http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/csi-las-vegas.jpg
-->''Concentrate on what cannot lie -- the evidence.''
--> -- '''Gil Grissom'''

A Super-successful show (2000-present) about a group of crime scene investigators in Las Vegas. Deliberately goes for style over substance; characters are composed of sturdy {{stereotype}}s (TheSpock, TheLabRat, etc), dialogue is either clinical exposition or snappy sound bites, while the real focus is on whooshing David Fincher-type editing, and almost obsessively gruesome forensic detail.

Early on, was fairly straightforward in its forensics -– the team would look for blood traces, DNA, even regular old fingerprints, meanwhile lead character Gil Grissom firmly believed in the usefulness of reenactments (throwing dummies off buildings, blowing a toy boat around a model lake, etc) which frankly looked wildly inaccurate.

As these things became repetitive and matter-of-fact, the forensics became steadily more convoluted and precise, with highly improbable sequences of events being deduced thanks to the investigators’ incredibly encyclopaedic knowledge of everything in the world -– no matter what the subject du jour, there will be some member of the team who happens to know something about it. Also, they have the world’s biggest MagicalDatabase, and Grissom and Greg seem to between them know the chemical composition of everything in existence. Meanwhile, Grissom did done a complete 180 on his reenactment-type experiments, and adheres to a policy of hard, unyielding fact. That was before he quit and went off to Costa Rica with Sara Sidle.

For a while, many of its cases involved various sexual subcultures.

[[FollowTheLeader Influenced a great many subsequent programs]]; most directly, it inspired its producer, Jerry Bruckheimer, to try and replicate this success with ''{{Without a Trace}}'' and ''ColdCase''. It also followed in ''{{Law and Order}}''’s 'franchise' footsteps, with ''{{CSI Miami}}'' and ''{{CSI NY}}''. As of the 2008-2009 season, there are over 600 total episodes of CSI, {{CSI Miami}}, and {{CSI NY}}, not including books, comic books, and video games related to the franchise. Please note, however, that it is not the oldest of the current crop of forensic shows, a title held by British show ''SilentWitness''.

Gil Grissom’s frequent one-liners right before the opening credits or an ad break are the namesake of the GrissomOneLiner. Pretty much established the NecroCam, which it uses as a device to re-enact for the viewers every single gruesome detail that can be extracted from a crime scene, and every theory it spawns.

The uncanny effectiveness of the show's AppliedPhlebotinum has caused some to suspect that it's not actually set in the present day, but, rather, TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture.

The show (and its spinoffs) have given rise to what legal professionals call 'TheCSIEffect': the necessity of compressing what would normally be months worth of delicate and time-consuming lab work into a 40-minute television episode causes similiarly unrealistic expectations in potential real-world jurors. As a result, the uninformed juror will assume that what they see on the show is happening ''as it actually occurs'', as opposed to being fabricated and accelerated for television.

This series has [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NightmareFuel/CSI Nightmare Fuel]].
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!!This show provides examples of:
* AffectionateParody (in one episode, to DarkerAndEdgier [[BattlestarGalactica reimaginings]] of [[StarTrek classic scifi shows]])
* AllPsychologyIsFreudian
** Episode "4x4"
--->'''Greg Sanders:''' No matter how hard you work to get big, there's always someone bigger.
--->'''Sara Sidle:''' It could be what keeps them going. Like Freud said, "Anatomy is destiny".
--->'''Greg Sanders:''' What do you think Freud would have to say about one of these being the murder weapon?
** Episode "Fur And Loathing"
--->'''Grissom:''' Well, Freud said that the only unusual sexual behavior was to have none at all.
** Episode "Lab Rats"
--->'''Hodges:''' Freud's theory on the uncanny raises the point that as children we want the doll to come to life. But as adults, we are terrified by the idea. The doll could represent the uncanny that is feared. The Sandman."
* AndStarring: Paul Gilfoyle gets an "And", Robert David Hall a "With". Laurence Fishburne because he is well, Laurence Fishburne, goes first in the order.
* AppliedPhlebotinum
* ATeamMontage: As the various forensic specialists build a case.
