Q&A Hollywood
Q: Is there any reason why “CSI: NY” is not showing any reruns? I see all the other CSIs but not New York.
A: There’s no easy answer to this one, and there almost never will be because there are so many different factors for why a show is (or isn’t) rerun.
On the seller’s side, for example, there’s who owns the rights, what they paid to get them, what they charge for licensing fees, and more. On the buyer’s (broadcaster) side, there’s the same license-fee question, but also who they think their audience is (an inexact science) and what they think they want (an even less exact science).
Multiply those factors by the number of different channels that play reruns and by the ever-increasing number of shows available for syndication, and you get to the point where a show’s chances of being run are close to random, mathematically speaking.
Your point about the other spinoffs is interesting, though. If the game is random, why do the other CSIs keep winning?
There are some things going against “CSI: NY,” the main one being it was less popular than the original version and “CSI: Miami.” (I’m not even going to talk about “CSI: Cyber,” which didn’t produce enough episodes for regular syndication.)
It also produced fewer episodes — it ran for nine seasons, compared to 10 for “Miami,” and a whopping 15 plus a movie for the original show. More episodes is generally better for a show going into repeats because it gets less, well, repetitive.
The other two shows are also just a little more iconic. Though “NY” star Gary Sinise (“Apollo 13,” 1995) can be fun to watch, the image of “Miami’s” Horatio Caine (David
Caruso, “NYPD Blue”) taking off his sunglasses to make a bad pun before that song by The Who kicks in is a symbol of the franchise that even non-fans recognize. And the original will always be the original. “NY” just can’t top that.
Q: Between his role as Spider-Man and his epic “Lip Sync Battle” performance, Tom Holland seems to be pretty gifted with his acrobatics. Was he a dancer or something beforehand?
A: Not “or” — he was a dancer and more.
You’re right to grab on to the dancing aspect first, though. Vox did the same thing in a fawning article explaining why Tom Holland is a better Spider-Man than predecessors Tobey Maguire (in the mid-2000s series of films) and Andrew Garfield (in the early 2010s films).
Prior to becoming part of the highest-grossing film franchise of all time, Holland was a stage actor who also did gymnastics and parkour running. His stage work required him to study classical dance as well, particularly for his role in the
London stage adaptation of “Billy Elliot,” about a miner’s son who becomes a ballet dancer.
“Gymnastics and parkour are valuable skills for any action performer to have, but actors must be able to emote through that movement if they’re going to headline an entire franchise,” the Vox critic Oliver Sava said. “That’s where dance comes in.”
Sava goes on to talk about the challenge of communicating emotion while wearing a full-body costume, and how the Spider-Man character’s whole superpower is based on movement and use of space (that is to say, wall-crawling).
And, yes, we did see some more of this dance background in his beltwinning performance on Spike TV’s “Lip Sync Battle,” where he turned in an overthe-top mashup of “Singin’ in the Rain” and Rihanna’s pop hit “Umbrella.”