middle-aged Horatio had obviously taken some avuncular interest in a sweet young woman, possibly helping her with college homework. Could we expect an homage to The Importance of Being Earnest? His jaw twitched emotively when she was shot by one of those plentiful bald druggy men with a goatee called Ramon that seem to be scuttling about Miami in speedboats and four wheel drives and OH MY GOD. She was Horatio's WIFE. Euwww.

The rest of the actors on CSI Miami look like a cross between models and ...other models. It's intriguing: are they just bad actors, so full of Botox they can't emote, or do they avoid making a facial expression in case they roll their eyes at something in the "script"? Lab rat 1: "Guess what I found in my pile of vomit...Ipecac". Lab rat 2: "Hmmm, Ipecac: induces vomiting." Enough already with the what caused the vomiting thing.

All the characters in the CSIs know things they couldn't possibly know, so we get dialogue along the lines of "What's this? Under the victim? It's a nipple tassle. Only one shop in Las Vegas sells this kind of nipple tassle, and and the proprietor speaks Hungarian, drives a Humber Snipe and collects the early work of Yves Tanguy." Dang, I wish I got those powers of deduction from my nipple tassles.

And how about the frozen-faced coronor on CSI Miami who speaks to the corpses like they were contestants in Australian Idol and she's Marcia Hines; "What happened baby? What did somebody do to you? " Does she expect them to come back to life and say "Bad song choice"?

Anyway, back in CSI New York, Gary Sinise looks like he's pondering how to get out of his contract, or say his lines without screaming, "For the love of God, I'm an Academy Award nominee! I've directed 'Of Mice and Men'!". It's like watching Queen Elizabeth keep a straight face during an afternoon tea with chimps.