Trivia / Cold Case

• Actor-Shared Background:
  • Scotty Valens is Cuban American, like his actor Danny Pino.
  • Most of the plot-important Japanese American characters from "Family 8108" share the same ethnicity as their actors.
• Banned Episode: As of 2020, the episode "Strange Fruit" (which involves the lynching of a black teenager in 1963) has been removed from Start TV's lineup due to the police-related killings of African-Americans Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd and was replaced with season 5 episode "Justice"^note which revolves the murder of a popular college student and serial rapist and "Andy in C Minor"^note in which a deaf teenager is murdered.
• California Doubling:
  • Averted for six seasons, which included shots of Philadelphia that sometimes bordered Scenery Porn. However, the last season was filmed entirely in Los Angeles to reduce production costs.
  • Played straight in season 2's "Creatures of the Night" - the theater showing Rocky Horror was the Rialto Theater in South Pasadena, California.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Tracie Thoms, who portrays Det. Kat Miller, sung the closing medley "This Little Light of Mine" in the season six episode "Wednesday's Women".
  • Elena Satine gets to show off her powerful singing voice as the victim Nadia in "Triple Threat".
  • Adam Pascal, who plays the victim in "Willkommen", is professional stage actor who previously played the emcee in Cabaret.
  • Nathan Halliday, who plays the victim in "Shuffle, Ball Change", is a professional dancer.
  • Sharni Vinson, who plays the victim in "Metamorphosis", is also an accomplished dancer.
• The Danza: John Finn plays Lt. John Stillman.
• Edited for Syndication:
  • The airings on ION Television edited out several words heard on the original CBS airing, such as "bitch", "bastard" and several derogatory terms for Hispanics, Polish people and members of the LGBTQ community.
  • Also, the season one episode "The Letter" ^note which involved the brutal rape and murder of a black woman by white men in 1939 has the actual murder scene changed from its original 2004 airing after complaints were made about it.
  • Averted for years with the season two episode "Strange Fruit" ^note where a Black teenage boy is brutally beaten and lynched in 1963 by white supremacists in front of a little girl which was not edited until 2020 when the entire episode became banned (see above). Similarly in the season five episode "Family 8108", several anti-Asian slurs are left intact.
• Executive Meddling: To cut costs, season seven's production relocated from Philadelphia to Los Angeles as a result of this along with that Vera, Jeffries and Miller are absent in six episodes each, meaning that the entire cast only appear in four episodes.
• Fake American:
  • Ontario-born Jeremy Ratchford plays Detective Nick Vera.
  • Canadian Shaun Benson plays Tennessee country singer Truck Sugar in "The Red and the Blue".
  • Subverted with British actor Jamie Bamber as the American Jack Kimball in "Blood On The Tracks", because despite having been born in London, he has American citizenship via his father.
• Fake Mixed Race:
  • British-American Christina Hendricks plays Esther in "Colors", a black woman who could pass for white.
  • Italian-American Johnathon Schaech plays Julian in "Libertyville", a black man who could pass for white.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Korean American Sung Kang and Vietnamese American Doan Ly as a couple of Cambodian immigrants in "Who's Your Daddy?"
  • Vietnamese Canadian actor David Huynh and Chinese American actor Ron Yuan as Japanese Americans Billy Takahashi and Shinji Nakamura in the flashbacks of "Family 8108".
• Fake Russian:
  • Georgian-American Elena Satine as opera singer Nadia Koslov. Although both Satine and her character Nadia were born in the USSR.
  • Australian actress Sharni Vinson plays Russian-American circus performer Mia Romanov.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Hey, remember Tom Wilson, the actor who played eight different versions of the same character in Back to the Future? In his 10's, 40's, 70's, three different timelines, and as his Identical Grandson and Great-Grandfather? He's in Cold Case! As a character who appears once in a flashback because he died before the main characters could interview him.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: Extensive use of hit music from different eras has made it prohibitively expensive to release on DVD and streaming.^note Royalties are cheaper for broadcasting than they are for distribution. However, Cold Case is still heavily shown in syndication in the US and overseas, despite this.
  • As of Sept 2021, the entire series is on HBO Max and Roku TV, as well as Prime Video in UK and Australia.
• No Dub for You: When the show was first made available on Warner Bros.' streaming service HBO Max, it came with the option to watch it was the Spanish audio dub. Shortly after, HBO Max removed the Spanish dubs without explanation.
• The Pete Best: For the first four episodes, Det. Rush had a different partner with Chris Lassing but he was Put on a Bus after his actor Justin Chambers decided to leave during production and was thus replaced by Valens.
• Queer Character, Queer Actor: Tessa Thompson, who is bisexual, plays a Butch Lesbian in "Best Friends", in her first on-screen role.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • In the episode "The House", Mike Jaden in The '60s and the present-day are played by father and son Travis and Blake Clark, respectively.
  • In "The War at Home", the Victim of the Week's daughter is played by sisters Gigi and Lily Goff.
  • Series director David Barrett's daughter McKenna plays Lilly Rush as a child in "Into The Blue" and "Libertyville".
  • In "Metamorphosis", Lester "Gargantuan" Smith in 1971 and 2010 are played by Roger Morrissey and Carel Struycken, respectively, who are actual cousins.
• Reality Subtext: The Philadelphia PD suffering from budget cuts in "Hoodrats" was inspired by the show's budget cuts that affected the seventh and final season, hence it would be the last episode to have the entire cast appear until near the end of the season.
