Jerry Bruckheimer shouldn't be able to make television shows. Television characters deal with issues by having conversations; guys in Bruckheimer movies solve problems by blowing them up. If all TV shows were Bruckheimerian, Ross Geller's brains would have been splattered all over that giant Friends apartment by season two. But somehow Bruckheimer, the most successful producer in film history, with $12.5 billion in worldwide box-office receipts from movies such as Top Gun, Armageddon and Con Air, is on his way to becoming the most successful producer in the history of TV. He's the first to have three shows hit the Top 10 simultaneously: CBS's CSI, CSI: Miami and Without a Trace. And he has done it with shockingly few large-scale weapons.
Lots of people from the feature-film business have tried to create television shows, and the vast majority have failed. Most of them, deep down, thought network television was a wasteland that would be awed by 44-minute versions of their films. But Bruckheimer likes TV. He just wants to make TV that looks better and moves faster. "I don't want my butt to hurt," says Bruckheimer, 57. "I just want to keep the story moving. I try to take the air out, just like in our movies." All three of his shows start at point A and end, completely resolved an hour later, at point B. "The pitch for Without a Trace was a magazine thrown on my desk with the headline WHERE IS CHANDRA LEVY?" says Warner Bros. Television president Peter Roth about the missing-persons show. "The one-line pitch was 'Whoever finds her.' I thought, Absolutely, yes, yes, yes." CSI, a forensics-lab cop show, was inspired by Barry Scheck's testimony in the O.J. Simpson case. Like Law & Order, which steals from the New York Times, Bruckheimer also steals from the news, only his source material is the tabloid New York Post.
What separates Bruckheimer shows from the competition is a big-budget ethic. "I remember trying to imagine the world of the show in preproduction," says CSI: Miami star David Caruso. "My wife and I were driving toward the set, and we saw these four brand-new pewter-colored hummers. Then we realized they were for our show, and we said, 'That is Jerry Bruckheimer.'" The CSI set could serve as one of the country's best crime labs, since it boasts cutting-edge equipment donated by publicity-seeking manufacturers. Bruckheimer films might be mocked by other producers for being simpleminded but never for being simply executed. "Not all of his movies represent the highest quality," says Without a Trace star Anthony LaPaglia, who was hesitant about acting in a television show, Bruckheimer or not. "But they always look amazing. I knew at least with Jerry that at worst I'd have a show with great postproduction."