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alt title(s): Crime Scene Investigation 
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 stereotypes ( The Spock, The Lab Rat, 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 Magical Database, 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.
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 Cold Case. 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 Silent Witness.
Gil Grissom’s frequent one-liners right before the opening credits or an ad break are the namesake of the Grissom One Liner. Pretty much established the Necro Cam, 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 Applied Phlebotinum has caused some to suspect that it's not actually set in the present day, but, rather, Twenty Minutes Into The Future.
The show (and its spinoffs) have given rise to what legal professionals call ' The CSI Effect': 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 Nightmare Fuel .
This show provides examples of:
- Affectionate Parody (in one episode, to Darker And Edgier reimaginings of classic scifi shows)
- All Psychology Is Freudian
- 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."
- And Starring: Paul Gilfoyle gets an "And", Robert David Hall a "With". Laurence Fishburne because he is well, Laurence Fishburne, goes first in the order.
- Applied Phlebotinum
- A Team Montage: As the various forensic specialists build a case.
- Be As Unhelpful As Possible: 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!"
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 the pragmatic thing. (But again, Truth In Television. 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.)
- Bitter Almonds - 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!
- Black Blood / Alien Blood - 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).
- Bullet Time - commendably, they waited until Morpheus had thoroughly settled in before showing a bullet-time extravaganza (complete with Men In Black!).
- Bunny Ears Lawyer (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.)
- California Doubling
- Cant Get In Trouble For Nuthin: 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.
- Celebrity Star: Most episodes.
- City Of Adventure: It IS Las Vegas after all.
- Comatose Canary (Used straight on the original show; subverted on CSI: New York)
- Comedic Sociopathy (Hodges again. Would make a fine Magnificent Bastard if he weren't so grotesquely inept at everything that didn't involve forensic science.)
- Coolest Club Ever: Again, most episodes.
- Cowboy Bebop At His Computer (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)
- Cowboy Cop
- Crazy Prepared (Langston, to his detriment.)
- Crowning Moment Of Awesome (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 Car Fu 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.
- The CSI Effect (Lampshaded in an episode where they become the subject of a Show Within A Show 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.
- Dead Mans Chest: 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.
- Death In The Clouds: "Unfriendly Skies"
- Did Not Do The Research (Again, and again, and again.)
- Double Aesop: Frequently done with a guest character, to apply the moral of their story to a longer-running established story.
- Downer Ending (Any episode where they fail to catch the criminal.)
- Dying Dream: Working Stiffs: "I knew it would work..."
- Education Through Pyrotechnics (Complete with Adam and Jamie looking on in one episode.)
- Enhance Button: 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.
- Everybody Is Single
- Mostly. Gil and Sara are now a married item.
- Fatal Flaw: Warrick's gambling problem, or Grissom's hearing impairment. The latter was corrected with surgery.
- Felony Murder
- Five Man Band
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
- Follow The Leader: 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 Law And Order: Special Victims Unit).
- Forensic Drama
- Game Of Nerds (Grissom is a baseball fan)
- Gorn (The TMI-cam)
- GPS Evidence: 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.
- Grissom One Liner: Trope Namer
- Hard Work Montage: 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 Lampshade Hanging: 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".
- Hazardous Water: murder in a cloudy swimming pool.
- High School Rejects: The standard stoners and malcontents that are always the first suspects.
- Hollywood Nerd: EVERYONE. One of them is even supposed to be an ex-stripper!
- Hooker With A Heart Of Gold: 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.
- Hot Scientist: Nearly everyone. With the exception of Jim Brass, who is neither hot nor a scientist.
- Humiliation Conga: Langston's first day, for a non-villain example.
- Impersonating An Officer: In some episodes.
- In The Blood - Langston fears he may have a genetically inherited 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.
- Internet Backdraft - Never mention the episode "Fur and Loathing" to furries.
- 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.
- The Intern: Greg.
- Its Personal: The show usually starts or ends a season with an "It's Personal" episode.
- Jack The Ripoff: "The Execution of Catherine Willows"
- Jonas Quinn: 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.
- Killed Off For Real: Warrick, complete with Personal Effects Reveal and Meaningful Funeral
- Killer Rabbit: Can we ever look at cornmeal the same way?
- The Killer Was Left Handed (repeatedly, both with literal left-handedness and with problems with DNA in saliva)
- The Lab Rat: Greg Sanders, whose nickname at Television Without Pity inspired this entry's title. 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 Lower Deck Episode with the hilarious "You Kill Me".
- Lampshade Hanging: 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.
