Quotes of the Day
It's a beautiful day in New York City, and Gary Sinise and Melina Kanakaredes are spending it on a garbage barge docked on the East River. They're shooting on location for CSI: New York, and the pair has found a lovely corpse in fishnet stockings among the trash. Fortunately for them, it's "clean" trash — Pampers boxes, garbage bags filled with paper wads. When the crew used a barge filled with real garbage on CSI: Miami, it found a bloated dead rat that — waste not, want not — it used in the scene.
Executive producer Anthony Zuiker gleefully surveys the set, complete with a Coast Guard helicopter thundering overhead and Coast Guard and N.Y.P.D. boats offshore. "They gave us a chopper and two cutters — no charge!" he says. "How cool is that?"
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Way cool, if you get past the nagging worry that in a city at terrorism-alert orange, the hardware might be better used for, oh, guarding the coast. But when you've achieved CSI's level of success, everyone wants to give you a 21-gun salute. Your viewers do; they made CSI the most popular drama on TV and its two sequels, Miami and New York, instant Top 10 hits. Your network does; chairman Leslie Moonves of CBS approved the New York spin-off in a meeting that essentially consisted of his asking Zuiker to pick a city. "You can't overestimate how important the CSI franchise is to us," says Moonves. "It is the linchpin of the resurrection of this network." Your peers do; at this year's Emmys, the original CSI was nominated for Best Drama for the third year in a row. And if imitation is TV's highest compliment, you need only read the listings to see the crime spree the networks are on.
And why not? CSI and its cohort have taught TV new visual tricks, raised its production standards and perhaps shown the dinosaur networks a way to survive the swarm of nimble cable competitors. The CSIs have made network drama more consistent. But they have also — cop show after doctor-cop show after military-cop show — made it more homogeneous. They have taught TV to tell entertaining, simple stories without dumbing them down — and left the networks uninterested in much besides simple stories. The CSI effect has produced TV that looks 21st century but is as conventional as a rerun of Mannix. In some ways CSI is among the best that network drama has to offer, and it is evidence of how limited the networks' idea of "best" has become.
Within a few months in the year 2000, CBS debuted two series that not only turned around a limping network but also reshaped network TV. The effect of the first — Survivor — and of the dozens of reality shows that followed it was quick and obvious. But the second — CSI: Crime Scene Investigation — got little initial attention, even from CBS. CSI proved a dream marriage of the edgy and the safe: an old-fashioned whodunit, set in sexy Las Vegas, that wouldn't alienate CBS's Murder, She Wrote demographic but geeky enough — scientists wielding swabs, not guns — to attract the passionate audience of a cult show.
It also had executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer, who as producer of Top Gun and Pirates of the Caribbean knows how well American audiences like a spectacle. CSI looks like high-quality TV, which is to say, it looks expensive. Bruckheimer and his associates talk about creating "feature television"--delivering a movie experience on the small screen. And when Bruckheimer talks about the movie experience, he ain't talking about Lost in Translation. "It has to do with engaging your senses," he says. "It's not only titillating you with the visuals and the design and the cinematography, which we do, but the audio — sound effects and music — are very important, because they embellish the drama our writers create." Like summer studio pictures, the CSIs are largely "made" in postproduction.
And it shows. Visually, the CSIs are the most beautifully composed series on the networks. Each has its own color palette — neon for the original, set in Vegas; warm and tropical for Miami; metallic for New York — like the packaging for different flavors of chips (think of them as Original, Spicy Fiesta and Cool Ranch). And the special effects, which make the camera seem to zoom through blood vessels or the fiery barrel of a gun — render the forensic science more real than any dry technical explanation. The overexposed flashback images look like music videos, the lurid anatomical closeups like art film, the lab scenes like a lush photo shoot: cerulean blue trays, crystal glass, ruby chunks of human tissue laid out like a $300 sushi course.
But in TV, art follows business, and CSI — and its descendants, like CBS's Bruckheimer-produced Without a Trace and Cold Case-- are above all damn fine business. The shows follow the procedural format pioneered by Dragnet 50 years ago: crime stories, completely wrapped up in one episode, with minimal attention to the inner lives of any of the characters. A serial drama — say, Six Feet Under or 24--requires that you watch every week and pay close attention. That's a tall order given the competition from cable to the Internet to plain old busy work schedules, and networks are increasingly afraid that viewers will miss episodes, fall behind and give up. "There is now the S word — serialization — that the networks are terrified of," says J.J. Abrams, creator and executive producer of Alias and Lost. On the other hand, procedurals "are easy to digest," says Peter Jankowski, an executive producer of NBC's three Law & Order series. A fourth, Trial by Jury, is coming in midseason.
For the same reason, procedurals do better in reruns and syndication. This is especially important when sitcoms are in a years-long slump and reality shows usually don't rerun at all. Also, because viewers are drawn more by the crimes than the characters, the shows are less vulnerable to Friends-style salary hijackings. Last summer, when CSI co-stars George Eads and Jorja Fox held out for raises, they were quickly fired. (They later settled and were rehired.)