* BeAsUnhelpfulAsPossible: When a member of ''{{CSI}}'' intimates that the husband is always the first suspect when a wife is murdered, the husband's response is typically "You think I did this? This interview is over!" [[strike:Instead of what would be a more pragmatic "Wow, really? Well, I guess I better give you as much information as I possibly can to both clear my name and catch my wife's murderer."]] Thus inadvertently doing [[http://www.boingboing.net/2008/07/28/law-prof-and-cop-agr.html the pragmatic thing]]. (But again, TruthInTelevision. [[{{Burai}} This editor]] was told by a criminal justice instructor and county sheriff that police ''expect'' ordinary people to get angry when accused of crimes they didn't commit.)
* BitterAlmonds - Subverted brutally: a big show is made of only 20% of people being able to smell cyanide, and there is another, more useful, symptom. So many forensic miracles on this show, and yet this trick doesn't work!
* BlackBlood / AlienBlood - A bunch of people wound up with ''avocado-green blood'' (I'm fairly certain this ''isn't'' from the episode with the reptile conspiracy theorists).
* BulletTime - commendably, they waited until [[TheMatrix Morpheus]] had thoroughly settled in before showing a bullet-time extravaganza (complete with MenInBlack!).
* BunnyEarsLawyer (at least half the cast is messed up in some way or another despite being generally competent at their job, but the title definitely goes to Hodges, who is so mentally unbalanced that not only would he never be allowed to work with law enforcement in any capacity in the real world, he probably wouldn't even be allowed outdoors without some kind of supervision.)
* CaliforniaDoubling
* CantGetInTroubleForNuthin: In one episode, the Victim Of The Week in the B plot turn out to have been a homeless man. He tried to get sent to jail (for free food and shelter) by punching a police officer. Said officer realised what he was doing and left him handcuffed, apparently failing to realize this would lead to his death.
* CelebrityStar: Most episodes.
* CityOfAdventure: It IS Las Vegas after all.
* ComatoseCanary (Used straight on the original show; subverted on ''CSI: New York'')
* ComedicSociopathy (Hodges again. Would make a fine MagnificentBastard if he weren't so grotesquely inept at everything that didn't involve forensic science.)
* CoolestClubEver: Again, most episodes.
* CowboyBebopAtHisComputer (Langston, despite Laurence Fishburne's top billing, isn't Grissom's replacement as team leader, coming in at the bottom. Catherine Willows is now team leader)
* CowboyCop
* CrazyPrepared (Langston, to his detriment.)
* CrowningMomentOfAwesome (Specifically, Greg Sanders'. When interrogated at an inquest to determine his culpability in running over a proven murderer, he was accused by a judge of drinking prior to the event. After a second of panic, Greg proceeded to, calmly and systematically, prove exactly why the very little alcohol he consumed many hours earlier had no effect on him, performing a multitude of calculations in his head as he explained them to the jury. The judge was thoroughly humiliated.)
** Also, what lead to Greg's inquest: After a bit of CarFu to stop a gang member from beating a tourist, Greg took a ''severe'' beating from the rest of the gang, fighting, scratching and getting spat on the whole time. He stayed conscious long enough to give the team a detailed description of the gang, and to tell them he had DNA evidence under his fingernails.
* TheCSIEffect (Lampshaded in an episode where they become the subject of a ShowWithinAShow and mention that everything is edited together to make it look faster.)
** Which doesn't stop them from regularly STATING that only a couple of days have passed since they got the case, or even the same day.
** And in a later episode when Hodges mentions that he's convinced everyone that most of the advanced equipment he operates takes twice as long to work as it actually does in order to get more free time.
* DeadMansChest: In one episode, a spurned lover stuffs his ex-boyfriend's body in a trunk, which is kept in private storage. Problem is, the body won't fit, so he cuts off the head and leaves it in a car which is then stolen.
* DeathInTheClouds: "Unfriendly Skies"
* DidNotDoTheResearch (Again, and again, and again.)
* DoubleAesop: Frequently done with a guest character, to apply the moral of their story to a longer-running established story.
* DownerEnding (Any episode where they fail to catch the criminal.)
* DyingDream: [[spoiler: Working Stiffs: "I knew it would work..."]]
* EducationThroughPyrotechnics (Complete with [[{{Mythbusters}} Adam and Jamie]] looking on in one episode.)
