>On this note, stuck in hotel teevee land, i see CSI all over the place.
>What in dog's name is the appeal of that show?
Since I turned cable back on to watch the Sopranos I've seen a few of these on reruns. The one in Las Vegas is not bad. I think part of the appeal is there's no time spent on the characters private lives. It's just straight investigation and detail about the science of it. J.G. Ballard has a more philosophical take:
>In cold blood
>
>
>It has no car chases, no shoot-outs, no emotions. So what makes
>Crime Scene Investigation so utterly compelling? The answer, writes
>JG Ballard, goes to the heart of our most basic fears
>
>Saturday June 25, 2005
>Guardian Unlimited
>
>
>Television today is an ageing theme park, which we visit out of
>habit rather than in hope of finding anything fresh and original. At
>times I think that the era of television is over, but then it
>suddenly comes up with something rich and strange. A few years ago,
>hunting the outer darkness of Channel 5, I began to linger over a
>series called C.S.I: Crime Scene Investigation. After only a few
>episodes I was completely hooked, for reasons I don't understand even today.
>
>Set in Las Vegas, the series described the work of the police
>department's forensics team, a strictly tweezers and litmus paper
>operation where guilt or innocence hang on having the right kind of
>sand in your turnups. Lurid computer graphics provided flashbacks to
>the actual homicides, a stomach-churning revelation of what actually
>happens when an axe strikes the back of the skull, or a corrosive
>gas gets to work on the lungs. The series was original, slick and
>deeply disturbing, though I wasn't too keen to find out why.
>
>At least I wasn't the only one to be hooked. Two years ago C.S.I.
>climbed to the top of the audience ratings in America, and its
>success led to C.S.I. Miami and a third spin-off, C.S.I. New York.
>Now, as part of its Crime Season 2005, London's NFT is hosting The
>C.S.I. Phenomenon, a weekend devoted to the show with Quentin
>Tarantino as a guest. But for all its success, C.S.I. is a very
>unusual series, and a mystery in its own right. I suspect that it
>taps deeply into the collective unconscious of the TV audience, as
>did Sex and the City and Big Brother, but in a far more sinister way.
>
>What is so unsettling about the series? First of all, there are the
>locales, which are not what they seem. The Vegas series and C.S.I.
>Miami are set in the two strangest cities in America, but take no
>advantage whatever of their bizarre ecologies. The reason, of
>course, is that they are filmed in Los Angeles and rarely come
>anywhere near Las Vegas or Miami, unlike Hawaii Five-O and Miami
>Vice, which were shot on the spot, and where the lush flora and
>fauna helped to authenticate even the most improbable storylines.
>
>But this shunning of the real Vegas and Miami has its advantages.
>The air in LA is grey and dusty compared with the desert glare of
>Las Vegas and the spectral whiteness of Miami Beach. So C.S.I.,
>taking the same dim view of daylight as Count Dracula, stays indoors
>whenever it can.
>
>The series unfolds within an almost totally interiorised world, a
>clue to its real significance. The crimes - they are all homicides -
>take place in anonymous hotel rooms and in the tract housing of the
>Vegas and Miami suburbs, almost never in a casino or druglord's
>gaudy palace. A brutal realism prevails, the grimmest in any crime
>series. Suburban lounges and that modern station of the cross, the
>hotel bathroom, are the settings of horrific murders, which
>thankfully are over by the time each episode begins. Gloves donned,
>the cast dismantle u-bends and plunge up to their elbows in toilet
>bowls, retrieving condoms, diaphragms and bullet casings, syringes,
>phials and other signs of the contemporary zodiac. Faecal matter and
>toilet paper are never shown, perhaps reflecting American
>squeamishness, though evidence of anal intercourse and vaginal
>bruising is snapped out like the tennis scores.