The revival of the just-the-facts procedural began with NBC's powerhouse Law & Order (L&O) in 1990, but it took nine years for creator Dick Wolf to spin off Special Victims Unit, and the series was never widely imitated before the CSI explosion. Now the schedule is so crowded with procedurals that CSI: NY had to debut against the original L&O. To the surprise of TV analysts, it beat the veteran in its first outing and most weeks since. Even so, some within the CSI family have been worried about overextending; original CSI star William Petersen has publicly chided CBS for diluting the brand. (Petersen and co-star Marg Helgenberger refused interview requests for this article; a network representative explained that they don't do interviews for stories not exclusively about "their" CSI.)
And CSI's DNA is in more than cop shows. Even new medical series — such as NBC's hit Medical Investigation and Fox's upcoming House, in which doctors hunt down disease outbreaks abetted by the latest medical, and special-effects, technology — are structured like cop procedurals. You can see the influence in a show like NBC's Las Vegas, the sophomore hit about casino security that like CSI combines frisky visual effects and over-in-an-hour stories. What goes around, comes right back to Vegas.
Simple, unchallenging procedurals and self-contained dramas were standard fare about 30 years ago — think of Cannon, Columbo and Fantasy Island. That began to change, in part because of prime-time soaps like Dallas but especially because of one show, Steven Bochco's Hill Street Blues, which debuted on NBC in January 1981. Hill Street told stories, unfolding over several episodes and even years, that were about more than the caper of the week. They were about politics, cops' psychology and the social and racial contexts of crime and law. Demanding a greater commitment from viewers, the show delivered a bigger payoff.
After Hill Street came a string of dramas that broke with the procedural format to tell complex stories with deeply developed characters: St. Elsewhere, L.A. Law, Wiseguy, thirtysomething, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, NYPD Blue, The X-Files, My So-Called Life, Ally McBeal, The West Wing. This is not to say that the '80s and '90s were some kind of Renaissance — we have not forgotten Models Inc. But these shows believed that drama was first about character — fleshing out a set of people, week after week — and that human behavior was ultimately a more engaging mystery than any murder or virus (even if the shows were about murders or viruses).
In contrast, we know the investigators like we know our coworkers, as sets of tidbits and quirks — Horatio Caine (David Caruso) is divorced; Gil Grissom (Petersen) is an atheist — but the job comes first, second and third. L&O's cops are even less well defined, and that has helped the show survive the gradual loss of its original cast. (This season Dennis Farina replaced long-timer Jerry Orbach.)
For TV writers who want to tell more involved stories — who have had reality TV eat into their mortgage payments — the CSI-ization of the networks has been trouble. David E. Kelley established himself with character dramas like Picket Fences and The Practice. The year before CSI's debut he had five shows on the networks. Today he has one — ABC's Boston Legal — and a reality show about lawyers in the works for NBC. Last year his family drama The Brotherhood of Poland, N.H. was blown off the air by Law & Order after just four weeks. "Ten or 15 years ago," he says, "a show like Poland would have had a chance to cultivate a constituency. And that's what character-driven shows need — to get an audience invested in the people, which happens over a series of episodes." Later this season Bochco will debut Blind Justice, an ABC drama about a sightless cop. It looks to be much less serial than his NYPD Blue (which goes off the air after this season); it also uses nifty visual effects to show how its lead "sees" a crime scene that look a lot like ... CSI.
Ironically, executive producer Zuiker says that CSI: NY is meant to be more "character driven" than its two siblings. Sinise's character, Detective Mac Taylor, we learn, lost his wife in the World Trade Center. In the first episode, Taylor describes throwing out all his wife's effects except a beach ball she blew up the weekend before she died. "Her breath is still in there," he says. The promise of emotional scenes, says Sinise, helped persuade the Oscar nominee and Golden Globe and Emmy winner to take a role that still largely involves staring very, very seriously at garbage. That, the Bruckheimer pedigree and the relative job security. "It seemed like the right thing for my family," he says. "It shoots in Los Angeles"--with occasional location shoots in New York City--"and that's where my kids are."
Still, Taylor's story is nothing like the layered look at 9/11 trauma, for instance, in the FX fire-fighter drama Rescue Me. Taylor's reminiscence doesn't teach us much about Taylor except that he's really sad, and the episodes still mostly follow the CSI crime-science-confession formula. Indeed, everyone connected with CSI: NY stresses it will still be mainly a procedural, and with good reason. The franchise has dabbled before in the personal lives of its characters; the original CSI tried a continuing story line in which Grissom began to lose his hearing. "We were fascinated by the idea of, What if a crime-scene investigator like Grissom were to lose one of his five senses?" says Zuiker. "How would that impact his ability to be perceptive?" But fans griped that the story arc detracted from CSI's no-hugging-no-learning ethos. One quick bout of ear surgery later, as Zuiker diplomatically puts it, "we moved on."