* EnhanceButton: This show likes to rely on the NTSC overscan to find hidden details in an image. In one episode, they are able to reconstruct a recognisable image from the reflection in someone's eye. At night. In the dark. From a grainy CCTV image. Another similar example involved getting a recognisable image of a person behind camera from the reflection of someone's sunglasses in the window of a car.
**CSI had a particularly egregious example when they showed off a 3D crime scene scanner. Such a device does actually exist, using a laser to create a 3D image of an area, but then they used the computer to ''lift the body off the bed to look at the stains on the sheets underneath it''. It's the equivalent of taking an ordinary photographic image and being able to "strip away" the skin and muscles to get an image of not just the structure of the person's bones, but what ''color'' they are.
* EverybodyIsSingle
** Mostly. Gil and Sara are now a ''married'' item.
* FatalFlaw: Warrick's gambling problem, or Grissom's hearing impairment. The latter was corrected with surgery.
* FelonyMurder
* FiveManBand
-->'''The Hero''': Nick Stokes
-->'''The Lancer''': Sara Sidle
-->'''The Big Guy''': Warrick Brown
-->'''The Smart Guy''': Greg Sanders
-->'''The Chick''': Catherine Willows
-->'''Mentor''': Gil Grissom
* FollowTheLeader: The show precipitated a host of forensic science shows, even to the point that shows not inherently about forensics now spend more time on the subject (e.g. the medical examiner on ''LawAndOrder: Special Victims Unit'').
* ForensicDrama
* GameOfNerds (Grissom is a baseball fan)
* {{Gorn}} (The [[FanNickname TMI-cam]])
* GPSEvidence: Most of the time. In the season five finale, "Grave Danger," when Grissom, Entomologist Extraordinaire, determines Nick's location from the ants in his box, since fire ants can only be found in nurseries in Nevada, which means that the soil...etc.
* GrissomOneLiner: TropeNamer
* HardWorkMontage: This show does this to show the characters doing the hard work of forensic investigation at the lab. In the episode "I Like to Watch", they do some LampshadeHanging: Hodges looks forward to a certain test, as he thinks it will be good material for the documentary crew currently in the lab. Nick points out that the test takes six hours, to which Hodges remarks that "When they cut it together, it'll only take thirty seconds." It takes thirty seconds. Also known as "Microscope montage".
* HazardousWater: murder in a cloudy swimming pool.
* HighSchoolRejects: The standard stoners and malcontents that are always the first suspects.
* HollywoodNerd: '''EVERYONE'''. One of them is even supposed to be an ex-stripper!
* HookerWithAHeartOfGold: The first season has Nick falling for a hooker, who is indeed killed by her pimp. However, there's a slight subversion, in that her pimp claims she did not have a heart of gold, and was going back to school to ''recruit'' for him.
**A rather similar thing happens to Warrick in the eighth season.
**In fact, Catherine Willows is a former stripper, and therefore could be considered this. She hasn't been killed, but constantly faces people and places from her dubious past.
**Also in CSI, Grissom had for a while a kind of is-she-or-isn't-she-interested attraction to Lady Heather, an intelligent but intense woman who ran an S&M club. She was not the delicate flower in need of nurturing, though, but more of a velvet glove and iron fist in one.
* HotScientist: '''Nearly everyone'''. With the exception of Jim Brass, who is neither hot nor a scientist.
* HumiliationConga: Langston's first day, for a non-villain example.
* ImpersonatingAnOfficer: In some episodes.
* InTheBlood - Langston fears he may have a genetically inherited [[BloodKnight violent streak]] from his father, which is the toned-down version of his original backstory where he fears he may become ''a serial killer''. In an interesting subversion, the person he tells the story of his father (minus the In The Blood part) is the adopted son of the infamous serial killer Judge Mason/Milander to show that being a serial killer isn't passed down to people who are neither related nor shown that kind of behavior, despite what his weary mother fears.
* InternetBackdraft - Never mention the episode "Fur and Loathing" to [[FurryFandom furries.]]
