CSI SIGNS OFF
Unlikely hit wraps after 15 seasons
There was scant evidence suggesting it would be a hit.
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation was a last-minute pickup by CBS, plugged into a Friday lineup whose widely forecast surefire hit would be a reboot of The Fugitive, not a quirky little drama dwelling on hair fibres and blood spatter.
“I thought it was never going to succeed,” Jorja Fox says.
At the time she had a recurring role on The West Wing as a Secret Service agent, “but I thought, ‘How fun would it be just to take this ride for a little while!’ By Christmas, I figured I would be back on The West Wing.”
“I figured there would be an audience for it,” William Petersen says, “among those people who do crossword puzzles. I never thought the audience would also be everyone who’s NEVER done a crossword puzzle!”
Though set in Las Vegas, CSI occupies the world of forensic investigators who solve criminal cases not in the streets or an interrogation room, but in the lab, where the truth reveals itself in the evidence they probe.
Debuting in October 2000, CSI was an out-of-nowhere smash. (The Fugitive flopped.) But that was just for starters. It would spawn two long-running spinoffs, set in Miami and New York, and recently gave birth to a third, CSI: Cyber, which now will survive it as the 15-season run of the original CSI comes to an end Sunday with a series finale.
The two-hour farewell brings back bygone stars including Marg Helgenberger (who played Catherine Willows until departing three seasons ago) and Petersen (who headlined for eight-plus seasons as lab boss Gil Grissom). At least two regulars declined to return: George Eads as Nick Stokes and Elizabeth Shue as Finn.
Petersen recalled that in 2000 he was looking for a TV series, “but I didn’t want to play a lawyer, a cop or a divorced dad. CSI was something different and while we didn’t know what it was going to be, we wanted a chance to figure it out.”
He got his chance and loved the experience, he says, then moved on in 2008 to pursue theatre work.
Being back on the CSI set for the finale “was like no time had passed,” he says. “It felt like yesterday.”
“It was a delight to be back with Billy,” Helgenberger says. “We always had great chemistry. He’s a funny guy and I laugh at all his jokes.”
But as the series marks the end, some viewers thought they’d never see, the inevitable question arises: Why was CSI so big, for so long?
Petersen observes that just weeks after CSI premiered, a much-disputed presidential election left many U.S. voters confused and disillusioned. The terrorist attacks the following September traumatized millions.
This all cemented a period of what Petersen calls “postmodern vagueness,” with people doubting themselves and their world and wondering, “What does it mean? What does it matter? Where is the truth?”
“What our show did was give you the truth. You can be confused about many things, but this little piece of lint that we found on the floor, you can count on that. Granted, it was just one small truth about one particular case, but it was something you could touch and see and trust in.”
“The show had a new way of coming at crime and murder and mayhem,” says Ted Danson, who joined the series in Season 12 as D.B. Russell and now is a star of the Cyber spinoff.
“Taking a scientific point of view on a crime show was new back then and allowed viewers into the darker side of life in a way that wasn’t just cops and robbers.”
“On pretty much every show we got the guy, thanks to irrefutable science,” Helgenberger says.
“We made science fun and interesting.”
Even now, when science has fallen into disfavour among many — people for whom what you believe overrules what science proves — CSI still champions the scientific method in the face of its cultural assault.