>
>If the crime scene is brightly lit, the outdoor world is always
>dark. A car crash or street shooting always takes place at night,
>when the city seems deserted and dead. Light and safety are found
>only in the crime lab, among its high-tech scanners and its ruthless
>deconstruction of human trauma. This rejection of the outside world
>eliminates the need for transport, and there are no cars in the
>C.S.I. series. David Caruso, who plays the head of the Miami team,
>sometimes turns up in a vast Hummer, an armoured vehicle that
>transforms a quiet Miami suburb into a bomb-ridden quarter of
>Baghdad, as if underlining the hostility of the external world.
>
>The complete absence of cars touches a nerve of anxiety in the
>viewer. Television crime series, from Felony Squad and The Rockford
>Files to our own Z Cars and The Sweeney, were filled with their huge
>carapaces, swerving in and out of alleys, reversing in a howl of
>burning rubber. Watched with the sound down, episodes of Starsky and
>Hutch resembled instructional films on valet parking. The
>identification of car and hero reached its apotheosis in the 1970s
>series Vegas, where the playboy private eye played by the affable
>Robert Urich actually parked his car inside his living room,
>stretched out beside him like a faithful bloodhound.
>
>In C.S.I., not only are there no cars, but there are no guns. The
>team wear sidearms, but I have rarely seen a gun drawn in
>self-defence, let alone fired. The only bullets discharged end up in
>calibrated water tanks. The assumption is clearly made that reason
>and logic need never rely on anything so crude as brute force. No
>cars, no guns and, even more significant, no emotions, except in the
>flashbacks to the actual crime.
>
>Every viewer knows that the only people who show emotion in C.S.I.
>are about to be dead. This lack of emotion extends to the cast, who
>never display a flicker of anger or revulsion. None of the team have
>relationships with each other, and there are few rivalries and no
>affairs. We never see where they live and know nothing about them.
>Gil Grissom, the head of the C.S.I. team played by William Petersen,
>is a likeable but hermetic figure who will throw out a Shakespeare
>quote or a tag from Rousseau as he peers into his microscope, but he
>remains sealed inside his quest for the truth. The queenly Marg
>Helgenberger, who plays Grissom's number two, is a former "exotic
>dancer", a single mother with a daughter we never see. Her
>speciality is "blood spatter analysis".
>
>Still, this reticence contrasts favourably with the demented
>profligacy of The Bill, with its cast of murderers, psychopaths,
>child molesters and arsonists, all of them in police uniform and all
>emotionally interlocked with each other. New arrivals at Sun Hill
>station are ruthlessly asset-stripped of whatever weaknesses they
>try to hide and then discarded. Emotion rules rather than reason.
>Characterisation, we are always told, is the key to drama, but this
>is a literary notion that serves the interests of unimaginative
>novelists. In any case, it is untrue to life, where we can work with
>people in the same office for years, or even share the same bed in a
>tolerable marriage, and know next to nothing about their real
>characters until a sudden crisis occurs.
>
>Given that there are no interesting characters, no car chases or
>shoot-outs, no violently stirred emotions and no dramatic action,
>why is the C.S.I. series so riveting? What is it that grips us to
>the end of the episode, which is scarcely more than an elaborate
>crossword puzzle with human tissues in the place of clues? My guess
>is that the answer lies in the inner sanctum at the heart of all
>three series - the autopsy room. Here the victims surrender all that
>is left of their unique identities, revealing the wounds and medical
>anomalies that led to their demise. Once they have been dissected -
>their ribcages opened like suitcases, brains lifted from their
>craniums, tissues analysed into their basic components - they have
>nothing left, not even the faintest claim on existence.
>
>I suspect that the cadavers waiting their turn on the tables are
>surrogates for ourselves, the viewers. The real crime the C.S.I.
>team is investigating, weighing every tear, every drop of blood,
>every smear of semen, is the crime of being alive. I fear that we
>watch, entranced, because we feel an almost holy pity for ourselves
>and the oblivion patiently waiting for us.