**[[YourMileageMayVary Your Mileage May Vary]], some furries actually found it funny BECAUSE it was so inaccurate.
*** Others simply pragmatically acknowledged as, despite being inaccurate, still the closest thing to accurate and fair a show had done on them so far, as opposed to, say, ''{{ER}}''.
* TheIntern: Greg.
* ItsPersonal: The show usually starts or ends a season with an "It's Personal" episode.
**When the investigators fly off the handle, they sometimes violate some of the suspects' rights with their outbursts (Catherine Willows and Sara Sidle are especially guilty of this) or some of the ways they try to obtain evidence. As just one example, getting a suspect to give a urine sample through saying it's required by law, when it actually isn't, sounds like grounds to have the evidence thrown out of court, given that it was obtained under false pretenses, or was coerced.
** In the episode ''Random Acts of Violence'', Warrick is processing the scene of a suburban drive-by shooting, at which a young child has been shot and killed. Upon discovering that the child's father is a close friend (known to be an admirable and honorable person generally), Warrick does his best to comfort the grieving father. Aware of this connection, Grissom arrives and checks on his colleague:
--->'''Grissom''': You going to be able to handle this?
--->'''Warrick''': ...I want this case.
**In early seasons, even if there weren't a direct relationship between the investigators and the criminals, the nature of the crime would often make the investigator ''take it personally'' themselves. For instance: domestic abuse, or overall violence towards women? Sara would sympathize. Broken marriages, or mothers (especially the working kind)? Catherine. Damaged childhoods? Nicky. Grissom himself explicitly stated that drug dealers and people who harm children make him furious.
***"You prey on innocent children, and you think we came all the way out here to bust you for posession, you dumb punk?!"
* JackTheRipoff: "The Execution of Catherine Willows"
* JonasQuinn: Dr. Raymond Langston replaces Grissom in Season 9 (played by Laurence Fishburne), Reilly takes Sara's place.
** However, Langston is entering at the bottom of the scale, not the top, something that took explaining to people due to Fishburne's position at the top of the cast list.
* KilledOffForReal: [[spoiler:Warrick]], complete with PersonalEffectsReveal and MeaningfulFuneral
* KillerRabbit: Can we ever look at cornmeal the same way?
* TheKillerWasLeftHanded (repeatedly, both with literal left-handedness and with problems with DNA in saliva)
* TheLabRat: Greg Sanders, whose nickname at TelevisionWithoutPity inspired this entry's title. [[PromotionToOpeningTitles He has now become a CSI in his own right.]]
**His role has been taken over by multiple people- David Hodges (a nerdy guy), Archie Johnson (an East Asian guy who was doing the Audiovisual stuff) anyway, Mandy and Wendy Simms. They got a LowerDeckEpisode with the hilarious "You Kill Me".
* LampshadeHanging: After ten long years, they finally take the piss out of their periodic explanations of how a test or piece of equipment works for the benefit of the audience, even though there's no good reason for, say, Sara to be telling this to Nick in the course of everyday work.
* LeftHanging: "Bad to the Bone". Out of 6 or 7 subthreads, none of which were even close to resolved.
* LimitedAdvancementOpportunities: Avoided. Though the cast has remained more or less constant, their relative rank and internal structure have been adjusted, including Brass's handing over the department to Grissom (and going back to being a detective), the race between Warrick and Nick to achieve CSI 3, and Ecklie's breakup of the team into two different shifts, which prompted the promotion of Catherine Willows to supervisor, and made room in the ranks for Greg to go from lab tech to field agent.
**A particularly nice touch was Grissom making sure that Greg really does want to make the lateral (and downward!) jump from Senior Lab Tech to extremely junior Field Investigator, reminding him that he'll be taking a substantial pay cut and that it will take quite a while to get back to his present level.
* LockedRoomMystery: A more diluted form sometimes appears in a PoliceProcedural where the puzzle is eventually unravelled by an eccentric protagonist using more obvious clues and AppliedPhlebotinum.
* LongRunners: Now onto its tenth season.
* LowerDeckEpisode - ''You Kill Me'' and ''Lab Rats'', both featuring the lab techs.
* LukeIAmYourFather: Catherine's dad was a recurring casino owner who regretted not taking responsibility sooner, although the two were very close. This soured when Catherine found out that he had someone (probably a bunch of someones considering it was [[GangsterLand old Vegas]]) murdered; they managed to patch things up a little [[spoiler: before he died]] and she now refers to him as "my dad".
