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MURDER IS FUNNY! There have been many rich, subtle explorations of crime on TV. CSI is not one of them. The scripts are brisk, jargonish--"vic" for victim--and businesslike (except for Grissom's occasional sermonette about religion or man's animal nature). The tone is smart, as opposed to intellectual. But the show does offer black-humor dialogue with camp appeal: you can count on at least one groan-inducing zinger per episode, as when a CSI, scouring a crime scene for broken pieces of teeth, deadpans that she's on a quest for "the tooth, the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth."
IT'S THE CORPSES, STUPID. On CSI, each victim's body is a rich source of detail, a novel in which the investigators read about deception and murder. The lead characters are another matter. They're sexy and likable but self-effacingly undeveloped. The series tosses us a tidbit every now and then--Grissom is a lapsed Catholic, Willows used to be a stripper--but the show is least original when it delves into their private lives. Yet the CSIs' parsimonious back stories can make for tantalizing enigmas. Is Grissom sweet on Sara (Jorja Fox)? Will Warrick (Gary Dourdan) pursue his love of jazz? The actors don't know, and the scripts may never tell. It can be tough to play such lightly sketched characters, says Helgenberger: "You want to sink your teeth into a scene." But for fans of CSI's high-tech mysteries, this is no problem. They know that the most interesting people on CSI are dead.
--Reported by Leslie Berestein/Los Angeles