- Left Hanging: "Bad to the Bone". Out of 6 or 7 subthreads, none of which were even close to resolved.
- Limited Advancement Opportunities: 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.
- Locked Room Mystery: A more diluted form sometimes appears in a Police Procedural where the puzzle is eventually unravelled by an eccentric protagonist using more obvious clues and Applied Phlebotinum.
- Long Runners: Now onto its tenth season.
- Lower Deck Episode - You Kill Me and Lab Rats, both featuring the lab techs.
- Luke I Am Your Father: 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 old Vegas) murdered; they managed to patch things up a little before he died and she now refers to him as "my dad".
- Magical Database: 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 Lampshade Hanging 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. 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 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.
- Midlife Crisis Car - Lampshaded.
- Mood Lighting
- Ms Fanservice (Catherine and later Reilly)
- Mulder Moment: "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.
- The Murder After: Warrick and a stripper who is found dead in his car.
- Murder Dot Com: "Grave Danger"
- My Card: The investigators will often give a witness their card and say "call me if you remember anything."
- Myth Arc: the "Miniature Killer"
- Necro Cam: 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 referred to as TMI Cam.
- Need A Hand Or A Handjob - 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.
- Never Suicide: 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 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. 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.
- The Only One: 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.
- Orifice Invasion / Orifice Evacuation / Chest Burster: Rats seem to like getting inside corpses in this show.
- Papa Wolf - The occasional suspect, especially in the case of an Asshole Victim.
- Grissom also gave Catherine's abuse ex-husband an Oh Crap moment when said ex tried to bully Catherine.
- The Patsy
- The Perfect Crime - In "Working Stiffs" a lowly office drone makes a seemingly perfect get rich quick scheme. 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..."
- Pet The Dog - a posthumous one for 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.
- Plucky Comic Relief: 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 Lab Rats.
- Poorly Disguised Pilot: CSI did this to launch CSI Miami, which in turn launched CSI NY.
- And the episode "Hollywood Brass" certainly feels like a PDP. Were they thinking about a Jim Brass spin-off set in LA?
- Put On A Bus: Sara and Grissom, presumed retired for good.
- Well, until it was announced Sara will return for a few episodes in Season 10.
- Rasputinian Death (the episode "Ending Happy")
- Redemption Equals Death (Keppler killed an innocent man on the word of a corrupt cop. Guess what happens in the episode that outs the secret?)
- Red Shirt: 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.
- Run For The Border: The new season opener is type A.
- Sacrificial Lamb: The series began with a Naive Newcomer 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 New Meat.
- Sarcasm Failure: When Grissom doesn't do the Grissom One Liner.
- Science Hero: Grissom
- Seeker Archetype: Grissom again.
- Sex Is Evil: 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 Crime And Punishment 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 squicked out by alternative sexual practices (Grissom, of course, finds it all very fascinating).
- Shipping
- Ship Tease - 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
launch CSI Miami investigate a case there, "I missed your tush".
- The "How can I help?" scene (see above for details).
- Shout Out: Hodges and Langston do a very-thinly-disguised Mythbusters-style experiment, complete with Plexiglas shield. All they needed was the "3, 2, 1!" part.
- Shown Their Work: More often than you think, it's the editing that turns it into Hollywood Science.
- Sick Episode: "Grissom's Divine Comedy"
- Side Bet: 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 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 Running Gag 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.
- Snuff Film ("Snuff")
- The Spock: Grissom
- Sympathetic Murderer (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 The Far Side, complete with the wife wearing cats-eye glasses.
- Take Five
- Television Geography: The frequent presence of lush greenery and vegetation, and moderately frequent rain, in desert Las Vegas on CSI (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 "Jackpot" and another in the 2004 season premiere.
- The Collector Of The Strange: (All the creepy crawlies in Grissom's office. There's also an irradiated fetal pig)
- Time Delayed Death: 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 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 gets 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 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.
- Token Minority: Warrick Brown until 2008. This role is now played by
Morpheus Dr Raymond Langston.
- Two Lines No Waiting: Nearly every single episode. Occasionally the characters will find out halfway through the episode that the crimes they are investigating are tied together. Some episodes pull this off better than others.
- Viva Las Vegas: Duh.
- We Are Everywhere
- Welcome Episode: Subverted in a major way by having a Welcome Episode premiere which ended with Naive Newcomer Holly Gribbs getting shot dead.
- Then played straight when Sara Sidle is brought in to replace her/act as an independent investigator.
- Well Intentioned Extremist: 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.
- Working The Same Case (frequently)
- Youth Is Wasted On The Dumb
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