* MagicalDatabase: Revolutionised this trope. They have demonstrated databases on blood, hair, rope, wire, shoe prints, tire treads, tire rubber compositions, and even clown makeup patterns. There was a LampshadeHanging in a sixth season episode, in which a character sarcastically suggested searching a database to discover the brand of a hot dog.
** And yes, there is a national clown registry to prevent identical makeup.
** Amusingly subverted in one episode where Greg is disappointed to learn that there is no hotdog database & winds up spending his entire year's food budget on various brands of hotdogs in an attempt to find a match to one found in a vic's stomach (He thought the department would reimburse him. [[ButtMonkey They didn't]]).
** Don't forget the software/database that allows one to find where a picture in New York was taken by measuring the skyline in comparison to a reference height (while the technique is sound, there is no such software).
** However, one episode shows them using [[http://livelabs.com/photosynth/ Photosynth]].
*** The same lab that created Photosynth is also working on something that would pretty much be the above software and then some.
** In fact, it's when CSI avoids the trope that it can be jarring. A reoccurring scene is the local trace evidence guy naming a compound, and the CSI identifying the compound's common name, and it's uses, including the more arcane (say, Jeweller grinder lubricant) on the top of their head. Said arcane use are always the key to cracking the case. This gets jarring because there ARE databases to identify the most common uses of chemicals.
* MidlifeCrisisCar - Lampshaded.
* MoodLighting
* MsFanservice (Catherine and later Reilly)
* MulderMoment: "Fur And Loathing". The normally sexually-open Catherine is weirded out by the Furries while Grissom is intrigued.
**Its only remarkable for Catherine, as Grissom is intrigued by right about anything that does not directly kill people. And even then.
* TheMurderAfter: Warrick and a stripper who is found dead in his car.
* MurderDotCom: "Grave Danger"
* MyCard: The investigators will often give a witness their card and say "call me if you remember anything."
* MythArc: the "Miniature Killer"
* NecroCam: Done multiple times in every episode
**The show is also notable for its gory body-dives, in which the camera flies around inside somebody's body (often tracing the path of a murder weapon), accompanied by all sorts of icky Foley noises. This is commonly [[FanNickname referred to]] as [[TooMuchInformation TMI]] Cam.
* NeedAHandOrAHandjob - Inverted when Catherine, while being evaluated by Grissom, complains about her lack of social life (and sex). "How can I help?" Grissom asks, and has to clarify that it's not THAT kind of help when Catherine raises her eyebrow at him.
* NeverSuicide: Subverted in one episode: an investor shoots himself at a party. It originally looks like a staged suicide since he's still holding the gun, which usually doesn't happen, as the muscles relax after death.
**Another variation: The villain of an arc staged identical suicides of men who were born on the same date that his father was murdered in the same manner (this was also his father's birthday). Up to and including a faked suicide note (well, tape). He did all this to prove his father's murder wasn't a suicide.
**''Inverted'' in another episode: a man is found in some woods with all the evidence initially pointing towards murder... only it turns out to be an extremely elaborate suicide designed to look like a murder so his wife would receive his life insurance money.
** And subverted YET AGAIN in another episode, when one man throws himself in front of a car. The entire episode runs like an ordinary investigation, the suicide letter being the final twist, only seconds before the episode ends.
**One more [[spoiler:double]] inversion, when a Sherlock Holmes impersonator is found shot to death. Like the above example, the episode runs as a murder investigation, until the team discovers the gun tied to an elastic in the chimney, revealing that when the victim shot himself and let go of the gun, the elastic snapped it back into the chimney. [[spoiler:Then we find out that the ''real'' murderer had ''set the whole thing up to look like a suicide that had been set up to look like a murder'', as an appropriately Holmesian mystery. Yes, a murder, made to look like a suicide, made to look like a murder.]]
*** Which references one of Holmes' later cases.
* TheOnlyOne: The Crime Scene investigators (and Brass) are the only law enforcement personnel who care about getting the criminals. The DA's only care about getting convictions, even if it is a wrongful one. Judges are at best unhelpful or helpless, at worst are corrupt and seek to hinder the CSI in anyway possible. Other cops just don't care. Parole Boards are more focused on bureaucracy than on doing their job of making sure bad people stay in jail.
