alt title(s): Crime Scene Investigation
Concentrate on what cannot lie — the evidence. — Gil Grissom
A Super-successful show 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.
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
- Applied Phlebotinum
- A Team Montage
- Be As Unhelpful As Possible
- 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!
- Bullet Time
- 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
- Celebrity Star
- City Of Adventure
- 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
- 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.)
- 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
- Did Not Do The Research (Again, and again, and again.)
- Double Aesop
- Downer Ending (Any episode where they fail to catch the criminal.)
- Education Through Pyrotechnics (Complete with Adam and Jamie looking on in one episode.)
- Enhance Button
- Everybody Is Single
- Fatal Flaw
- Five Man Band
- Follow The Leader
- Forensic Drama
- Game Of Nerds (Grissom is a baseball fan)
- Gorn (The TMI-cam)
- GPS Evidence
- Grissom One Liner
- Hard Work Montage
- Hazardous Water: murder in a cloudy swimming pool.
- High School Rejects
- Hollywood Nerd
- Hooker With A Heart Of Gold
- Hot Scientist
- Humiliation Conga: Langston's first day, for a non-villain example.
- Impersonating An Officer
- Internet Backdraft - Never mention the episode "Fur and Loathing" to furries.
- The Intern
- Its Personal
- Jack The Ripoff
- Jonas Quinn: Dr. Raymond Langston replaces Grissom in Season 9 (played by Laurence Fishburne), Riely takes Sara's place.
- 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
- Left Hanging
- Limited Advancement Opportunities
- Locked Room Mystery
- Lower Deck Episode - You Kill Me and Lab Rats, both featuring the lab techs.
- Magical Database
- Midlife Crisis Car - Lampshaded.
- Mood Lighting
- Ms Fanservice (Catherine and later Reilly)
- Mulder Moment
- The Murder After
- Murder Dot Com: "Grave Danger"
- My Card
- Myth Arc: the "Minature Killer"
- Necro Cam
- Never Suicide
- Only One
- Orifice Invasion: Rats seem to like getting inside corpses in this show.
- The Patsy
- Plucky Comic Relief
- Poorly Disguised Pilot
- Put On A Bus: Sara and Grissom, presumed retired for good.
- Rasputinian Death (the episode "Ending Happy")
- Red Shirt
- 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?)
- Run For The Border
- Sarcasm Failure: When Grissom doesn't do the Grissom One Liner.
- Sacrificial Lamb
- Science Hero: Grissom
- Seeker Archetype
- Sex Is Evil
- Shipping
- Shout Out: Hodges and Langston do a very-thinly-disguised Mythbusters-style experiment, complete with plexiglass shield. All they needed was the "3, 2, 1!" part.
- In an earlier episode, Savage and Hyneman make a cameo observing such an experiment.
- Shown Their Work: More often than you think, it's the editing that turns it into Hollywood Science.
- Side Bet
- Snuff Film ("Snuff")
- The Spock
- 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.)
- Take Five
- Television Geography
- The Collector Of The Strange: (All the creepy crawlies in Grissom's office. There's also an irradiated foetal pig)
- Time Delayed Death
- Token Minority
- Two Lines No Waiting
- Viva Las Vegas
- We Are Everywhere
- Welcome Episode
- Working The Same Case (frequently)
