Original CSI pioneered technique, odd plots
Landmark drama to be toe-tagged in two-hour finale
A landmark television drama is headed toward its conclusion. And no, we’re not talking about Mad Men.
CBS says CSI: Crime Scene Investigation will end its 15-year run with a two-hour TV movie airing in September. Original series stars William Petersen (Gil Grissom) and Marg Helgenberger (Catherine Willows) will return for the finale.
Set in a Las Vegas crime lab, CSI was such a successful mass-market show and spawned so many spinoffs (Miami, New York and now Cyber) that it’s easy to forget just how surprising and original the series was. Its look, setting and central themes were all distinctive.
“I need that cinematic look in television,” producer Jerry Bruckheimer told the pilot’s director Danny Cannon. Cannon, who directed 25 episodes, shot on Super 35mm film stock and manipulated the colour in post-production to heighten visual impact.
One of his tricks was to adjust the blacks, creating what he described in a DVD extra as “a graduated filter that goes all the way around the lens and draws your eyes into the centre of it.”
On CSI, the tedious job of processing evidence — kept off-screen in most cop shows — was glamorized in dramatically lit montages, as mysterious and alluring as studio-era Hollywood portraits. But here the work, not the actor, was the star.
“While scenes about sifting evidence might be all ‘talk’ in other crime series, in CSI they are all about ‘show,’” media-studies scholar Sue Turnbull says in a 2007 essay. (For better and worse, CSI also taught viewers that databases are omniscient and always work like magic.)
Although CSI may now seem like a cosy retreat, in its early days the show’s graphic depiction of corpses also pushed the boundaries of prime-time gore. (Who could forget the bloated body rotting in a bathtub?) When a rookie investigator vomited in the pilot episode, she was standing in for an audience unaccustomed to seeing blue-veined bodies cut up on coroner’s slabs. And yes, the vomit was equally explicit.
And then there were the signature “CSI shots,” whizzing through blood vessels, tracking bullets as they burst through flesh or were fired in test tanks, magnifying hair follicles 1,000 times, penetrating the secrets of floorboards and walls. In the real Las Vegas, the spectacle is on a grand scale. On CSI, it was microscopic. “We took the camera where it had never been before,” Cannon said.
Las Vegas proved an ingenious venue, offering an unusual range of possible plots. While some episodes featured aspiring, current or washed-up entertainers, many depicted a mythic U.S. city in a resolutely unmythic way — as a place of suburban tract homes where ordinary people made middle-class lives dealing cards and waiting tables. When the real estate bust tanked the real-life Las Vegas economy, the show took up that theme as well.
Some of the most memorable episodes used Las Vegas as a gathering place where people who were in some way unusual sought fellowship. Plots brought viewers into conventions of furries and chess players, dwarfs and obese people, science-fiction fans and wordgame contestants. However rare their enthusiasms or bodies might be, these individuals always turned out to share universal human emotions and motivations — including, of course, potentially deadly ones.
A show that introduced its heroes with a beat cop’s dismissive “Here comes the nerd squad” was bound to take a tolerant, even celebratory, view of oddballs. Grissom, the team’s leader for the first nine years and the show’s moral centre long after his departure, was a stereotypical eccentric scientist — with an important difference. Unlike the often-cruel Sherlock Holmes archetype, his strangeness made him not merely perceptive but kind. He developed a huge fan base, particularly among female viewers.