It is, of course, possible to use crime stories to take a deeper look into human motives and conditions; that's the difference between NBC's Law & Order and Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. But cop shows that do that — like complex, character-based dramas generally — are on cable. FX's The Shield — about politics, corruption and nobility in a dangerous L.A. precinct — has its share of grisly, surprise-twist murder investigations, but above all, it's a multifaceted story about how we want (as opposed to how we claim we want) police to use power at a time of anxiety. Last season's story line about a male police captain who is raped on the job — and deals with his shame and rage afterward — was more intriguing than any network story arc last year, and would have been impossible to tell in 44 neat minutes on a procedural, even if it had made it past the network censors.
On HBO, meanwhile, the best cop drama — the best drama, period — now on TV, The Wire (currently airing its third season) is essentially the anti-CSI. Each season — set in the drug-flooded inner city of Baltimore, Md.--deals with a single investigation, solved or unsolved, not with technical wizardry but through stakeouts, wiretaps and paperwork. It ties together a staggering array of characters — jaded detectives, career-climbing captains, ambitious city councilmen, aimless corner kids, junkies, union bosses, drug lords — all with distinctive voices, humanity and dignity. Executive producer David Simon, a former Baltimore crime reporter, says the series is only nominally a cop show but rather a story about "how the working class has been betrayed" and how institutions — from companies to police departments to gangs — fail the little guy. "I wanted to make a show," he says, "where in the beginning people wonder if the cops will catch the bad guy but by the end of a season start to wonder what a bad guy is and whether it matters at all whether you catch him or not."
It's also one of only a few TV dramas with numerous intriguing, well-fleshed-out black and poor characters. "One of the problems with the American cop show is that we have demonized the underclass and made them out to be subhuman," says Simon.
The Wire is more explicitly political than one could fairly expect a mainstream network show, which needs a bigger audience, to be. The current season questions, among other things, whether enforcing drug laws does any good. But cop shows — which, coincidentally or not, multiplied after 9/11--inevitably play off the anxieties of the day. L&O creator Wolf has said that his series benefited from more conservative attitudes toward crime — the very title recalls Nixon's '68 campaign. Then again, in an L&O episode last season, Orbach and Jesse L. Martin traded cracks about the war in Iraq, with Martin's character saying Bush had "lied to us."
Today's cop shows aren't usually so strident, but the legacy of 9/11 arises, directly or obliquely. On the one hand, in a powerful episode of Without a Trace, a Muslim doctor is mistaken for a terrorist and gunned down after someone overhears him joke about "blowing up" Shea Stadium. (He's a baseball fan and thinks it's a lousy park.) In a more Ashcroftian vein, on CSI: Miami, a child is abducted from a Chuck E. Cheese — like establishment, and the CSI techs close the building to keep anyone from leaving. A law student pipes up that the lockdown is unconstitutional — which it is — but he's portrayed as a selfish crybaby, unwilling to pipe down for the greater good. The war on terrorism may have superseded the war on urban crime, but the arguments are the same. Do you want to be free or safe? Do you attack root causes or crack down on offenders? Should you be worried about why people do evil or only how? Is it prudent, or is it bleeding heart, to try to understand criminals — or, put another way, to ask, "Why do they hate us?" On this, the network procedurals are united: they're not too concerned with deeply understanding anyone, cop or criminal.
With CSI, Bruckheimer said he wanted to bring the movies to TV, and he succeeded perhaps more completely than he intended. In the TV universe after CSI, the big "studios" (read: the major networks) are where you go for Bruckheimerian spectacles, with big-name actors, eye-popping visual effects and a generous helping of music to do the emotional lifting. The "indies" (read: cable) are where you go for character studies, with generally plain visuals but novelistic attention to dialogue and psychology. The CSIs are not dumb shows; they're brisk, entertaining, full of scientific detail and thankfully low on cornball melodrama. But you can watch them while paying your utility bills, and these days, that's what keeps the stockholders happy.
There are signs, though, that the CSI effect may have started to peak. Even as CSI: NY became an instant hit this fall, ABC had two surprise Top 10 hits with Lost and Desperate Housewives — ambitious, demanding serial dramas as unlike CSI as anything else on the networks (see box). CSI, CSI: Miami and Without a Trace still dominate the Nielsen's top five, but it may be that mass audiences are ready for something more than "just the facts, ma'am."
TV would be better off for it. There's a famous line used in another New York cop show, Naked City: "There are 8 million stories in the naked city." What that means — or should, anyway — is not that there are 8 million potential victims of really cool murders involving carpet fibers and arcane poisons. Rather, there are 8 million people, and any ordinary person — a cop, a plumber, a teacher — can, if you spend enough time with him or her and ask the right questions, be as fascinating as any whodunit. (This is one reason that, for all their detractors, reality shows are as popular and often absorbing as they are.) Good mysteries like CSI belong on TV. But so do the subtler stories — the kind that remind us that the most amazing secrets inside the human animal are ones that you cannot find with a microscope.
- James Poniewozik