* OrificeInvasion / OrificeEvacuation / ChestBurster: Rats seem to like getting inside corpses in this show.
* PapaWolf - The occasional suspect, especially in the case of an AssholeVictim.
** Grissom also gave Catherine's abuse ex-husband an OhCrap moment when said ex tried to bully Catherine.
* ThePatsy
* ThePerfectCrime - In "Working Stiffs" a lowly office drone makes a seemingly perfect get rich quick scheme. [[spoiler: He manages to get the unbreachable safe open, but is crushed against the wall by a piece of it that comes flying at him. Upon seeing he actually succeeded in doing the impossible, his last words are "I knew it would work..."]]
* PetTheDog - a posthumous one for [[SerialKiller Milander]], as his son has only happy memories of his father, especially of his father's (though he didn't know it at the time) special effects shop.
* PluckyComicRelief: Greg Sanders is an excellent example of this trope.
**Not so much anymore, now that he's had several serious character arcs (not to mention becoming one of the most experienced [=CSIs=] on the team). The role has been taken over by Hodges and the supporting [[TheLabRat Lab Rats]].
* PoorlyDisguisedPilot: CSI did this to launch ''CSIMiami'', which in turn launched ''[[CSINewYork CSI NY]]''.
**And the episode "Hollywood Brass" certainly feels like a PDP. Were they thinking about a Jim Brass spin-off set in LA?
* PutOnABus: Sara and Grissom, presumed retired for good.
** Well, until it was announced Sara will return for a few episodes in Season 10.
* RasputinianDeath (the episode "Ending Happy")
* RedemptionEqualsDeath (Keppler killed an innocent man on the word of a corrupt cop. Guess what happens in the episode that outs the secret?)
* RedShirt: At the opposite end of a career-span, the first CSI episode had a Red Shirt who had only been on the job for a week.
* RunForTheBorder: The new season opener is type A.
* SacrificialLamb: The series began with a NaiveNewcomer character who basically served to introduce the various members of the show's cast. With that out of the way, she caught two in the back of the head, turning into the second victim and confirming her status as the NewMeat.
* SarcasmFailure: When Grissom doesn't do the GrissomOneLiner.
* ScienceHero: Grissom
* SeekerArchetype: Grissom again.
* SexIsEvil: One of the more frequent knocks on ''{{CSI}}'' is that this is pretty much how it treats any sex practices (regardless of consent) outside of hetero and committed. And it treats THAT with a layer of shame when it comes to the regulars (Gil/Sara, anyone?)
** This is a common problem with any CrimeAndPunishment show, really, as the only time the characters usually encounter alternative lifestyles is when there's a grisly murder involved.
** {{CSI}} tends to be a bit schizophrenic about this, really. While they tend to portray "perverts" of various types as being twisted in various way aside from their sexual appetites, those that aren't involved in the crime of the week, & even some who were are ultimately portrayed sympathetically for the most part. The best example being {{Recurrer}} Lady Heather, a dominatrix who is a tragic & sympathetic character. Admittedly, most of the tragic part is in some way due to her lifestyle, but it is ultimately left up to the viewer to decide whether this is due to her own "sins," or other people's (including her own daughter) reaction to them.
** Humorously, ex-stripper Catherine seems to be the most {{squick}}ed out by alternative sexual practices (Grissom, of course, finds it all very fascinating).
* {{Shipping}}
* ShipTease - Grissom and Catherine playfully flirt with each other and it never goes anywhere. To wit:
** Catherine to Grissom, while helping the latter put on a tie, "You need a woman."
** Grissom, when Catherine returns from Miami in which she helped [[strike: launch CSIMiami]] investigate a case there, "I missed your tush".
** The "[[NeedAHandOrAHandjob How can I help?]]" scene (see above for details).
* ShoutOut: Hodges and Langston do a very-thinly-disguised {{Mythbusters}}-style experiment, complete with Plexiglas shield. All they needed was the "3, 2, 1!" part.
