What It Takes to Make ‘CSI’ Not Suck
In the vast realm of popular culture, there’s very little I hate more than the CSI juggernaut*, but recently I’ve found myself obsessed with the Miami flavor. I can’t tolerate anything other than this one because it always seems to me that the cast goes wildly over-the-top because the performances are secretly tongue-in-cheek. They always have these little grins on their faces, which may or may not be the excessive botox and facelifts the regular cast members have obviously undergone, that makes me think they’re going to crack up as soon as they cut. I have to believe this is the case to keep my sanity.
The other series, which I’ve sampled on occasionally out of curiosity, don’t hold up nearly as well because there’s a different kind of attitude to the cast — a smugness, as if they really feel they’re a part of something important. I guess you could argue that it’s important to bring joy to tens of millions of Americans who like the kind of TV you can watch while doing the laundry and making dinner, but I like something a little more substantive. Even the Seagal movies I’ve raved about lately, while ridiculous and implausible, are at least attempting to get at something resembling a higher truth — exposing rampant police and government corruption, oil companies fucking over both Native Americans and the environment, and so on — while the CSI shows are content to play out the same basic ideas over and over again (to be fair, the Law & Order shows on NBC are equally guilty of this, and more than anything else so is American Idol). Making crimes ridiculously over-the-top is not a substitute for quality, especially since it always turns out to be the first person they interview, played by an actor so cartoonishly evil any good detective would hold them in interrogation until they break them.
Well, recently I decided to take a look at the two-part fifth-season finale. Quentin Tarantino directed both episodes, and while I enjoy his movies I should say upfront that I’m not really an obsessive, Tarantino-defending fanboy. I downloaded these particular episodes for what the Internet has declared CSI: Original Recipe’s crowning moment: Gil Grissom’s eleventh-hour antgasm. It was as funny as I expected, but it also disappointed me…
…because the episodes themselves were actually kinda good.
I can think of two simple reasons for the surprising quality. First, each episode had almost nothing to do with lab work. The thing that sinks most CSI episodes is the cartoonishly over-the-top crimes. Yes, the crimes have to get sort of wild in order for them to be solved using most likely inaccurate science!!!, but these shows take it to extremes that make Agatha Christie’s weirdest shit sound reasonable. It doesn’t help that the lab tests these people perform on whims cost tens of thousands of dollars, and no police department on the planet would justify the amount of goofy tech and tests they use. (That’s not even getting into the fact that most forensic investigators rarely have anything to do with interviewing suspects, arresting people, etc. To its credit, CSI actually got this detail right at the start, but soon enough it got ridiculous.)
For those thinking I’m ripping on this shit for being implausible because that’s the best I can do, and I should just relax and enjoy the show, here’s the thing: there are junky procedurals I like. I like House, I like Bones, I like Monk…all three are ridiculous in almost every possible way, but they’re also populated with interesting characters. I can check out and stop caring about real-world impracticalities if I’m interested in the characters and conflicts happening in each scene. When I don’t have that, and on CSI I never do**, I bitch. I bitch when the plot doesn’t make sense, or when something doesn’t seem like it could really happen, because nothing else of interest is happening.
The second major difference in this episode of CSI is that, for the first time, we’re given that conflict, especially in the form of George Eads’s Nick Stokes. Much more of this has to do with Quentin Tarantino’s ability to work with actors than the actual writing — these people gave more than I’ve ever seen them give before, including in the movies, so I have to assume Tarantino is responsible for that. Television is not known as a director’s medium, but it just goes to show what a good director can bring — he rushes past the plot holes and builds the suspense and drama from the helplessness of the usually unstoppable lab team.
The plot basically goes like this: a CSI is lured to an odd crime scene. Turns out, someone manufactured the scene so they could nab a CSI, lock him in a plexiglas coffin, and bury him alive. Whoever perpetrated the crime knows his shit — they get their lab work out of the way pretty quickly, and there’s nothing. No leads. Eventually they get a package that leads them to a webcam broadcasting Stokes’s struggle to survive. Boo-hoo. Oh, also, the guy wants $1 million in 12 hours, or Stokes dies.
Once they’ve exhausted their attempts at “science,” all we’re left with is a team who has to deal with the terror of a fellow lab worker trapped in an unknown location. When they finally get the money and deliver it, the man (played by the awesome John Saxon) is shocked — that was never part of the plan. He pretty much intended just to blow himself up. That’s how part one ends. In part two, they find an intact thumb, figure out the man’s motive (shoddy lab work got his daughter convicted of murder), and use actual investigative skills to figure out what happened to Stokes.
It’s not without its flaws. I know they need to find him, but the thumb thing just struck me as way too easy, especially when they contrive false drama from Sara’s inability to find any fingerprints, and then in, like, the next scene another lab tech is like, “Oh, I ran it through another database and found something.” Then, of course, there’s the breathing tube protruding very obviously from the middle of a path. It’s a place of business — nobody would notice that?!
I also have an issue with the frustrating, moronic “time” element toward the end of part two. It sort of reminded of the movie Soultaker, featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000, where initially it’s a big part of the plot that they have to get back to their bodies by midnight or their parents will pull the plug — but even after they’ve changed their mind, the director keeps showing shots of the clock as they frantically rush to the hospital rooms. Same deal here: Warrick estimates Stokes has 90 minutes before the fan circulating the air will die (it’s on a battery). All this means is that when the watch stops, that gives him the two and a half hours Grissom estimated he’d have based on the size of the coffin. Nonetheless, when the timer goes off, Warrick looks like he’s about to give up — what the fuck?!
It had some frustrating moments of stupidity, but I was actually disappointed about how little comedy fodder this episode had. In fact, for the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed CSI in a non-ironic way. Again, I’m going to go ahead and credit Tarantino with this, because if CSI’s producers were capable of this kind of work all the time, the show would be halfway decent. (Also, even though Tarantino only receives a STORY BY credit, his severed-thumbprints are all over this episode’s writing, from the distinctive dialogue style to the weird — some might say annoying — ’70s pop-culture fixation.)
*Note that I also qualify the other Bruckheimer-produced procedurals (Cold Case, Without a Trace, and Close to Home, a surprise failure) as part of the juggernaut, because (a) they’re on the same network, (b) they’re made by the same production company, and (c) face it: they’re the same show. One deals with cold cases, one deals with kidnappings, one dealt with “suburban”/small-town crime, but they conform to the exact same formula.
**Yes, each show has defined characters, but in the worst possible way. Each has a distinctive trait, maybe two, that we’re supposed to latch onto.
Posted by Stan on April 24, 2008 3:29 PM | Permalink | Reviews | Digg It
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