• Recycled Script:
  • Season 3's "Beautiful Little Fool" was remade in practice as season 4's "Torn". Both begin with a young woman bringing the case of a long-deceased relative, a young woman that was murdered. Both are the team's new record for oldest case reopened, the only case in the series from that decade, and take place in the last year of said decade ("BLF"'s victim is a 1929 flapper, "Torn"'s is a 1919 socialite). In both cases, the clue that solves the crime is provided by an old woman, who was a little girl when the murder was committed, and is the only witness still alive, with every other testimony being provided by books, records, diaries, historians of the era or descendants of the people involved. The perp is long deceased in both (as it could only be realistically) but left a recorded confession. The murder was committed during the arrival of a big historical event that destroyed the fortune of a man related to the victim (a member of the Vanderbilt family that lost his fortune in the Crash of 1929 in "BLF", a beer magnate that went out of business with Prohibition in "Torn").
  • The episode "Mindhunters" is very similar to Without a Trace's "Doppelgänger"—the detectives discover a Serial Killer and interrogate him relentlessly, only for him to outsmart them and talk in circles around them. They ultimately have no choice but to release him, as they have no real evidence and he hasn't confessed.
  • WAT's "White Balance" is similar to CC's "8:03AM", in that they focus on the disappearance/death of a white girl and a black boy, with the white girl's case being considered more important.
  • Both shows also have episodes in which lottery winners were murdered by jealous people who wanted to get their hands on the money.
  • Season 5's "The Road" has elements from season 2's "Mind Hunters" and "The Woods": a Serial Killer who abducts strong-willed women to psychologically torture them, the killer upon being cornered by Lilly tries to goad her into killing him, and "John Smith" even at one points yells, "Don't you turn away from me!" just as George Marks did.
  • Season 6's "One Small Step" is a Gender Flipped remake of season 2's "The Sleepover": a "geeky" kid starts hanging out with a trio of "cool" kids, the leader is a well-off Spoiled Brat from a troubled home who bullies the kid along with their two minions, the adult lives of the trio include addiction/mental illness, they end up no longer being friends in the present day, and the leader shows no empathy or remorse for the victim or their deaths. The main differences between the two episodes though is that in the later episode, one of the friends commits suicide out of guilt, shame and mental illness, the leader was the one who did the killing out of jealousy instead of another kid in the group in the heat of the moment, and there were more genuinely likable people within the episode other than the victim.
  • Season 7's "Almost Paradise" has many similarities with season 3's "Family". Both of the victims were high school students murdered in a hit-and-run on the night of their proms in the late 80's, and both of the perpetrators were members of the school faculty.
  • Another Season 7 episode, "Dead Heat", share many similarities with season 3's "Frank's Best". Both of the victims were elderly mentors beaten to death, who were killed by their neglected sons with anger issues.
• Romance on the Set: Between Kathryn Morris (Rush) and actor Johnny Messner (who played FBI Agent Ryan Cavanaugh in the series' final season). Together since 2010, they also welcomed twin boys in 2013.
• Screwed by the Network:
  • A good 70% of episodes start late due to football in the US. They refuse to do anything about it. This is amusing because football fans complain about CBS's obsessive Repeating Ad promos during the games themselves. And if it isn't football, it's usually something else...
  • Cases that took place during the 2000s became more frequent during the final seasons thanks to budget cuts.
  • The last screw driven into this show was cancellation. It's gone for good now.
• Scully Box: Used for teenager Brent Harris in "Saving Sammy."
• Underage Casting:
  • For the episode "The Letter", the actors who played present-day versions of the characters seen in the 1939-set flashback were actually a lot younger than their characters, who were meant to be in either in their early seventies to late eighties during the present day.
    • Lillian Lehman was 56 when she played the older version of Blanche Debbins.
    • Lou Beatty Jr. was in his fifties when he played the older version of Manross Delaney.
    • Geoffrey Lewis was 68 when he played the older version of Nathan "Jonesy" Jones.
    • Zoe Cotton was in her fifties when she played the older version of Arletta Marion.
  • For the episode "Family 8108", the actors who played the present-day versions of the characters seen in the WWII-set flashbacks were actually 10-40 years younger than their characters, who were meant to be in their early to mid eighties.
    • Kim Miyori was 56 when she played the older version of Evelyn Takahashi.
    • Mary Margaret Lewis was 57 when she played the older version of Mary Anne Clayton.
    • Jerry Douglas was 75 when he played the older version of Eugene "Skip" Robertson.
    • Jonathan Terry was in his sixties when he played the older version of Larry Scholz.
    • Keone Young was 60 when he played the older version of Shinji Nakamura.
    • Patti Yasutake was 54 when she played the older version of Barbara Takahashi, who is supposed to be in her early sixties.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Silas Weir Mitchell, who guest starred in two episodes, was considered for the role of Detective Vera.
  • Josie Sutton was intended to be a series regular in season 3, with the first five episodes meant to test waters for her, but her actress Sarah Brown decided not to become a series regular, thus she departs in the fifth episode with Kat Miller being introduced three episodes later as her replacement and eventually being Promoted to Opening Credits in the season's 13th episode.
  • The season three episode, "Detention" (where the victim was mourning the death of Kurt Cobain) was to be a solo artist episode featuring only the music of Nirvana, but the show was unable to get clearance to use it. They were eventually given the rights by the season five premiere, "Thrill Kill", which ended up getting all the Nirvana music (and interestingly enough, also takes place in 1994.)
  • Had the show continued for another season, then Det. Rush and Agent Cavanaugh would have become a couple, while Rush would have been transferred to the Federal Cold Case Unit in New York City. Additionally, there were plans for the other main characters to gain their own love interests.
• You Look Familiar:
  • Alicia Ziegler first appeared in the opening flashback of "A Time to Hate" as a friend of the Victim of the Week's girlfriend. She went on to play the victim in "Superstar".
  • Madeline Carroll played the daughter of the Victim of the Week in flashbacks in both "Gleen" and "November 22nd".