** In an earlier episode, Savage and Hyneman make a cameo observing such an experiment.
** In another episode, a missing woman is found with a SerialKiller at a place called [[HalfLife Black Mesa]].
** [[BattlestarGalactica Boomer and her creator]] look on in horror as a StarTrek expy is given the DarkerAndEdgier treatment.
** The 2009 season opens with an extended BulletTime extravaganza, complete with [[TheMatrix Morpheus kicking an "Agent" through a window]].
* ShownTheirWork: More often than you think, it's the editing that turns it into HollywoodScience.
* SickEpisode: "Grissom's Divine Comedy"
* SideBet: In one episode, Greg Sanders's replacement eventually cracks from the pressure to be just like Greg and quits. Nick forks over a bill to Warrick. (Who really [[BrokenAesop shouldn't have been participating]]...)
** Because Warrick had a gambling addiction in the first season. But there's also been a whole episode with a RunningGag about Nick and Warrick having a bet about what happened to the Vic of the Week, so it seems that Warrick can engage in "fun" bets with a buddy without a problem. (Or the writers just forgot, but another ep of similar vintage actually brings it up, so dunno...)
** Another CSI sees Catherine and Grissom making a bet over whether two murder victims deaths were related or not (they were long lost twins). At the end it turns out they were both right, and Cathrine rips a bill apart and hands half of it to Gil after the very heavy conversation, lending to a tension breaker when Grissom reminds her that doing that is a federal offense.
* SnuffFilm ("Snuff")
* TheSpock: Grissom
* SympatheticMurderer (Played really really straight in the one guy who is responsible, by complete and total accident, for the death of his grandmother, wife, and next door neighbor, and winds up buried up to his waist in cement for it.)
** On top of all that the whole thing reads like an extended version TheFarSide, complete with the wife wearing cats-eye glasses.
* TakeFive
* TelevisionGeography: The frequent presence of lush greenery and vegetation, and moderately frequent rain, in desert Las Vegas on ''{{CSI}}'' ([[CaliforniaDoubling filming in LA]], also a desert but heavily watered) is often a source of amused derision by show fans. Also, Geoff Duncan has written two articles on the geographical inaccuracy of two outside jobs, one in [[http://www.teevee.org/archive/weblog/2003/11/10/102730.html "Jackpot"]] and another in [[http://www.teevee.org/archive/weblog/2004/09/24/095909.html the 2004 season premiere]].
* TheCollectorOfTheStrange: (All the creepy crawlies in Grissom's office. There's also an irradiated fetal pig)
* TimeDelayedDeath: Most episodes. Here are some examples.
**A man who was punched in the back of the head in a bar fight, who later died of a brain hemorrhage in the bath.
**A boy who was [[spoiler:stabbed trying to prevent his little brother from murdering their mother's boyfriend]] tries to walk home, but collapses and dies... right under the tires of a cab. The cabbie then [[spoiler:gets [[VigilanteExecution beaten to death by a mob]] who thinks he ran the boy down]].
** A football coach is savagely beaten about the head while he sleeps; the next morning he wakes up, brushes his teeth, has breakfast and gets the paper [[HighOctaneNightmareFuel while bleeding profusely from his head and mouth]]. The ME concludes that parts of his brain was just intact enough to "zombie-walk" him through his morning rituals.
* TokenMinority: Warrick Brown until 2008. This role is now played by [[strike:[[TheMatrix Morpheus]]]] Dr Raymond Langston.
* TwoLinesNoWaiting: Nearly every single episode. Occasionally the characters will find out halfway through the episode that the [[HalfwayPlotSwitch crimes they are investigating are tied together.]] Some episodes pull this off better than others.
* VivaLasVegas: Duh.
* WeAreEverywhere
* WelcomeEpisode: Subverted in a major way by having a WelcomeEpisode premiere which ended with NaiveNewcomer Holly Gribbs [[StuffedIntoTheFridge getting shot dead]].
**Then played straight when Sara Sidle is brought in to replace her/act as an independent investigator.
* WellIntentionedExtremist: [[spoiler: The "neighborhood watch" guy, who can't move due to the economy and has to see an internet porn business and a crackhouse open up on his street.]]
* WorkingTheSameCase (frequently)
*YouthIsWastedOnTheDumb
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