CSI: It’s Evolution, Baby
I didn’t get into CSI during season one. It was opposite something I watched, or I wasn’t watching TV, or something. I can’t remember now. Around season three Jenn got started watching, and I joined her, then she got the DVDs, and I started watching watching the backlog.
I’m glad I didn’t start watching at the beginning. CSI is a show that got much, much better as it went along. And now Spike (they may have finally stabilized their name), 7.5 years later, is airing season one episodes, and I’m watching with hindsight.
Season one had promise, in a low-budget, ham-handed kind of way. No one really had their characters figured out yet, and were playing off-the-rack stereotypes: Petersen played The Emotionally Disconnected Nerd. Dourdan played The Smooth Brother. Eads played The Cowboy. Guilfoyle played The Grizzled Cop. Eric Szmanda played The Punky Whiz Kid. With Marg Helgenberger, an actress I admire and have watched for years, they never figured out her hair or makeup that season (trying to make her look young, unsuccessfully?) so she seems to come off as The Self-Righteous Bitchy Woman, even though I think that if I were watching blindfolded I’d find her performances more textured. The only one who had her character figured out from the beginning? Jorja Fox, playing a complicated, troubled, multi-layered person with a lot of baggage.
I’m not a fan of her character. When they need a problem on the show, they usually put it on her, maybe because she can act. She was frequently badly-written, sometimes did surprising things, but always somehow made it work. Her character arc became the most complex in the show, and through the whole thing, her character, as a believable human being, was making the journey — it wasn’t just an actor becoming accustomed to new stuff being thrown at her, like it was when Locke punched Charlie (switching shows, but seriously, WTF? Almost couldn’t watch Lost after that.) She’s also the least attractive regular on the show, maybe excepting Wallace Langham, and I like me some eye candy.
Mainly, though, I hate alcoholics on shows, and they made her into one, out of the blue. Writers seem to find them easy to write — maybe more than the fair share through personal experience. But TV alcoholics, almost without fail, are written badly: they’re not really like alcoholics. They’re like self-rationalizations of alcoholics, hammed up for the screen. Denzel in Courage Under Fire and Baldwin on H:LOTS come to mind as two of the very few exceptions in film and television.
The highlight in the first season was probably episode 13, Boom. Magnificent guest performance by the criminally underrated Stephen Lee, and hints at some of the great stuff that was to come. But most notably, in the first season, the characters knew less than they do now.
Much less. Not just simple stuff like having someone on the set to pronounce petechia for the actors. Not just “the audience knows less, so we have to pretend to be learning for the sake of exposition.” Big stuff. Huge stuff. Like the following Grissom (he’s the Nerd) quote:
[I'm thinking about] how amazing the universe is. All made of the same Carbon, from stars to trees, trucks to human bones
Pardon me? Not a chemist here, but let’s do a miniature game of “Daddy, what’s X made of?”
Stars: Hydrogen. Hydrogen plasma, fusing into heavier elements, which are ejected as waste products. H + H = He, H + He = Li, Li + Li = C, so yes, Carbon is being produced, but “made of” implies primacy.
Trees: Sure, structurally they use carbon. But a live tree? Doesn’t it have to be mostly water, and therefore mostly Oxygen? This is the only one that might have more Carbon in it than any other element.
Trucks: Uh, gonna go with Iron. There’s Carbon in the tires, in the gas tank, in the Freon, in the seat liners, but seriously, half a ton, folks. Gonna stick with Iron.
Human Bones: Oh, for Pete’s sake. Calcium. Everyone knows that, right?
I may be wrong there somewhere, but I’m damn sure righter than Grissom.
Duchovny of The X-Files once responded to a question about the premise of his own show as follows: “It’s about a fictional world with alien visitations and supernatural phenomena.” CSI is fiction of the same sort. Perhaps the biggest and most harmful fiction? The idea that, every time a dead body is found, a team of top-notch (at least starting season three) scientists swoop in and do their magic, then interrogate the suspects and arrest them. In the meantime, they engage in shootings, restrain violent people, and so forth. Kinda funny how on Law and Order: Criminal Intent, the detectives do all the sleuthing, including evidence collection and examination, along with the cop stuff. Oh, and on House, the overqualified doctors perform the MRIs, CAT scans, defibrillation, and blood draws. That’s why the original Law & Order was a neat premise: two very different teams, doing very different jobs, in the same episode.
In the real world, when you die, a team of scientists does not step in. Not even detectives. Bumbling cops do, they contaminate evidence, do wacky stuff like tell bystanders to hold the victim’s wallet while they dig in their own pockets (true!), and on, and on, and on. I understand the need to reassign roles a bit, for effect, to give your actors camera time. But to go as far as Skeptical Inquirer did by calling CSI one of the best things on television because science was put first? Maybe if it were real science. I’m not sure CSI is helping.
(I know I’m off the rails here with posting. Bear with me. Save up the posts if you want. I’m probably going to crash eventually and mcgees.org will be silent for two months.)
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January 29th, 2008 at 7:24 am